We performed a comparison between Black Duck and Sonatype Nexus Lifecycle based on our users’ reviews in four categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Result: Based on the parameters we compared, Sonatype Nexus Lifecycle comes out ahead of Black Duck. Although both products have valuable features and can be estimated as high-end solutions, our reviewers found that Black Duck has some limitations with its reporting and can be difficult to integrate.
"The solution works well on Mac products."
"It highlights what the developers have done, and it shows the impact from an intellectual property point of view."
"Black Duck is pretty extensive in terms of the scan reserves and the vulnerability exposures. From that perspective, I'm happy with it."
"The solution is stable."
"I like the fact that the product auto analyzes components."
"The UI is the solution's most valuable feature since it allows for easy pipeline integration."
"It is able to drill down to the source level."
"The cloud option of the product is always available and a positive aspect of the solution."
"Automating the Jenkins plugins and the build title is a big plus."
"Due to the sheer amount of vulnerabilities and the fact that my company is still working on eliminating all vulnerabilities, it's still too early for me to say what I like most about Sonatype Nexus Lifecycle. Still, one of the best functions of the product is the guidance it gives in finding which components or applications have vulnerabilities. For example, my team had a vulnerability or a CVE connected to Apache last week. My team couldn't find which applications had the vulnerability initially, but using Sonatype Nexus Lifecycle helped. My team deployed new versions on that same day and successfully eliminated the vulnerabilities, so right now, the best feature of Sonatype Nexus Lifecycle is finding which applications have vulnerabilities."
"The integration of Lifecycle is really good with Jenkins and GitHub; those work very well. We've been able to get it to work seamlessly with them so that it runs on every build that we have."
"It was very easy to integrate into our build pipeline, with Jenkins and Nexus Repository as the central product."
"When developers are consuming open-source libraries from the internet, it's able to automatically block the ones that are insecure. And it has the ability to make suggestions on the ones they should be using instead."
"The IQ server and repo are the most valuable."
"The quality or the profiles that you can set are most valuable. The remediation of issues that you can do and how the information is offered is also valuable."
"The integrations into developer tooling are quite nice. I have the integration for Eclipse and for Visual Studio. Colleagues are using the Javascript IDE from JetBrains called WebStorm and there is an integration for that from Nexus Lifecycle. I have not heard about anything that is not working. It's also quite easy to integrate it. You just need to set up a project or an app and then you just make the connection in all the tools you're using."
"The solution's pricing model and documentation areas of concern where improvement is needed."
"The scanner client is limited by the size of software it can handle."
"The initial setup could be simplified. It was somewhat complex."
"The product's pricing is higher compared to other competitor products."
"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."
"They are giving a lot of APIs and Python scripts for certain functionalities, but instead of using APIs and Python scripts, they should provide these functionalities through the UI. Users should be able to customize and add more fields through the UI. Users should be able to add more fields and generate reports. Currently, they are not giving flexibility in the UI. They're providing a script that simply generates an Excel file or CSV file. There is no flexibility."
"I would like to see more integration with other solutions, such as IntelliJ IDEA."
"The tool needs to improve its pricing. Its configuration is complex and can be improved."
"Fortify Static Code Analyzer has a bit of a learning curve, and I don't find it particularly helpful in narrowing down the vulnerabilities we should prioritize."
"Sonatype Nexus Lifecycle can improve by having a feature to automatically detect vulnerabilities. Additionally, if it could automatically push the dependencies or create notifications it would be beneficial."
"In terms of features, the reports natively come in as PDF or JSON. They should start thinking of another way to filter their reports. The reporting tool used by most enterprises, like Splunk and Elasticsearch, do not work as well with JSON."
"We got a lot of annotations for certain libraries when it comes to Java, but my feeling, and the feeling of a colleague as well, is that we don't get as many for critical libraries when it comes to .NET, as if most of them are really fine... It would be good if Sonatype would check the status of annotations for .NET packages."
"Sometimes we face difficulties with Maven Central... if I'm using the 1.0.0 version, after one or two years, the 1.0.0 version will be gone from Maven Central but our team will still be using that 1.0.0 version to build. When they do builds, it won't build completely because that version is gone from Maven Central. There is a difference in our Sonatype Maven Central."
"Sonatype Nexus Lifecycle can improve the functionality. Some functionalities are missing from the UI that could be accessed using the API but they are not available. For example, seeing more than the 100 first reports or, seeing your comments when you process a waiver for a vulnerability or a violation."
"One thing that it is lacking, one thing I don't like, is that when you label something or add a status to it, you do it as an overall function, but you can't go back and isolate a library that you want to call out individually and remove a status from it. It's still lacking some functionality-type things for controlling labels and statuses. I'd like to be able to apply it across all of my apps, but then turn it off for one, and I can't do that."
"The user interface needs to be improved. It is slow for us. We use Nexus IQ mostly via APIs. We don't use the interface that much, but when we use it, certain areas are just unresponsive or very slow to load. So, performance-wise, the UI is not fast enough for us, but we don't use it that much anyway."
Black Duck is ranked 1st in Software Composition Analysis (SCA) with 19 reviews while Sonatype Lifecycle is ranked 5th in Software Composition Analysis (SCA) with 43 reviews. Black Duck is rated 7.8, while Sonatype Lifecycle 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 Sonatype Lifecycle writes "Seamless to integrate and identify vulnerabilities and frees up staff time". Black Duck is most compared with Snyk, Fortify Static Code Analyzer, JFrog Xray, Mend.io and Checkmarx Software Composition Analysis, whereas Sonatype Lifecycle is most compared with SonarQube, Fortify Static Code Analyzer, GitLab, Checkmarx One and Mend.io. See our Black Duck vs. Sonatype Lifecycle report.
See our list of best Software Composition Analysis (SCA) vendors.
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