The use of continuous integration and continuous delivery, or CI/CD for short, is increasingly demanding stronger security within pipelines. In a recent study, 57% of organizations reported experiencing a security incident based on exposed secrets from insecure DevOps processes in the last two years. This alarming statistic underscores the growing threat landscape where CI/CD environments are prime targets for attackers seeking to inject malicious code or exfiltrate sensitive data. By integrating CI/CD security tools, organizations can effectively address these vulnerabilities, ensuring the integrity and security of their software development lifecycle while significantly mitigating associated risks.
In this article, we will discuss what CI/CD is, why CI CD security tools are required, and how to mitigate the top CI/CD security risks. Later, we dive even deeper by listing a detailed CI CD tools list, reviewing the top 11 tools to secure your CI CD pipeline, and giving you some of the CI/CD security best practices on how to choose the right solution for your organization.
What is CI/CD?
CI/CD is the acronym for Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery/Deployment. It refers to the practice of implementing frequent developer code changes and automating the process of releasing software. CI/CD is the foundational pillar of modern DevOps as it provides teams with the ability to take new features out of the door more rapidly and maintain stability. Organizations that implement CI/CD integration record 25 percent faster lead times and have 50 percent fewer failures when compared to non-CI/CD integrating organizations. These practices are, therefore, embedded in companies, which boosts the efficiency of development and also guarantees the quality and reliability of the resulting software in a more responsive and agile development cycle.
Need for CI/CD Tools
During the last couple of years, CI/CD tools have become an integral part of software development, enabling organizations to manage their software delivery lifecycle in an effective manner. In this section, we have listed some of the top reasons why businesses need these tools and some major benefits to the development teams that come with them.
- Accelerate Development Cycles: CI/CD tools allow for integrating code faster and deploying it faster because of automation processes and reductions in manual testing. Therefore, teams can focus on core functionalities and enhancements due to reduced bottlenecks. Companies that maintain good use of CI/CD could take the lead over others through quicker delivery of new features, thus delivering an advantage in the fast-moving market.
- Increased Collaboration: In a CI/CD environment, developers, testers, and the operations team work together on a common platform in real-time for effective communication and overall transparency of the build cycle. This collaborative workspace makes sure that all the stakeholders involved are aware of how things are working, hence minimum miscommunication and assurance of alignment with development goals. With increased collaboration, teams can find resolutions faster and ensure consistency across projects.
- Improved Code Quality: With the use of CI/CD tools in the development lifecycle, early error detection is enhanced through automated testing and code checks each and every time to avoid bugs slipping into production. Early detection of errors improves code quality as well as reduces the frequency of critical failures in production environments. It also creates release stability and increases the number of releases.
- Integration of Security: The CI CD security tools provide seamless security integrations right from the start of software development. Thus, each stage of the pipeline has automated security checks inserted into them so that scrutiny and resolution take place before deployment. Security measures integrated right into the process of CI/CD provide a proactive stance toward security by reducing breaches and offering better compliance with standards. This is because, through continuous vigilance, security is never an afterthought but a core component of the development process.
- Risk Mitigation: CI/CD tools not only provide insight into software performance and quality at every stage of the development pipeline but also support the rollback feature, which is essential during the deployment of software when flaws are detected. As this can keep a history of builds and automatically roll back to working ones when needed, businesses can ensure minimum downtime in maintaining operational continuity even when challenges arise.
- Compliance Assurance: Most industries have special compliance standards to be followed. This is especially true in the case of healthcare, finance, or even government sectors, which require compliance with standards such as GDPR, PCI-DSS, and CCPA. CI/CD tools ensure that all forms of compliance tests needed on the code are automatically done during the development life cycle. This makes the software meet regulatory requirements while it is under development and deployment. Such automated compliance minimizes manual intervention and saves companies from hefty fines or law-related issues because of non-compliance.
