We performed a comparison between HCL AppScan and Sonatype Lifecycle based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Application Security Tools solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."It highlights, with several grades of severity, the types of vulnerabilities, so we can focus on the most severe security vulnerabilities in the code."
"This solution saves us time due to the low number of false positives detected."
"It comes with all of the templates that we need. For example, we are a company that is regulated by PCI. In order to be PCI compliant, we have a lot of checks and procedures to which we have to comply."
"There's extensive functionality with custom rules and a custom knowledge base."
"Usually when we deploy the application, there is a process for ethical hacking. The main benefit is that, the ethical hacking is almost clean, every time. So it's less cost, less effort, less time to production."
"The security and the dashboard are the most valuable features."
"It is a stable solution...It is a scalable solution...The initial setup or installation of HCL AppScan is easy."
"Compared to other tools only AppScan supports special language."
"The grandfathering mode allows us to add legacy applications which we know we're not going to change or refactor for some time. New developments can be scanned separately and we can obviously resolve those vulnerabilities where there are new applications developed. The grandfathering is a good way to separate what can be factored now, versus long-term technical debt."
"Sonatype support is quite responsive. When we needed something, we could reach out and set up a meeting. They provide the best support possible."
"The application onboarding and policy grandfathering features are good and the solution integrates well with our existing DevOps tools."
"The value I get from IQ Server is that I get information on real business risks. Is something compliant, are we using the proper license?"
"For us, it's seeing not only the licensing and security vulnerabilities but also seeing the age of the open-sources included within our software. That allows us to take proactive steps to make sure we're updating the software to versions that are regularly maintained and that don't have any vulnerabilities."
"The key feature for Nexus Lifecycle is the proprietary data they have on vulnerabilities. The way that they combine all the different sources and also their own research into one concise article that clearly explains what the problem is. Most of the time, and even if you do notice that you have a problem, the public information available is pretty weak. So, if we want to assess if a problem applies to our product, it's really hard. We need to invest a lot of time digging into the problem. This work is basically done by Sonatype for us. The data that it delivers helps us with fixing or understanding the issue a lot quicker than without it."
"Lifecycle lets developers see any vulnerabilities or AGPL license issues associated with code in the early stages of development. The nice thing is that it's built into the ID so that they can see all versions of a specific code."
"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."
"One thing which I think can be improved is the CI/CD Integration"
"It has crashed at times."
"I would like to see the roadmap for this product. We are still waiting to see it as we have only so many resources."
"If HCL AppScan is able to alert the clients over email once the scan is complete, it would be great. Right now, HCL AppScan doesn't let me know if the scanning part is finished or not, because of which I have to come back and check mostly."
"The solution's scalability can be a matter of concern because one license runs on one machine only."
"IBM Security AppScan needs to add performance optimization for quickly scanning the target web applications."
"In future releases, I would like to see more aggressive reports. I would also like to see less false positives."
"The dashboard, for AppScan or the Fortified fast tool, which we use needs to be improved."
"It's the right kind of tool and going in the right direction, but it really needs to be more code-driven and oriented to be scaled at the developer level."
"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."
"The biggest thing is getting it put uniformly across all the different teams. It's more of a process issue. The process needs to be thought out about how it's going to be used, what kind of training there will be, how it's going to be socialized, and how it's going to be rolled out and controlled, enterprise-wide. That's probably more of a challenge than the technology itself."
"There is room for improvement in the code analysis aspect of Sonatype Lifecycle, specifically in the area of deployment security."
"The reporting could be better."
"It can be tricky if you want to exclude some files from scanning. For instance, if you do not want to scan and push testing files to Fortify Software Security Center, that is tricky with some IDEs, such as IntelliJ. We found that there is an Exclude feature that is not working. We reported that to them for future fixing. It needs some work on the plugins to make them consistent across IDEs and make them easier."
"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."
"One area of improvement, about which I have spoken to the Sonatype architect a while ago, is related to the installation. We still have an installation on Linux machines. The installation should move to EKS or Kubernetes so that we can do rollover updates, and we don't have to take the service down. My primary focus is to have at least triple line availability of my tools, which gives me a very small window to update my tools, including IQ. Not having them on Kubernetes means that every time we are performing an upgrade, there is downtime. It impacts the 0.1% allocated downtime that we are allowed to have, which becomes a challenge. So, if there is Kubernetes installation, it would be much easier. That's one thing that definitely needs to be improved."
HCL AppScan is ranked 15th in Application Security Tools with 41 reviews while Sonatype Lifecycle is ranked 6th in Application Security Tools with 43 reviews. HCL AppScan is rated 7.8, while Sonatype Lifecycle is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of HCL AppScan writes " A stable and scalable product useful for application security scanning". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Sonatype Lifecycle writes "Seamless to integrate and identify vulnerabilities and frees up staff time". HCL AppScan is most compared with SonarQube, Veracode, Acunetix and OWASP Zap, whereas Sonatype Lifecycle is most compared with SonarQube, Black Duck, Fortify Static Code Analyzer, GitLab and FOSSA. See our HCL AppScan vs. Sonatype Lifecycle report.
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