FOSSA vs Fortify Static Code Analyzer comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary
 

Categories and Ranking

Fortify Static Code Analyzer
Average Rating
8.4
Number of Reviews
15
Ranking in other categories
Static Code Analysis (3rd)
FOSSA
Average Rating
8.6
Number of Reviews
12
Ranking in other categories
Software Composition Analysis (SCA) (9th)
 

Market share comparison

As of June 2024, in the Static Code Analysis category, the market share of Fortify Static Code Analyzer is 27.6% and it increased by 162.1% compared to the previous year. The market share of FOSSA is 1.7% and it decreased by 50.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Static Code Analysis
Unique Categories:
No other categories found
Software Composition Analysis (SCA)
5.6%
 

Featured Reviews

Maurizio Garofalo - PeerSpot reviewer
Nov 21, 2023
Makes code review much easier pre-deployment
They are one of the market leaders, according to Gartner's Magic Quadrant. We use Fortify to reduce application vulnerabilities significantly. In the test environment, we don't just use software code review. Before the use of Fortify, we would test the applications; however, using Fortify allows us to test internationally and to align with various compliance requirements, for example, European banking requirements. It offers efficiency in the deployment of the application. It makes code review much easier pre-deployment. The Fortify FOD Portal is quite useful. It helps centrally manage everything and provides us with a 360-degree view of our AppSec team. The solution truly supports the development team by giving a clear indication of vulnerabilities and providing suggestions on how to deal with vulnerabilities in a clear manner. There is a lot of useful analysis. It can help us map application libraries. The software security center, in terms of managing and tracking risks, is good. It's very consistent. In Italy, the culture of risk analysis is very low. However, it provides very clear reporting. It offers great mapping. It maps both the tests and the severity of the vulnerability. It can help support the goals of risk analysis and help prioritize tasks to deal properly with risk. It can support risk analysis effectively. The testing of the application portfolio is useful. It's also great for regulatory requests, including in the European community. The mapping of the application vulnerabilities provides us a way to respond according to risk. It's very simple to use Fortify. We can fully integrate with GitHub. However, we can also migrate in certain scenarios. We can prepare packages subject to analysis and send them to Fortify. It's not difficult. It's very simple. When Fortify is on-premises with GitHub, remediation is easy. They can suggest and resolve issues directly. Fortify can offer guidance to the development team. So it's not only an identification tool, it's also a tool that can provide remediation for potential vulnerabilities. Now, in the European Union, it's mandatory to analyze software. Fortify has become a necessary product. We might have started using it before there was a regulatory need. However, we now must have something like Fortify in place. It helps us reduce risk exposure on applications through the discoverability of vulnerabilities and weaknesses. It's fully satisfactory. It ensures we are being fully compliant. We chose the solution as it is one of the market leaders, according to Gartner. We can only use the best in the market since it's so integral to our compliance requirements. It ensures we are always compliant with internal and external audits. Fortify does provide real-time feedback on security problems. However, we don't use, at the moment, the functionality of real-time vulnerability analysis during the developer's typing of the code. We check the code afterward. It's helped us free up staff time. We spend less time fixing software deployments. We've reduced the time to market of the implementation phase by 50%. We can test the applications faster, and we can support a number of projects with the same number of people.
BF
Oct 5, 2020
Compatibility with a wide range of dev tools, web and "C-type", enables us to scan across our ecosystem, including legacy software
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. That would give me a better idea of where to look, rather than just generically searching the web. They do provide more information than they used to, which is good, but I still think that they have a ways to go with it. Another topic is the components tab of FOSSA. It has a couple of reports that tell me the packages that are being tracked and that allow me to look up packages. That could be expanded in several ways and fixed up in several ways. It could be expanded in that, right now, you can only search for and find packages that are in use in the organization. There is no way to search for all packages, even packages that we're not using. That would be really useful to my developers, for them to be able to come into FOSSA and get more information about components before they use them. The other thing on that tab, regarding the reports, is something that I've been working on with them for a while. The reports don't really work that well for us. They do provide good information but they perform poorly with either the number of projects, or components, in the system. Reports that worked when the load was low, are now timing out before finishing. Unfortunately, that makes it a feature that I can't really roll out to the rest of the organization. For example, the due diligence report and the audit report FOSSA has would be very beneficial to my teams, but until they work for all the teams, I can't roll it out. So there is work that needs to be done on this page for reporting. If they're going to provide reports they should function and they should provide actionable information. They do provide actionable information but because they don't function, they're not really useful to me, and I need them to be. So the components tab needs work, or it needs to be removed, but I prefer that it gets the work. There are other little things that could be improved as well. On the issues tab, there is a problem with resolving issues that have been identified and that occur in a larger number of projects. It doesn't even have to be that many. We've got one component that is tied to 61 projects and we have tried to resolve it for all but it never actually works. It spins for a while, but it doesn't do anything. These aren't things that happen on a regular basis. They're not so much of an issue that the system doesn't work. There are a few other usability issues in the system, UI concerns that I have, and I bring those up on the Slack channel with them as I run into them. Quite often they address them very quickly.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"Fortify integrates with various development environments and tools, such as IDEs (Integrated Development Environments) and CI/CD pipelines."
"It's helped us free up staff time."
"The integration Subset core integration, using Jenkins is one of the good features."
"You can really see what's happening after you've developed something."
"The reference provided for each issue is extremely helpful."
"Fortify Static Code Analyzer tells us if there are any security leaks or not. If there are, then it's notifying us and does not allow us to pass the DevOps pipeline. If it is finds everything's perfect, as per our given guidelines, then it is allowing us to go ahead and start it, and we are able to deploy it."
"I like the Fortify taxonomy as it provides us with a list of all of the vulnerabilities found. Fortify release updated rule packs quarterly, with accompanying documentation, that lets us know what new features are being released."
"We've found the documentation to be very good."
"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."
"The scalability is excellent."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"I am impressed with the tool’s seamless integration and quick results."
"Their CLI tool is very efficient. It does not send your source code over to their servers. It just does fingerprinting. It is also very easy to integrate into software development practices."
"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."
 