CI/CD Security Tools Landscape in 2025
The CI/CD security landscape has changed a lot in recent years, offering stronger options with seamless integration of DevOps practices. Attackers are increasingly targeting the injection of malicious code into the CI/CD pipelines. Primarily, it is essential to have tools that grant you end-to-end visibility, proactive threat detection, and seamless integration into your development environment. Below, we have listed the top 11 CI CD security tools in 2025, all providing unique benefits to improve your pipeline’s security:
The CI/CD security landscape has changed a lot in recent years, offering stronger options with seamless integration of DevOps practices. Attackers are increasingly targeting the injection of malicious code into the CI/CD pipelines. Primarily, it is essential to have tools that grant you end-to-end visibility, proactive threat detection, and seamless integration into your development environment. Below, we have listed the top 11 CI CD security tools in 2025, all providing unique benefits to improve your pipeline’s security:
#1 SentinelOne Singularity™ Platform
Singularity™ Platform unifies and expands detection and response capabilities across multi-layer security—Endpoint, Cloud, Identity, Network, and Mobile—providing robust security coverage and complete visibility at an enterprise-wide level with powerful analytics.
Platform at a Glance:
- SentinelOne fluidly integrates into dynamic software development environments and ensures strong CI/CD pipeline security. Its Singularity™ Platform provides holistic protection across all stages. SentinelOne uses advanced machine learning and behavioral AI to detect and neutralize threats before they can occur, both known and unknown.
- There is also Singularity™ Ranger, which scans for real-time network profiling and attack surface management. It keeps track of unmanaged endpoints and devices within the pipeline to reduce risks from rogue elements. SentinelOne also provides RemoteOps forensics which enables security teams to deeply investigate incidents and proactively solve vulnerabilities. SentinelOne’s Synk integration is an added bonus; the platform can detect more than 750 types of secrets and scans IaC templates like Helm and CloudFormation. SentinelOne also secures both public and private repositories for entities like GitHub.
- Singularity™ Cloud Security offers automated incident response especially designed to adapt to high-velocity CI/CD operations. Verified Exploit Paths™ map potential attack vectors and therefore prioritize risks to resolve them right away. Coupled with CSPM capabilities, SentinelOne is capable of detecting misconfigurations and resolving them in real-time, ensuring total protection across every pipeline stage. It lets organizations build, test, and deploy code with confidence, keeping their CI/CD workflows resilient and at bay against emerging cyber threats by providing complete, end-to-end visibility, automated threat hunting, and proactive security measures.
Features:
- Advanced AI-Driven Threat Detection: Deploys enhanced machine learning algorithms that provide highly precise identification of both known and unknown threats, thereby mapping out swift action to block an attack before it can cause any damage.
- ActiveEDR for Threat Context: Active Endpoint Detection and Response brings vital context to threat detection, enabling security teams to analyze and understand the origin, behavior, and intent of the threats with unparalleled speed, which drives quicker response times.
- Deep Network Discovery: Inbuilt agent technology finds not just the assets but also maps connections and dependencies, thus giving an overall topological view of the network while discovering hidden rogue and unmanaged devices before they become vulnerabilities.
- Ranger® Rogue Device Discovery: Extends visibility into unmanaged devices through active network scanning, identifying devices that are not protected, thereby reducing the risk of rogue devices causing a breach.
- Workload Protection Across Clouds: Advanced security for workloads from development to runtime; private and public cloud workloads are protected throughout their full life cycle, powered by automated compliance checks and runtime monitoring.
Core Problems that SentinelOne’s Singularity™ Platform Eliminates
- Rapid Deployment: The platform scales easily, securing rapid deployments across environments with millions of devices.
- Edge to Cloud Distributed Intelligence: Offers a complete solution for endpoints, containers, and cloud services, bringing total visibility and protection.
- Proactive Threat Detection: Autonomous, proactive detection ensures threats are dealt with before they can materialize into incidents.
- Threat Containment in Real Time: Uses machine learning for response automation, meaning that it contains threats immediately and without human involvement.
- Comprehensive MDR and ActiveEDR: Integrates industry-leading MDR with AI-driven ActiveEDR to enable always-on security.
Testimonial:
“My team was initially concerned about the rollout. “How are we going to deploy it? How much work is it going to be? When we did it, it was simple and quick. It was one of the easiest solutions we’ve ever deployed.” – John Pieterse, Chief Security Officer at Racing Post.
Look at Singularity™ Cloud Security’s ratings and reviews on Gartner Peer Insights and PeerSpot for additional insights.
#2 OWASP ZAP
OWASP ZAP is an open-source passive and active web application vulnerability scanner meant to secure the Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment pipeline by providing a solution for finding vulnerabilities within web applications. It can secure testing and production environments.
