We performed a comparison between Black Duck and Sonatype Nexus Lifecycle based on our users’ reviews in four categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Result: Based on the parameters we compared, Sonatype Nexus Lifecycle comes out ahead of Black Duck. Although both products have valuable features and can be estimated as high-end solutions, our reviewers found that Black Duck has some limitations with its reporting and can be difficult to integrate.
"Policy management is a valuable feature."
"The most valuable feature is the vulnerability scanning, and that it's easy to use."
"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."
"Black Duck is pretty extensive in terms of the scan reserves and the vulnerability exposures. From that perspective, I'm happy with it."
"We didn't have a central inventory to quickly identify issues or determine how many products were affected. Now under Black Duck, it's all consolidated. You search for a component and immediately see which products use it."
"The solution is very good at scanning and evaluating open source software."
"The stability is okay."
"The UI is the solution's most valuable feature since it allows for easy pipeline integration."
"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."
"The proxy repository is probably the most valuable feature to us because it allows us to be more proactive in our builds. We're no longer tied to saving components to our repository."
"Some of the more profound features include the REST APIs. We tend to make use of those a lot. They also have a plugin for our CI/CD; we use Jenkins to do continuous integration, and it makes our pipeline build a lot more streamlined. It integrates with Jenkins very well."
"The most valuable feature is that I get a quick overview of the libraries that are included in the application, and the issues that are connected with them. I can quickly understand which problems there are from a security point of view or from a licensing point of view. It's quick and very exact."
"I like Fortify Software Security Center or Fortify SSC. This tool is installed on each developer's machine, but Fortify Software Security Center combines everything. We can meet there as security professionals and developers. The developers scan their code and publish the results there. We can then look at them from a security perspective and see whether they fixed the issues. We can agree on whether something is a false positive and make decisions."
"The data quality is really good. They've got some of the best in the industry as far as that is concerned. As a result, it helps us to resolve problems faster. The visibility of the data, as well as their features that allow us to query and search - and even use it in the development IDE - allow us to remediate and find things faster."
"The reference provided for each issue is extremely helpful."
"The REST API is the most useful for us because it allows us to drive it remotely and, ideally, to automate it."
"The initial setup could be simplified. It was somewhat complex."
"I would like to see improvements in Black Duck's reporting capabilities."
"It is a cloud-only solution. In many cases, companies like to evaluate the software, but they're very reluctant to give you the software. It would be great if they could offer an on-prem component that could be used to scan the code and then upload the discovery results to the cloud and get all the information from there, but there is no such possibility. You have to upload the code to the Black Duck cloud system. Of course, they have a strong legal department, and they offer some configuration, but it is never enough. You have to give the code, which is a drawback. In modern designs like Snyk or FOSSA, you don't need to give the code. It requires more native integration with Coverity because they go together technically. You need both Coverity and Black Duck Hub. It would be really helpful for companies working in this space to get a combined offer from the same company. They should provide an option to buy Coverity for an additional fee. Coverity combined with Black Duck Hub will provide a one-step analysis to get everything you need and a unified report. It would be really great to be able to connect Black Duck Hub with Coverity unified reports."
"They are giving a lot of APIs and Python scripts for certain functionalities, but instead of using APIs and Python scripts, they should provide these functionalities through the UI. Users should be able to customize and add more fields through the UI. Users should be able to add more fields and generate reports. Currently, they are not giving flexibility in the UI. They're providing a script that simply generates an Excel file or CSV file. There is no flexibility."
"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."
"I would like to see more integration with other solutions, such as IntelliJ IDEA."
"The tool needs to improve its pricing. Its configuration is complex and can be improved."
"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."
"There is room for improvement in the code analysis aspect of Sonatype Lifecycle, specifically in the area of deployment security."
"They could do with making more plugins for the more common integration engines out there. Right now, it supports automation engine by Jenkins but it doesn't fully support something like TeamCity."
"Another feature they could use is more languages. Sonatype has been mainly a Java shop because they look after Maven Central... But we've slowly been branching out to different languages. They don't cover all of them, and those that they do cover are not as in-depth as we would like them to be."
"Improvement as per customer requirements."
"We got a lot of annotations for certain libraries when it comes to Java, but my feeling, and the feeling of a colleague as well, is that we don't get as many for critical libraries when it comes to .NET, as if most of them are really fine... It would be good if Sonatype would check the status of annotations for .NET packages."
"In the beginning, we sometimes struggle to access the customer environment. The customer must issue the required certificates because many customers use cell phone certificates, and Sonatype needs a valid CA certificate."
"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."
"We use Griddle a lot for integrating into our local builds with the IDE, which is another built system. There is not a lot of support for it nor published modules that can be readily used. So, we had to create our own. No Griddle plugins have been released."
Black Duck is ranked 1st in Software Composition Analysis (SCA) with 19 reviews while Sonatype Lifecycle is ranked 5th in Software Composition Analysis (SCA) with 43 reviews. Black Duck is rated 7.8, while Sonatype Lifecycle 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 Sonatype Lifecycle writes "Seamless to integrate and identify vulnerabilities and frees up staff time". Black Duck is most compared with Snyk, Fortify Static Code Analyzer, JFrog Xray, Mend.io and Checkmarx Software Composition Analysis, whereas Sonatype Lifecycle is most compared with SonarQube, Fortify Static Code Analyzer, GitLab, Checkmarx One and Mend.io. See our Black Duck vs. Sonatype Lifecycle report.
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