Cons

"Streamlining the upgrade process and enhancing compatibility would make it easier for us to keep our security tools up-to-date."
"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."
"Their licensing is expensive."
"Fortify's software security center needs a design refresh."
"Not all languages are supported in Fortify."
"The product shows false positives for Python applications."
"The pricing is a bit high."
"The generation of false positives should be reduced."
"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."
"One thing that can sometimes be difficult with FOSSA is understanding all that it can do. One of the ways that I've been able to unlock some of those more advanced features is through conversations with the absolutely awesome customer success team at FOSSA, but it has been a little bit difficult to find some of that information separately on my own through FAQs and other information channels that FOSSA has. The improvement is less about the product itself and more about empowering FOSSA customers to know and understand how to unlock its full potential."
"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."
"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 the FOSSA API to be broader. I would like not to have to interact with the GUI at all, to do the work that I want to do. I would like them to do API-first development, rather than a focus on the GUI."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"From our standpoint, we are significantly better off with Fortify due to the favorable pricing we secured five years ago."
"The licensing is expensive and is in the 50K range."
"The price of Fortify Static Code Analyzer could be reduced."
"There is a licensing fee, and if you bring them to the company and you want them to do the installation and the implementation in the beginning, there is a separate cost. Similarly, if you want consultation or training, there is a separate cost. I see it as suitable only for enterprises. I do not see it suitable for a small business or individual use."
"Although I am not responsible for the budget, Fortify SAST is expensive."
"It has a couple of license models. The one that we use most frequently is called their flexible deployment. We use this one because it is flexible and based on the number of code-contributing developers in the organization. It includes almost everything in the Fortify suite for one developer price. It gives access to not just the secure code analyzer (SCA) but also to FSC, the secure code. It gives us accessibility to scan central, which is the decentralized scanning farm. It also gives us access to the software security center, which is the vulnerability management platform."
"The setup costs and pricing for Fortify may vary depending on the organization's needs and requirements."
"FOSSA is not cheap, but their offering is top-notch. It is very much a "you get what you pay for" scenario. Regardless of the price, I highly recommend FOSSA."
"Its price is reasonable as compared to the market. It is competitively priced in comparison to other similar solutions on the market. It is also quite affordable in terms of the value that it delivers as compared to its alternative of hiring a team."
"FOSSA is a fairly priced product. It is not either cheaper or expensive. The pricing lies somewhere in the middle. The solution is worth the money that we are spending to use it."
"The solution's cost is a five out of ten."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
28%
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Government
7%
Manufacturing Company
26%
Computer Software Company
17%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Healthcare Company
5%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Fortify Static Code Analyzer?
Integrating the Fortify Static Code Analyzer into our software development lifecycle was straightforward. It highlights important information beyond just syntax errors. It identifies issues like pa...
What needs improvement with Fortify Static Code Analyzer?
The product shows false positives for Python applications.
What do you like most about FOSSA?
I am impressed with the tool’s seamless integration and quick results.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for FOSSA?
FOSSA is a fairly priced product. It is not either cheaper or expensive. The pricing lies somewhere in the middle. The solution is worth the money that we are spending to use it.
What needs improvement with FOSSA?
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 scannin...
 

Also Known As

Fortify Static Code Analysis SAST
No data available
 

Learn More

Video not available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
AppDyanmic, Uber, Twitter, Zendesk, Confluent
Find out what your peers are saying about Veracode, Checkmarx, OpenText and others in Static Code Analysis. Updated: May 2024.
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