We performed a comparison between Black Duck and Mend (formerly WhiteSource) based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Mend is the clear winner in this comparison. Compared with Black Duck, it is easier to set up and has better reporting and analysis features and superior customer support. Mend also has a proven ROI.
"The stability is okay."
"It highlights what the developers have done, and it shows the impact from an intellectual property point of view."
"The solution is very good at scanning and evaluating open source software."
"The product enables other applications to be secure."
"It is able to drill down to the source level."
"The installation is very easy."
"We didn't have a central inventory to quickly identify issues or determine how many products were affected. Now under Black Duck, it's all consolidated. You search for a component and immediately see which products use it."
"We accidentally use third-party library APIs, which may not be secure. Our technical team may not have the end time or expertise to figure it out. Black Duck helps us with that and saves us time."
"We use a lot of open sources with a variety of containers, and the different open sources come with different licenses. Some come with dual licenses, some are risky and some are not. All our three use cases are equally important to us and we found WhiteSource handles them decently."
"The solution is scalable."
"The reporting capability gives us the option to generate an open-source license report in a single click, which gets all copyright and license information, including dependencies."
"WhiteSource helped reduce our mean time to resolution since the adoption of the product."
"The vulnerability analysis is the best aspect of the solution."
"WhiteSource is unique in the scanning of open-source licenses. Additionally, the vulnerabilities aspect of the solution is a benefit. We don't use WhiteSource in the whole organization, but we use it for some projects. There we receive a sense of the vulnerabilities of the open-source components, which improves our security work. The reports are automated which is useful."
"Our dev team uses the fix suggestions feature to quickly find the best path for remediation."
"The license management of WhiteSource was at a good level. As compared to other tools that I have used, its functionality for the licenses for the code libraries was quite good. Its UI was also fine."
"I would like to see improvements in Black Duck's reporting capabilities."
"It is a cloud-only solution. In many cases, companies like to evaluate the software, but they're very reluctant to give you the software. It would be great if they could offer an on-prem component that could be used to scan the code and then upload the discovery results to the cloud and get all the information from there, but there is no such possibility. You have to upload the code to the Black Duck cloud system. Of course, they have a strong legal department, and they offer some configuration, but it is never enough. You have to give the code, which is a drawback. In modern designs like Snyk or FOSSA, you don't need to give the code. It requires more native integration with Coverity because they go together technically. You need both Coverity and Black Duck Hub. It would be really helpful for companies working in this space to get a combined offer from the same company. They should provide an option to buy Coverity for an additional fee. Coverity combined with Black Duck Hub will provide a one-step analysis to get everything you need and a unified report. It would be really great to be able to connect Black Duck Hub with Coverity unified reports."
"We're not too sure about the extension of the firewall. It never shows up in the Hub."
"It's still a bit inconsistent. For example, if I scan today, it might not show the same results tomorrow."
"The tool's documentation and support are areas of concern where improvements are required."
"It needs to be more user-friendly for developers and in general, to ensure compliance."
"It can be cumbersome to use or invalidate open source software because there is a hold time to check requirements or common regulations to ensure compliance."
"I would like to see more integration with other solutions, such as IntelliJ IDEA."
"We specifically use this solution within our CICD pipelines in Azure DevOps, and we would like to have a gate so that if the score falls below a certain value then we can block the pipeline from running."
"I rated the solution an eight out of ten because WhiteSource hasn't built in a couple of features that we would have loved to use and they say they're on their roadmap. I'm hoping that they'll be able to build and deliver in 2022."
"The UI is not that friendly and you need to learn how to navigate easily."
"It would be good if it can do dynamic code analysis. It is not necessarily in that space, but it can do more because we have too many tools. Their partner relationship support is a little bit confusing. They haven't really streamlined the support process when we buy through a reseller. They should improve their process."
"Needs better ACL and more role definitions. This product could be used by large organisations and it definitely needs a better role/action model."
"At times, the latency of getting items out of the findings after they're remediated is higher than it should be."
"We have been looking at how we could improve the automation to human involvement ratio from 60:40 to 70:30, or even potentially 80:20, as there is room for improvement here. We are discussing this internally and with Mend; they are very accommodating to us. We think they openly receive our feedback and do their best to implement our thoughts into the roadmap."
"We have ended our relationship with WhiteSource. We were using an agent that we built in the pipeline so that you can scan the projects during build time. But unfortunately, that agent didn't work at all. We have more than 500 projects, and it doubled or tripled the build time. For other projects, we had the failure of the builds without any known reason. It was not usable at all. We spent maybe one year working on the issues to try to make it work, but it didn't in the end. We should be able to integrate it with ID and Shift Left so that the developers are able to see the scan results without waiting for the build to fail."
Black Duck is ranked 1st in Software Composition Analysis (SCA) with 19 reviews while Mend.io is ranked 4th in Software Composition Analysis (SCA) with 29 reviews. Black Duck is rated 7.8, while Mend.io is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Black Duck writes "Enables applications to be secure, but it must provide more open APIs". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Mend.io writes "Easy to use, great for finding vulnerabilities, and simple to set up". Black Duck is most compared with Snyk, Fortify Static Code Analyzer, JFrog Xray, FOSSA and Sonatype Lifecycle, whereas Mend.io is most compared with SonarQube, Snyk, Veracode, Checkmarx One and JFrog Xray. See our Black Duck vs. Mend.io report.
See our list of best Software Composition Analysis (SCA) vendors.
We monitor all Software Composition Analysis (SCA) reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.