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."I am impressed with the tool’s seamless integration and quick results."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"Our overall security has improved. We are running fewer severities and vulnerabilities in our packages. We fixed a lot of the vulnerabilities that we didn't know were there."
"The most valuable features include enriched information around the vulnerabilities for better triaging, in terms of the vulnerability layer origin and vulnerability tree."
"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."
"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 code scans on the source code itself were valuable."
"From the software composition analysis perspective, it first makes sure that we understand what is happening from a third-party perspective for the particular product that we use. This is very difficult when you are building software and incorporating dependencies from other libraries, because those dependencies have dependencies and that chain of dependencies can go pretty deep. There could be a vulnerability in something that is seven layers deep, and it would be very difficult to understand that is even affecting us. Therefore, Snyk provides fantastic visibility to know, "Yes, we have a problem. Here is where it ultimately comes from." It may not be with what we're incorporating, but something much deeper than that."
"I am impressed with the product's security vulnerability detection. My peers in security are praising the tool for its accuracy to detect security vulnerabilities. The product is very easy to onboard. It doesn't require a lot of preparation or prerequisites. It's a bit of a plug-and-play as long as you're using a package manager or for example, you are using a GitHub repository. And that is an advantage for this tool because developers don't want to add more tools to what they're currently using."
"Snyk helps me pinpoint security errors in my code."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"The technical support has room for improvement."
"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."
"I wish there was a way that you could have a more global rollout of it, instead of having to do it in each repository individually. It's possible, that's something that is offered now, or maybe if you were using the CI Jenkins, you'd be able to do that. But with Travis, there wasn't an easy way to do that. At least not that I could find. That was probably the biggest issue."
"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."
"Compatibility with other products would be great."
"Basically the licensing costs are a little bit expensive."
"The solution could improve the reports. They have been working on improving the reports but more work could be done."
"I think Snyk should add more of a vulnerability protection feature in the tool since it is an area where it lacks."
"The feature for automatic fixing of security breaches could be improved."
"It can be improved from the reporting perspective and scanning perspective. They can also improve it on the UI front."
"They need to improve the Snyk plugins and make it easier to make your optimizations based on your own needs or features."
"For the areas that they're new in, it's very early stages for them. For example, their expertise is in looking at third-party components and packages, which is their bread-and-butter and what they've been doing for ages, but for newer features such as static analysis I don't think they've got compatibility for all the languages and frameworks yet."
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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