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 most valuable feature for me in Black Duck is its ability to scan binary files effectively."
"The solution is very good at scanning and evaluating open source software."
"Policy management is a valuable feature."
"It highlights what the developers have done, and it shows the impact from an intellectual property point of view."
"The UI is the solution's most valuable feature since it allows for easy pipeline integration."
"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."
"The installation is very easy."
"The product enables other applications to be secure."
"The best feature is that the Mend R&D team does their due diligence for all the vulnerabilities. In case they observe any important or critical vulnerabilities, such as the Log4j-related vulnerability, we usually get a dedicated email from our R&D team saying that this particular vulnerability has been exploited in the world, and we should definitely check our project for this and take corrective actions."
"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."
"The overall support that we receive is pretty good. "
"It gives us full visibility into what we're using, what needs to be updated, and what's vulnerable, which helps us make better decisions."
"The dashboard view and the management view are most valuable."
"For us, the most valuable tool was open-source licensing analysis."
"The solution is scalable."
"We find licenses together with WhiteSource which are associated with a certain library, then we get a classification of the license. This is with respect to criticality and vulnerability, so we could take action and improve some things, or replace a third-party library which seems to be too risky for us to use on legal grounds."
"We're not too sure about the extension of the firewall. It never shows up in the Hub."
"The product's pricing is higher compared to other competitor products."
"The tool's documentation and support are areas of concern where improvements are required."
"The initial setup could be simplified. It was somewhat complex."
"Due to the fact that, with our software developer life cycle, we don't need to scan our source code every day or every week. For that reason, we find the cost is too high. We might only actually use it five to ten times a year, which makes it expensive."
"The solution must provide more open APIs."
"We have been having some issues with the latest releases where we are not able to scan our applications with the help of Black Duck."
"The documentation is quite scattered."
"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."
"The only thing that I don't find support for on Mend Prioritize is C++."
"I would like to have an additional compliance pack. Currently, it does not have anything for the CIS framework or the NIST framework. If we directly run a scan, and it is under the CIS framework, we can directly tell the auditor that this product is now CIS compliant."
"Mend lets you create custom policies. They're not too complicated to set up, but it would be helpful if they had some preconfigured policies to match what we have in Azure DevOps. That would save us a lot of time. It's tedious to configure the policies manually, and I lack the capacity to do it right now. Other products have preconfigured packs and templates, and Mend doesn't."
"WhiteSource Prioritize should be expanded to cover more than Java and JavaScript."
"Needs better ACL and more role definitions. This product could be used by large organisations and it definitely needs a better role/action model."
"The UI is not that friendly and you need to learn how to navigate easily."
"On the reporting side, they could make some improvements. They are making the reports better and better, but sometimes it takes a lot of time to generate a report for our entire organization."
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.
