We performed a comparison between FOSSA and Snyk based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Software Composition Analysis (SCA) solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."Policies and identification of open-source licensing issues are the most valuable features. It reduces the time needed to identify open-source software licensing issues."
"The most valuable feature is its ability to identify all of the components in a build, and then surface the licenses that are associated with it, allowing us to make a decision as to whether or not we allow a team to use the components. That eliminates the risk that comes with running consumer software that contains open source components."
"I found FOSSA's out-of-the-box policy engine to be accurate and that it was tuned appropriately to the settings that we were looking for. The policy engine is pretty straightforward... I find it to be very straightforward to make small modifications to, but it's very rare that we have to make modifications to it. It's easy to use. It's a four-category system that handles most cases pretty well."
"The scalability is excellent."
"Their CLI tool is very efficient. It does not send your source code over to their servers. It just does fingerprinting. It is also very easy to integrate into software development practices."
"One of the things that I really like about FOSSA is that it allows you to go very granular. For example, if there's a package that's been flagged because it's subject to a license that may be conflicts with or raises a concern with one of the policies that I've set, then FOSSA enables you to go really granular into that package to see which aspects of the package are subject to which licenses. We can ultimately determine with our engineering teams if we really need this part of the package or not. If it's raising this flag, we can make really actionable decisions at a very micro level to enable the build to keep pushing forward."
"Being able to know the licenses of the libraries is most valuable because we sell products, and we need to provide to the customers the licenses that we are using."
"The support team has just been amazing, and it helps us to have a great support team from FOSSA. They are there to triage and answer all our questions which come up by using their product."
"We use Snyk to check vulnerabilities and rectify potential leaks in GitHub."
"It has a nice dashboard where I can see all the vulnerabilities and risks that they provided. I can also see the category of any risk, such as medium, high, and low. They provide the input priority-wise. The team can target the highest one first, and then they can go to medium and low ones."
"The most valuable feature is that they add a lot of their own information to the vulnerabilities. They describe vulnerabilities and suggest their own mitigations or version upgrades. The information was the winning factor when we compared Snyk to others. This is what gave it more impact."
"The most effective feature in securing project dependencies stems from its ability to highlight security vulnerabilities."
"The most valuable features of Snyk are vulnerability scanning and automation. The automation the solution brings around vulnerability scanning is useful."
"The solution's Open Source feature gives us notifications and suggestions regarding how to address vulnerabilities."
"The CLI feature is quite useful because it gives us a lot of flexibility in what we want to do. If you use the UI, all the information is there and you can see what Snyk is showing you, but there is nothing else that you can change. However, when you use the CLI, then you can use commands and can get the output or response back from Snyk. You can also take advantage of that output in a different way. For the same reason, we have been using the CLI for the hard gate in the pipeline: Obtain a particular CDSS score for vulnerability. Based on that information, we can then decide if we want to block or allow the build. We have more flexibility if we use the CLI."
"The dependency checks of the libraries are very valuable, but the licensing part is also very important because, with open source components, licensing can be all over the place. Our project is not an open source project, but we do use quite a lot of open source components and we want to make sure that we don't have surprises in there."
"We have seen some inaccuracies or incompleteness with the distribution acknowledgments for an application, so there's certainly some room for improvement there. Another big feature that's missing that should be introduced is snippet matching, meaning, not just matching an entire component, but matching a snippet of code that had been for another project and put in different files that one of our developers may have created."
"Security scanning is an area for improvement. At this point, our experience is that we're only scanning for license information in components, and we're not scanning for security vulnerability information. We don't have access to that data. We use other tools for that. It would be an improvement for us to use one tool instead of two, so that we just have to go through one process instead of two."
"On the legal and policy sides, there is some room for improvement. I know that our legal team has raised complaints about having to approve the same dependency multiple times, as opposed to having them it across the entire organization."
"I would like the FOSSA API to be broader. I would like not to have to interact with the GUI at all, to do the work that I want to do. I would like them to do API-first development, rather than a focus on the GUI."
"One thing that can sometimes be difficult with FOSSA is understanding all that it can do. One of the ways that I've been able to unlock some of those more advanced features is through conversations with the absolutely awesome customer success team at FOSSA, but it has been a little bit difficult to find some of that information separately on my own through FAQs and other information channels that FOSSA has. The improvement is less about the product itself and more about empowering FOSSA customers to know and understand how to unlock its full potential."
"On the dashboard, there should be an option to increase the column width so that we can see the complete name of the GitHub repository. Currently, on the dashboard, we see the list of projects, but to see the complete name, you have to hover your mouse over an item, which is annoying."
"The technical support has room for improvement."
"For open-source management, FOSSA's out-of-the-box policy engine is easy to use, but the list of licenses is not as complete as we would like it to be. They should add more open-source licenses to the selection."
"We would like to have upfront knowledge on how easy it should be to just pull in an upgraded dependency, e.g., even introduce full automation for dependencies supposed to have no impact on the business side of things. Therefore, we would like some output when you get the report with the dependencies. We want to get additional information on the expected impact of the business code that is using the dependency with the newer version. This probably won't be easy to add, but it would be helpful."
"The solution's reporting and storage could be improved."
"We have to integrate with their database, which means we need to send our entire code to them to scan, and they send us the report. A company working in the financial domain usually won't like to share its code or any information outside its network with any third-party provider."
"We were using Microsoft Docker images. It was reporting some vulnerabilities, but we were not able to figure out the fix for them. It was reporting some vulnerabilities in the Docker images given by Microsoft, which were out of our control. That was the only limitation. Otherwise, it was good."
"We tried to integrate it into our software development environment but it went really badly. It took a lot of time and prevented the developers from using the IDE. Eventually, we didn't use it in the development area... I would like to see better integrations to help the developers get along better with the tool. And the plugin for the IDE is not so good. This is something we would like to have..."
"The log export function could be easier when shipping logs to other platforms such as Splunk."
"The feature for automatic fixing of security breaches could be improved."
"There is always more work to do around managing the volume of information when you've got thousands of vulnerabilities. Trying to get those down to zero is virtually impossible, either through ignoring them all or through fixing them. That filtering or information management is always going to be something that can be improved."
FOSSA is ranked 9th in Software Composition Analysis (SCA) with 12 reviews while Snyk is ranked 2nd in Software Composition Analysis (SCA) with 41 reviews. FOSSA is rated 8.6, while Snyk is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of FOSSA writes "Compatibility with a wide range of dev tools, web and "C-type", enables us to scan across our ecosystem, including legacy software". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Snyk writes "Performs software composition analysis (SCA) similar to other expensive tools". FOSSA is most compared with Black Duck, Mend.io, Fortify Static Code Analyzer, JFrog Xray and Sonatype Lifecycle, whereas Snyk is most compared with SonarQube, Black Duck, GitHub Advanced Security, Fortify Static Code Analyzer and Veracode. See our FOSSA vs. Snyk report.
See our list of best Software Composition Analysis (SCA) vendors.
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