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."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."
"FOSSA provided us with contextualized, easily actionable intelligence that alerted us to compliance issues. I could tell FOSSA exactly what I cared about and they would tell me when something was out of policy. I don't want to hear from the compliance tool unless I have an issue that I need to deal with. That was what was great about FOSSA is that it was basically "Here's my policy and only send me an alert if there's something without a policy." I thought that it was really good at doing that."
"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."
"What I really need from FOSSA, and it does a really good job of this, is to flag me when there are particular open source licenses that cause me or our legal department concern. It points out where a particular issue is, where it comes from, and the chain that brought it in, which is the most important part to me."
"The most valuable feature is definitely the ease and speed of integrating into build pipelines, like a Jenkins pipeline or something along those lines. The ease of a new development team coming on board and integrating FOSSA with a new project, or even an existing project, can be done so quickly that it's invaluable and it's easy to ask the developers to use a tool like this. Those developers greatly value the very quick feedback they get on any licensing or security vulnerability issues."
"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."
"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 scalability is excellent."
"Static code analysis is one of the best features of the solution."
"The solution's vulnerability database, in terms of comprehensiveness and accuracy, is very high-level. As far as I know, it's the best among their competitors."
"What is valuable about Snyk is its simplicity."
"We use Snyk to check vulnerabilities and rectify potential leaks in GitHub."
"The most valuable feature of Snyk is the SBOM."
"It has improved our vulnerability rating and reduced our vulnerabilities through the tool during the time that we've had it. It's definitely made us more aware, as we have removed scoping for existing vulnerabilities and platforms since we rolled it out up until now."
"The most effective feature in securing project dependencies stems from its ability to highlight security vulnerabilities."
"I think all the standard features are quite useful when it comes to software component scanning, but I also like the new features they're coming out with, such as container scanning, secrets scanning, and static analysis with SAST."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"The solution provides contextualized, actionable, intelligence that alerts us to compliance issues, but there is still a little bit of work to be done on it. One of the issues that I have raised with FOSSA is that when it identifies an issue that is an error, why is it in error? What detail can they give to me? They've improved, but that still needs some work. They could provide more information that helps me to identify the dependencies and then figure out where they originated from."
"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."
"I would like more customized categories because our company is so big. This is doable for them. They are still in the stages of trying to figure this out since we are one of their biggest companies that they support."
"I want the product to include binary scanning which is missing at the moment. Binary scanning includes code and component matching through dependency management. It also includes the actual scanning and reverse engineering of the boundaries and finding out what is inside."
"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 solution could improve the reports. They have been working on improving the reports but more work could be done."
"Scalability has some issues because we have a lot of code and its use is mandatory. Therefore, it can be slow at times, especially because there are a lot of projects and reporting. Some UI improvements could help with this."
"The way Snyk notifies if we have an issue, there are a few options: High vulnerability or medium vulnerability. The problem with that is high vulnerabilities are too broad, because there are too many. If you enable notifications, you get a lot of notifications, When you get many notifications, they become irrelevant because they're not specific. I would prefer to have control over the notifications and somehow decide if I want to get only exploitable vulnerabilities or get a specific score for a vulnerability. Right now, we receive too many high vulnerabilities. If we enable notifications, then we just get a lot of spam message. Therefore, we would like some type of filtering system to be built-in for the system to be more precise."
"We have seen cases where tools didn't find or recognize certain dependencies. These are known issues, to some extent, due to the complexity in the language or stack that you using. There are some certain circumstances where the tool isn't actually finding what it's supposed to be finding, then it could be misleading."
"One area where Snyk could improve is in providing developers with the line where the error occurs."
"Snyk's API and UI features could work better in terms of speed."
"The tool needs improvement in license compliance. I would like to see the integration of better policy management in the product's future release. When it comes to the organization that I work for, there are a lot of business units since we are a group of companies. Each of these companies has its specific requirements and its own appetite for risk. This should be able to reflect in flexible policies. We need to be able to configure policies that can be adjusted later or overridden by the business unit that is using the product."
FOSSA is ranked 9th in Software Composition Analysis (SCA) with 12 reviews while Snyk is ranked 3rd 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 Checkmarx Software Composition Analysis, 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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