Features:
- Automated Vulnerability Scanning: Automatic security checks throughout the development cycle ensure protection in real-time.
- Active and Passive Scanning Modes: Provides flexibility in the detection of vulnerabilities with both in-depth and lightweight scanning options.
- CI/CD Workflow Integration: Integrates into CI/CD workflows where security becomes a core part of the pipeline.
- Fully Customizable Scanning Scripts: Users can customize the scanning parameters to suit specific projects based on specific security requirements.
- User-Friendly Dashboard: Streamlines the process of vulnerability management for both security teams and developers by providing them with one place from which to manage.
#3 Trivy
Trivy is an open-source vulnerability scanner that provides security for container images, Infrastructure as Code, and dependencies used in CI/CD workflows. Most of the users favor Trivy for its simplicity and speed.
Features:
- Quick Image Scanning: Quickly scans container images for vulnerabilities so that one can securely deploy without delay.
- Direct CI/CD Tool Integration: Works seamlessly with GitHub Actions, Jenkins, and other CI/CD tools to enable frictionless security.
- IaC and Configuration File Scanning: This software can reduce security risks later on by detecting misconfigurations early in the development cycle.
- Policy Compliance Checks: Ensures all components that go into the building adhere to the necessary industry standards to meet compliance requirements.
- Dependency Analysis: Scans third-party libraries for known vulnerabilities and provides in-depth security information.
Check Trivy’s ratings and reviews on PeerSpot to understand how well it works for enterprise CI/CD security.
#4 Snyk
Snyk provides developer-first security that fits within CI/CD pipelines and automated detection of vulnerabilities in code dependencies and container images with ease. It allows developers to find and fix security issues in their usual workflows.
Features:
- Automated Vulnerability Scanning: Provides scanning for open-source component and container vulnerabilities throughout the entire development process.
- Developer-Friendly Remediation: Offers step-by-step remediation guidance through direct integration with popular development environments.
- Integration with Major CI/CD Platforms: Jenkins, GitLab, and Azure DevOps are currently supported, making security part of the pipeline.
- Continuous Vulnerability Monitoring: Informs developers of new, latest discovered vulnerabilities in real time to keep their code secure.
- Policy Enforcement Tools: Security standards may be automatically enforced to maintain compliance by teams.
To assess Snyk’s capabilities or CI/CD security, review its ratings and PeerSpot reviews.
#5 Aqua Security
Aqua Security provides a compelling offering for securing the CI/CD, with an appropriate focus on container image security, and follows best practices for cloud-native security. It rules out vulnerable containers so they don’t reach production.
Features:
- Container Image Scanning: Provides deep inspections to identify vulnerabilities before they are deployed, thus limiting security risks.
- Real-time Threat Detection: Identifies threats in real-time at every stage of building and deployment for effective mitigation.
- Integration of CI/CD: Allows for easy integration with Jenkins and GitLab, among other DevOps tools, for aggressively automating security in an end-to-end chain of CI/CD.
- Runtime Security for Containers: Enables monitoring and prevention after the deployment of the containers has occurred, ensuring long-term security.
- Compliance Checks: Automatically applies compliance to meet industry and regulatory standards according to policy.
See how Aqua Security can help you perform CI/CD security audits by reading its PeerSpot and Gartner Peer Insights ratings and reviews.
#6 Sonatype Lifecycle
Sonatype Lifecycle identifies and manages open-source vulnerabilities within CI/CD pipelines, enabling organizations to keep their software secure and compliant by managing open-source dependency-related risks.
Features:
- Open-Source Component Analysis: Finds vulnerabilities in third-party software to ensure the secure use of open source.
- Automated Security Policy Enforcement: Automates the application of security policies to comply with organizational needs and reduces manual work.
- CI/CD Integration: Provides frictionless security testing from within popular CI/CD tools by integrating security into the pipeline.
- Real-time Alerts: Notifies teams about vulnerabilities in open-source components in real-time.
- Detailed Compliance Reporting: Provides reports that facilitate the effective functioning of a team to achieve industry standards and regulatory requirements.
Review Sontatype Lifecycle’s reviews and ratings on PeerSpot to find out how well It works for CI/CD security assessments.
