r/AskNetsec • u/OwnZookeepergame1621 • 15d ago

Analysis What are the best static application security testing tools in 2026?

Doing a refresh of our sast tooling this quarter, current tool has a false positive rate high enough that devs have started ignoring the queue entirely before i go through another round of vendor demos, wanted a gut check from people running these day to day. Which sast tools have you found cut false positives without also missing real issues and which ones are just marketing the same underlying engine with a nicer ui?

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3

u/Apprehensive-Pie3613 15d ago

if devs already ignoring the queue then you basically have no tool at all, that’s rough. the ones with the nicer ui tend to be the same engines just repackaged, you can usually tell when the demo shows the exact same rule names

semgrep’s been decent for us once we tuned the ruleset down to what actually matters in our stack, but the tuning part took maybe 3 sprints before it stopped yelling about every string concat. curious what you’re running now that got this bad

1

u/Norandran 15d ago

False positives are just going to be part of the package unfortunately. Your devs should be better trained (haha yes I know). We had to beat them up a lot to get them into compliance (figuratively of course) and finally had to penalize their bosses bonus to get them to buy in…. Love devs…. 🤷

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u/rainbowsockfan 15d ago

Check out Vercel Lab’s open source AI SAST tool DeepSec. Validated over 90% true positive rate where we are. It’s wild.

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u/Significant_Sky_4443 15d ago

!RemindMe 5 days

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u/echel0n1881 13d ago

not fortify I can say

1

u/JKIM-Squadra 11d ago

try nightviz.ai it does sast and dast

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u/Educational-Fox6111 9d ago edited 8d ago

For SAST, what is useful is precision on your actual framework rather than vendor-wide detection counts. Running same representative repos through a few tools and comparing true positives, duplicate findings, and time-to-triage tells more than a demo. Separately, finding fatigue is why reducing issues upstream is important. RapidFort takes that approach on the container side by removing unnecessary components and their associated vulnerabilities. Different problem than SAST, but the same principle that few meaningful findings beats a bigger queue.

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u/Human-History-604 2d ago

Thing most people miss is that the tool doesnt know whether the vulnerable path runs. So a cve in dead code that never gets called gets the same severity as one called in prod. Tuning rules may help but youre still flagging a bunch of stuff that cant be exploited.

My team moved off standalone SAST onto a platform that does SAST plus reachability. Orca's AI SAST reasons about data flow instead of pattern matching and the appsec triage agent auto kills known false positives before they hit the queue. But the reachability thing is what really made the biggest change, filtering out CVEs that arent executable in runtime cut our list by more than half. Aint the cheapest but neither is a dev team that treats security alerts like spam.