Top 10 Application Security Tools in {year}

Application security tools have become an indispensable part of software development, designed to protect modern applications from threats and vulnerabilities beginning from the initial coding stages through to deployment and beyond. By resolving software vulnerabilities before hackers can exploit them, these tools can improve the security of sensitive data.

As application development and IT operations teams merge, there are many aspects for where applications and their secure operations intersect, and this can be found in our DevSecOps overview. There you can learn more about where in the DevOps and SDLC domains, development and operations can work together to better secure your systems, applications, infrastructure, and also instill better culture.

In this article, we’ll review the core categories of applications security tools, their pros and cons, and our favorite tools in each category. We’ll also examine best practices for implementation. First, we’ll start with the basics of application security tools: what are they? and what are their benefits? What can they find? Let’s get started.

Top 10 Application Security Tools in 2025 at a Glance

1. Best overall application security tool in 2025: Jit
2. Best AppSec tool for customizable static analysis: Semgrep
3. Best AppSec tool for open-source vulnerability detection: OSV Scanner
4. Best AppSec tool for integrated DevSecOps platforms: Snyk
5. Best tool for configuration security automation: Aikido
6. Best AppSec tool for enterprise SAST analysis: Checkmarx
7. Best tool for cloud-based security testing: Veracode
8. Best AppSec tool for open source governance: Black Duck
9. Best infrastructure as code security tool: KICS
10. Best tool for GitHub-native security: GitHub Advanced Security

What Are Application Security Tools?

Application security tools embed security mechanisms and controls directly into the software development lifecycle (SDLC) to prevent, detect, and manage threats effectively. These tools are categorized based on the stage of the application lifecycle they are used in, and the specific functions they perform.

Furthermore, application security isn't just about hardening the app—it also involves creating a secure environment in which it operates, ensuring that both software and infrastructure are resilient against attacks. This dual focus is critical in an era where the interdependencies between applications and their operating environments are increasingly complex.

What kind of vulnerabilities do application security tools find?

Application security tools are designed to identify a wide range of vulnerabilities across different stages of the software development lifecycle. These tools target various types of security issues, including those listed in the OWASP Top 10, which is a regularly updated report outlining the most critical security risks to web applications. 

Some of the common types of vulnerabilities that application security tools aim to find include:

• Injection flaws: These flaws enable hackers to send intrusted data to an interpreter, which can manipulate a command or request to modify or delete data, among other malicious activities.

• Broken authentication: When authentication mechanisms are improperly configured, attackers can bypass them to gain unauthorized access to systems.

• Sensitive data exposure: This broad category of vulnerabilities can result from weak encryption or allowing sensitive information to be logged.

• Privilege escalation: Related to broken authentication, when malicious users can escalate their privileges to make unauthorized changes to a system to access sensitive data.

• Security misconfigurations: This is another broad category of vulnerabilities, which can include a misconfigured S3 bucket open to the public.

• Using known vulnerable open source components: Many open source components have known vulnerabilities, which can be accidentally included in the application development process and deployed into production.

Top 10 Application Security Tools in 2025



Best Practices for Application Security Tool Implementation

Integrating Application Security Tools Into the SDLC

As outlined above, different application security tools serve different stages of the SDLC.  This also means that they can be inserted at different points in the SDLC to be most effective. Utilizing various insertion points allows organizations to implement a layered security approach, addressing different types of vulnerabilities at different stages of development and deployment. 

Below is a list of some of the insertion points where you should consider integrating your application security tools, to derive the benefits of security guardrails across the entire SDLC and CI/CD Pipeline:

Coding By integrating AppSec tools directly into Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) or as part of the version control system (VCS, e.g. Github or Gitlab) through pre-commit hooks, it’s possible to detect security vulnerabilities while still writing the code for your applications. This enables shift left security and provides more rapid and economical remediation. 