#7 WhiteSource
WhiteSource is an analysis tool for software composition that helps in securing open-source components within CI/CD pipelines. WhiteSource identifies vulnerability in the dependency and delivers remediations to the production stage.
Features:
- Real-time Vulnerability Alerts: Provides a live alert about the vulnerabilities in dependency.
- Component Risk Analysis: Delivers risks associated with the open source’s component and offers actionable insights.
- Security Checks within CI/CD Pipelines: It embeds checks into popular continuous integration and deployment tools to make sure that there is frictionless software delivery.
- Compliance Reporting: It offers full compliance reports to ensure that the software is compliant with the industry.
- Developer-Friendly Interface: Its ease makes vulnerability management easier by offering intuitive dashboards tailored for working at the developer level.
Mend.io was formerly known as WhiteSource. Read PeerSpot reviews to learn more about WhiteSource’s features related to CI/CD security.
#8 Checkmarx
Checkmarx offers a single product set that encapsulates both static and interactive application security testing within the CI/CD development pipeline. This unified approach streamlines security integration, ensuring vulnerabilities are identified and managed at every stage of development.
Features:
- Static Application Security Testing: This tool helps detect vulnerabilities at the early stage of the codebase while implementing secure development practices.
- Interactive Application Security Testing: It runs vulnerability testing at runtime to ensure complete security coverage.
- API Security Testing: The appliance scans for web services integrated into an application and ensures that those web services are secure from all kinds of threats.
- CI/CD Tool Integrations: Seamless integration with Jenkins, GitLab, Bamboo, and many more to enhance security coverage.
- Real-time Developer Feedback: An active feedback mechanism for developers so that they are able to respond timely to security flaws that get detected.
See how well Checkmarx performs in CI/CD security by reviewing its PeerSpot ratings.
#9 Anchore
Anchore is a specialized tool for deep scanning of container images within CI/CD workflows and applies policy-based security checks to deploy only compliant images. By integrating seamlessly with CI/CD tools, it provides developers with robust vulnerability insights, allowing them to prioritize fixes effectively.
Features:
- Deep Dive Image Scanning: It allows users to scan container images in detail to identify hidden vulnerabilities.
- Policy-Based Compliance: Automatically enforces policies on containers to stay compliant at all times.
- CI/CD Integration: Seamlessly integrates with Jenkins and other leading CI/CD tools to ensure security as an integral element of the development cycle.
- Vulnerability and Risk Analysis: Provides comprehensive details of the risks in container images to enable prioritization of the fixes.
- Audit Logging: Offers detailed auditing suitable for the compliance of industries and monitoring of changes.
Explore SlashDot and Gartner feedback and ratings on PeerSpot for insights into Anchore.
#10 Veracode
The Veracode software security platform natively integrates into CI/CD pipelines in a manner that minimizes the risks that exist before the software goes into production environments as well as supports both static and dynamic analysis.
Features:
- Static Application Security Testing (SAST): Finds vulnerabilities in code early on before the application is put into production.
- Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST): Testing application runtime execution secures security validation
- Secure Coding Guidelines: Enhances the ability of developers to write secure code, avoiding securities at the beginning
- Ease in Integrating with CI/CD Tools: Ensures easy integrations with common CI/CD tools for smooth deployment.
Read Vercacode’s reviews and ratings on PeerSpot to determine if it’s effective for enterprise CI/CD security.
#11 SonarQube
SonarQube has carved a niche in integrating code quality and code security analysis into a CI/CD pipeline to ensure developers deliver quality yet secure code before it merges and deploys.
Features:
- Static Code Analysis: Detects code quality issues and security vulnerabilities early in the development process.
- Security Hotspot Detection: Detects code areas that must be manually reviewed because they are likely to contain security issues.
- Integration with CI/CD Platforms: Out-of-the-box integrations with Jenkins, GitLab, Bitbucket, and more provide continuous security analysis.
- Real-time Code Quality Feedback: Actively informs developers about how to improve their coding practices during the construction phase itself.
- Customizable Quality Gates: Gives development teams the ability to set quality thresholds that the code must pass before being merged.
Check out PeerSpot and SourceForge ratings and reviews to assess SonarQube’s CI/CD security capabilities.
How to Choose the Right CI/CD Pipeline Security Tool?
