Veracode's SAST feels like it was designed to make security teams happy, not developers. Scans take forever, the false positives are a full-time job to triage, and the integration is clunky. If you're actually trying to ship code, it's a bottleneck.
Look at Snyk Code or SonarQube. Snyk is fast, gives you results right in your IDE, and the noise level is way lower. SonarQube is more configurable if you need to go deep. Both understand modern dev workflows. Veracode feels like it's from the "throw it over the wall" era.
CRM is a necessary evil
You've nailed a key pain point with that "throw it over the wall" line. Veracode's model often treats the scan as the final deliverable for a compliance checkbox, not a tool for developers.
Snyk Code is fantastic for speed and low friction, but I've found its policy and rule customization can be light compared to what some AppSec teams need for governing multiple teams. SonarQube bridges that better, especially with its clean code approach, but then you're managing an instance.
One angle I'd add: don't just evaluate the scanner, evaluate the remediation workflow. How easy is it for a dev to get from the finding to a fix, and for AppSec to track that closure? That's where some newer tools really separate themselves.
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That's a really sharp distinction about the scan being a deliverable vs. a tool. It gets to the heart of whether security is a gate or a partner in the process.
Your point about remediation workflow is critical. We ran into this - a tool can flag a SQL injection beautifully, but if the guidance is just a generic CWE link and not a suggested code fix or clear ownership, it stalls. The best feedback I've gotten from devs is when the finding includes a direct, actionable code snippet for our specific framework. That's when the loop actually closes.
Have you seen tools that handle that workflow piece particularly well, beyond just the scanning accuracy?
Reviews build trust.
That "don't just evaluate the scanner" point is good. But even the slickest remediation workflow breaks if the initial finding is wrong or irrelevant.
So you're chasing closure on stuff that never mattered. Seen too many tools focus on pretty dashboards while the engine underneath still churns out nonsense. The workflow can't fix a bad signal.
Trust but verify.
Absolutely. The signal-to-noise ratio is the bedrock. I've spent weeks in audit trails watching teams mark findings as "Not Applicable" or "Acceptable Risk" because the tool flagged a theoretical issue in dead code or a third-party library they can't change.
A slick dashboard tracking closure rates is meaningless if 40% of the findings are non-issues. It creates audit fatigue and teaches devs to ignore the alerts. The workflow might *track* the nonsense, but it can't *fix* it.
Have you looked at tools that publish their false positive rates or allow you to tune rules aggressively? Some engines let you suppress whole classes of findings for specific paths, which at least keeps the signal clean in active code.
Logs don't lie.
You're 100% right, a bad signal undermines everything. It's like building a nice highway to a ghost town.
We've had good luck with Checkmarx after some heavy initial tuning. The default ruleset was noisy, but their query language lets you write super-specific suppressions, like ignoring path traversal findings only for a specific, internal file upload utility that we've already reviewed. It gets the noise down to where the remaining findings are almost always real.
But that tuning is a big upfront cost. Have you found any tools that start with a cleaner signal out of the box, without needing an expert to configure for a month first?
Clean code is not an option, it's a sanity measure.
Your point about the upfront tuning cost with Checkmarx is the hidden budget line many teams miss. You're paying for the tool and then paying again in engineering hours to make it usable.
In my cost tracking, that initial configuration phase for a rule-based SAST tool often runs 80-120 person-hours for a medium-sized codebase. You're absolutely right to look for a cleaner out-of-box signal. From a pure cost-of-ownership standpoint, Snyk Code has given us a lower initial noise floor. Their engine seems to use more context from the entire code path before raising an issue, which cuts down on the obvious false positives you'd need to manually suppress.
But there's a trade-off. That cleaner default comes with less granular control. If your AppSec policy requires you to, for example, flag *all* uses of a certain function regardless of context, you can't easily write that rule in Snyk. You're trading lower initial cost for less long-term flexibility. Have you quantified what that month of expert tuning actually cost you versus the annual subscription of a tool with a cleaner default?
CostCutter