A good example of this is with secret detection tools that can scan for accidental commits of sensitive information like passwords, tokens, or keys. They can be integrated as pre-commit hooks in version control systems to prevent such sensitive data from being pushed to code repositories.

We can also implement application security tools like SAST, SCA, and SBOM during the coding phase.

Build & Testing Implementing security tools on build servers or in CI/CD pipelines enable scanning and testing to be employed during the build and test phases of CI/CD workflows. This ensures that libraries and packages are vetted for security issues alongside quality, before the application is deployed to production. 

This is also a good opportunity to test for infrastructure misconfigurations and container security, and define thresholds for pass/fail of builds based on this criteria.

Deployment & Runtime Once deployed to production, it’s a good practice to have continuous security monitoring to ensure your application stack can remain secure, as vulnerabilities are discovered that may impact your running applications.

This is where you can implement DAST tools to continuously scan applications daily or after a new deployment.

Post-Deployment IAST, SOCs, SIEMs and SOARs, serve to provide post-deployment monitoring tools that can provide greater visibility into your application’s runtime security.

Prioritizing the Top Vulnerabilities

Application security tools often generate long backlogs of vulnerabilities, which are impossible to address completely. For this reason, we need prioritization to focus efforts on the highest risks.

Security prioritization typically involves evaluating factors such as severity, exploitability, and reachability of each identified vulnerability, in order to help security teams to understand which issues to address first based on their potential impact and likelihood of exploitation.

This is especially true in cloud native environments, with many moving parts of our stack and cloud fleet and cluster scale, built upon microservices and event-driven serverless architecture –– the alerts can become overwhelming and hard to prioritize. While existing frameworks for prioritization exist, one of the important elements they lack is the context, which is a combination of these three factors:

Vulnerability Severity Severity refers to the potential impact of a vulnerability if it were to be successfully exploited. This impact is often measured in terms of the damage to the system, the data, the business operations, and even the company's reputation. Severity is often rated using standard scoring systems such as the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS), which provides a numerical score indicating the severity level of vulnerabilities.

Vulnerability Exploitability Exploitability measures the ease with which a vulnerability can be exploited. This factor takes into account the complexity of the attack required to exploit the vulnerability, the level of access needed, and whether or not such an attack requires user interaction. Higher exploitability increases the likelihood that a vulnerability will be targeted by attackers, thus prioritizing it for remediation.

Vulnerability Reachability Reachability refers to the ability of an attacker to reach and exploit a vulnerability from an initial access point. This factor considers the network architecture and the positioning of the vulnerable component within the system. Understanding reachability helps in assessing the practical risk associated with a vulnerability, especially in complex network environments where multiple layers of security may impede direct exploitation.

Why Bother With Application Security Tools?

• Prevent potential breaches: One of the leading causes of cybersecurity breaches has been vulnerabilities in applications, which were the root cause of recent high profile attacks like the Solarwinds software supply chain incident. Application security tools can help application development teams identify vulnerabilities before hackers do.

• Proactive risk mitigation: While bug bounties are great ways to surface vulnerabilities, it's far more efficient to resolve them before they reach production. By integrating application security tools early in the development process (known as “shifting security left” in the SDLC), organizations can identify potential security issues before they become real problems. This not only minimizes the risk of costly breaches but also reduces the time and resources needed for remediation.

• Gain compliance with industry standards: As applications become increasingly common targets for attacks, regulatory bodies are creating and updating standards to ensure organizations are safeguarding user data and maintaining trust.

Implement Continuous Security With Application Security Tools

It’s not enough to just tick the application security boxes from pre-development through deployment, it is important to continuously monitor your applications post-deployment during runtime, to ensure new issues aren’t being discovered in existing application stacks.

Tools like Jit, help maintain ongoing and real time security management so that even if you have securities and zero-day vulnerabilities that arise during runtime, the discovery and remediation can be achieved much more rapidly.

With full stack security coverage from the first line of code through deployment to production, and post-production, application security tools can provide a comprehensive view of your product stack’s security in real time.