The selection of the right CI/CD security tool will ensure that the delivery of software is secure, efficient, and complies with requirements. This section consists of several important considerations when evaluating various CI/CD pipeline security tools against each other for better serving the needs of your organization:
- Compatibility with Existing Tools: Your chosen CI CD security tool must integrate or work with the tools already in place within your CI/CD pipeline. This minimizes the transition from adding security capabilities into your workflows. Make sure that the tool can work with popular CI/CD platforms such as Jenkins, GitLab, or Azure DevOps.
- Automation Capabilities: Look for tools with extensive automation in vulnerability detection and remediation. Automated tools minimize human intervention, freeing the teams for more time to be spent on development. Automation ensures issues are identified much quicker, which will reduce feedback loops and lead time.
- Proactive Threat Detection: Identify a solution that provides proactive threat detection mechanisms, including behavior analysis and AI-driven insights, to help expose security issues even before they become threats. Several machine learning-powered solutions focused on anomaly detection add layers of protection by predicting emerging threats as a way to minimize your risk.
- Real-Time Scanning: Ensure the security tool provides real-time scanning for flagging vulnerabilities in active development. Continuous scanning and continuous monitoring will help find issues on the spot. This allows developers to fix them before they become major issues or reach production. Real-time protection ensures that threats are being dealt with as they occur.
- Integrating DevOps Practices: The selected tool must be able to integrate with the principles of DevOps, thus enabling collaboration in development, security, and operations groups. Tools that are impossible to integrate are likely to slow down the development cycle, whereas an ideal security tool will accelerate DevOps. Furthermore, it will make collaboration seamless and maintain security without causing any barrier to speed and productivity.
- Scalability: Scalability is crucial for business growth. While selecting the CI/CD security tool, it must scale out easily with one’s development pipeline. It means that it can handle tremendous work increases without any performance degradation. As new projects get onboarded or expansion happens at an existing one, the security solution also needs to pace up without losing any velocity or precision.
- Compliance and Reporting Features: An ideal CI CD security tool should also offer detailed reporting and compliance, ensuring that your organization stays within the bounds of industry standards while providing insightful views on the state of pipeline security. Its customizable reporting capabilities empower different stakeholders, including developers, management, and auditors, to get the information they need in an accessible format. At the same time, compliance checks are going to make things easier when it comes to meeting regulatory requirements.
Conclusion
In the end, we now understand how CI/CD security tools have become essential for businesses to maintain a balance between integrity and resilience throughout the software delivery pipeline. With the right tools in place, vulnerabilities are identified and corrected well before going live into production, thus reducing risk and improving confidence in the reliability of a software release. In an evolving security threat environment, integrating advanced security into the CI/CD process is proactive and very valuable in digital asset defense.
If you are wondering which tool to go with, you can begin by trying each from top to bottom or based on your organization’s needs. For example, you can consider SentinelOne Singularity™ Platform as the answer to your robust solution for CI/CD security. Its AI-enabled functionalities provide comprehensive protection at every step of the development cycle, ensuring your pipeline is safe and sound from modern threats. SentinelOne empowers growing businesses with state-of-the-art security technology customized specifically for today’s challenges.
FAQs
1. What are CI/CD security tools, and why are they important?
CI/CD security tools are built into Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery pipelines to identify code vulnerabilities at each stage of the process. Through early flaw identification, risks associated with that are mitigated, ensuring a secure deployment environment, and eliminating the possibility of potential exploits. Overall, it empowers secure software delivery by lessening the chances of vulnerabilities sent to production.
2. What is the benefit of CI/CD security tools?
CI/CD security tools automate the detection and resolution of vulnerabilities along the entire software development lifecycle, saving time and effort that normally would have been expended through running manual checks. Among other things, it extends cybersecurity to match the industry standards compliance. Each stage is proactively secured to release safer, faster, and more reliable software releases.
3. How can organizations mitigate the top security risks in CI/CD pipelines?
By doing automated security scanning, tightly controlling access, and using secrets management software, organizations are able to safeguard themselves against CI/CD security risks. Other practices such as strict least-privilege access control, regular auditing, and running regular vulnerability assessments help further enforce the safety of pipelines in use. Continuous real-time monitoring throughout the development to deployment cycle ensures any potential threat is dealt with before it can compromise the system.