If you are looking for a Gartner SAST Magic Quadrant, it does not exist as a standalone report; Gartner evaluates static application security testing inside its broader Magic Quadrant for Application Security Testing (AST). That distinction matters, because a lot of vendor marketing implies a dedicated SAST ranking when what they are citing is a position in the wider AST quadrant where SAST is one criterion among several. Understanding what SAST Gartner coverage actually looks like will make you a smarter buyer.
What the AST Magic Quadrant is
Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Application Security Testing is a recurring analyst report that plots vendors on two axes: Ability to Execute and Completeness of Vision. Vendors land in one of four boxes: Leaders, Challengers, Visionaries, and Niche Players. The most recent edition was published on October 6, 2025.
Crucially, SAST is treated as a component of a broader platform, not a category with its own quadrant. To be included in the AST Magic Quadrant at all, a vendor generally has to compete with at least two of these technologies:
- Static Application Security Testing (SAST)
- Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST)
- Interactive Application Security Testing (IAST)
- Software Composition Analysis (SCA)
So a pure-play SAST vendor with no other testing modality may not even qualify for the quadrant, regardless of how good its static engine is. That is the first thing to understand about how Gartner and SAST relate.
Why there is no dedicated SAST quadrant
Gartner consolidated the individual testing categories into a single AST view years ago because buyers stopped purchasing point tools. The market moved toward platforms that combine SAST, DAST, SCA, and increasingly IAST and API testing behind one console and one policy engine. Evaluating SAST in isolation no longer matched how organizations actually buy, so the analyst view followed the market.
The practical effect is that a vendor's quadrant position reflects the strength of its whole testing portfolio, its integrations, its analyst-assessed roadmap, and customer feedback, not the raw accuracy of its SAST engine alone. A Leader in the AST quadrant is not necessarily the best SAST tool for your specific stack; it is a strong all-round platform.
What SAST is, briefly
Static Application Security Testing analyzes source code, bytecode, or binaries without running the application. It looks for patterns that indicate vulnerabilities: tainted data flowing into a SQL query, hardcoded credentials, unsafe deserialization, weak cryptography. Because it reads code rather than exercising a running app, SAST can point you at the exact file and line, which makes it a natural fit for pull-request gating.
Its well-known weakness is false positives. A static engine that cannot fully reason about runtime context will flag code paths that are unreachable or already sanitized. Tuning that noise down is where much of the real-world effort goes, and it is a big reason two teams can have very different experiences with the same "Leader" tool.
How to actually use the Gartner report
Treat the SAST Gartner positioning as a starting filter, not a decision. A defensible selection process looks like this:
- Use the quadrant to build a shortlist, typically of Leaders and any Visionary whose roadmap matches your direction. Do not automatically exclude Niche Players; a Niche Player can be an excellent fit if it specializes in your language stack.
- Read the accompanying Critical Capabilities report if you have access. That companion document scores vendors against specific use cases and gets closer to per-modality strength than the quadrant graphic does.
- Run a proof of concept on your own repositories. Measure the false-positive rate on your real code, the languages and frameworks actually covered, and how cleanly it fits your CI. A tool's quadrant box tells you nothing about how it handles your Kotlin monorepo or your legacy PHP service.
- Weigh licensing and total cost, including how findings triage scales with your team size.
For teams standing up a program from scratch, pairing SAST with SCA and DAST gives you coverage across your own code, your dependencies, and your running application, which is precisely the multi-modality breadth Gartner rewards in the quadrant.
A note on independence
Vendors license the right to reprint Gartner reports, so the version you download from a vendor's site is genuine but selectively promoted around that vendor's placement. That does not make the data wrong; it means you should read the full report and its methodology rather than a single quadrant image on a landing page. Gartner's own inclusion criteria and cautions are part of the report for a reason.
An honest program does not outsource its tool decision to an analyst graphic. Use the report to narrow the field, then let a bake-off on your own code decide. Our academy walks through running a fair SAST proof of concept, including how to build a benchmark set of known-vulnerable and known-clean code to measure precision.
FAQ
Is there a Gartner Magic Quadrant just for SAST?
No. Gartner evaluates SAST inside the Magic Quadrant for Application Security Testing, alongside DAST, IAST, and SCA. There is no standalone SAST quadrant.
When was the latest AST Magic Quadrant published?
The most recent Magic Quadrant for Application Security Testing was published on October 6, 2025.
Does a Leader position mean a tool has the best SAST engine?
Not necessarily. Quadrant placement reflects the whole platform, integrations, vision, and execution. A Leader may have a strong SAST engine, but you should validate accuracy on your own codebase with a proof of concept.
Can a pure SAST vendor appear in the quadrant?
Usually not. Gartner's inclusion criteria generally require competing with at least two testing technologies, so a single-modality SAST-only vendor may be excluded regardless of engine quality.