Embold vs CAST Highlight Comparison: Everything You Need to Know Before Choosing

CAST Highlight is a software-as-a-service product from CAST, the software intelligence company, that provides rapid insights across entire application portfolios. Large organisations often manage hundreds or thousands of custom applications written in many languages, and decision-makers struggle to answer basic questions about which applications are ready for the cloud, which carry the most technical debt, which use risky open-source components, and where modernisation budgets should be invested. Traditional code analysis tools are frequently too slow or too detailed to provide a portfolio-wide view. CAST Highlight addresses this by performing lightweight, automated source code scans that can be run locally, combined with short surveys completed by application owners. Its approach produces consistent, comparable indicators across the portfolio within days rather than months, supporting cloud migration planning, application rationalisation and governance of software health at scale. Key capabilities include cloud readiness assessment, which identifies code patterns that block or complicate migration to cloud platforms, and software health indicators covering resiliency, agility and elegance. Software composition analysis detects open-source components, known vulnerabilities and licence risks, generating software bills of materials, while green software indicators highlight code patterns associated with inefficient resource use. Portfolio dashboards combine technical findings with business context from surveys, allowing applications to be segmented according to value and risk, and recommendations can be mapped to cloud migration strategies. The product supports dozens of programming languages and integrates with CI/CD pipelines and repositories for repeated scans. Because only analysis results, rather than source code, are uploaded to the cloud platform, it can be used in organisations with strict security policies. CAST Highlight is used by large enterprises, government bodies, system integrators and consultancies undertaking modernisation or due diligence programmes. Pricing starts from around USD 10,000 with a free trial; there is no permanently free version.