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 solution works well on Mac products."
"The most valuable feature for me in Black Duck is its ability to scan binary files effectively."
"The product enables other applications to be secure."
"Black Duck is pretty extensive in terms of the scan reserves and the vulnerability exposures. From that perspective, I'm happy with it."
"It is able to drill down to the source level."
"Policy management is a valuable feature."
"The solution is stable."
"The installation is very easy."
"The inventory management as well as the ability to identify security vulnerabilities has been the most valuable for our business."
"For us, the most valuable tool was open-source licensing analysis."
"The most valuable feature is the unified JAR to scan for all langs (wss-scanner jar)."
"The most valuable feature is the inventory, where it compiles a list of all of the third-party libraries that we have on our estate."
"The dashboard view and the management view are most valuable."
"The overall support that we receive is pretty good. "
"The most valuable features are the reporting, customizing libraries "In-house, White list, license selection", comparing the products/projects, and License & Copyright resolution."
"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."
"I would like to see improvements in Black Duck's reporting capabilities."
"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."
"We're not too sure about the extension of the firewall. It never shows up in the Hub."
"It's still a bit inconsistent. For example, if I scan today, it might not show the same results tomorrow."
"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 product's pricing is higher compared to other competitor products."
"It needs to be more user-friendly for developers and in general, to ensure compliance."
"The solution's pricing model and documentation areas of concern where improvement is needed."
"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++."
"Make the product available in a very stable way for other web browsers."
"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."
"They're working on a UI refresh. That's probably been one of the pain points for us as it feels like a really old application."
"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."
"At times, the latency of getting items out of the findings after they're remediated is higher than it should be."
"We specifically use this solution within our CICD pipelines in Azure DevOps, and we would like to have a gate so that if the score falls below a certain value then we can block the pipeline from running."
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.