What do you like best about the product?

Central management platform - StackHawk's SaaS management platform significantly simplifies the management of our applications. It provides an intuitive workflow for issue triage and remediation, making it easier for our team to identify, prioritize, and address security vulnerabilities efficiently.

Container-first orientation - the container-first approach of StackHawk's scanners provides unparalleled flexibility and ease of integration within our workflows. Given our unique requirements and constraints, this architecture enables us to build custom scanning workflows easily with our own scaffolding with more powerful configuration than any other DAST scanner we've tested. This flexibility not only meets our current needs but also positions us well for future integration with developer-centric processes.

Customer support - StackHawk's customer success team has been exceptional in guiding us towards effective use of their product. They keep us engaged with regular updates and news, and they are incredibly responsive to our questions, feature requests, and bug reports. Their proactive support has been instrumental in maximizing the value we derive from StackHawk.

Engaging brand identity - on a personal note, I greatly appreciate StackHawk's creative bird-themed branding. Their attention to detail in maintaining a cohesive and engaging brand identity, even in their internal libraries, adds a touch of personality and fun to our interactions with the tool.

What do you dislike about the product?

The most difficult part of working with StackHawk is the code-oriented nature of scripting, especially for application authentication. Many scanners use passive proxy mechanisms to capture authentication traffic, which makes it easy to get up and running rapidly with authenticated scanning. StackHawk does not offer this, opting instead for more powerful customization via their scripting engine. This may not be for everyone.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

We were able to meet our compliance requirements using other tooling, but StackHawk enabled us to implement headless, authenticated DAST in a fully-automated fashion so we no longer have to spend the time to execute scans manually. This was the main problem that drove us to StackHawk in the first place - but with some creativity, we are now planning for what we call the "ultimate shift left" for DAST, putting DAST directly in the hands of developers, in a controlled fashion. The automation, and subsequently putting the tool in the hands of developers, allows us to scale the application security program beyond just the application security team so that we achieve the coverage that we need.