We performed a comparison between SonarQube and Sonatype Nexus Lifecycle based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Based on the parameters we compared, SonarQube and Sonatype Nexus Lifecycle seem to have a similar rating among users regarding ease of deployment, pricing, service and support, and ROI. In terms of features, users of SonarQube felt more scanning features were needed, while users of Sonatype Nexus Lifecycle felt the software needed to be more code-driven.
"Provides local scanning for developers."
"With SonarQube's web interface, it is easy to drill down to see the individual problems, but also to look at the project from above and get the big picture, with possible larger problem areas."
"The software quality gate streamlines the product's quality."
"This solution has helped with the integration and building of our CICD pipeline."
"The static code analysis is very good."
"It is very good at identifying technical debt."
"We are using the Community edition. So, we don't have to incur any licensing costs. This is the best part."
"The product is simple."
"The integration of Lifecycle is really good with Jenkins and GitHub; those work very well. We've been able to get it to work seamlessly with them so that it runs on every build that we have."
"With the plugin for our IDE that Sonatype provides, we can check whether a library has security, quality, or licensing issues very easily. Which is nice because Googling for this stuff can be a bit cumbersome. By checking it before code is even committed, we save ourselves from getting notifications."
"The way we can define policies and apply those policies selectively across the different applications is valuable. We can define a separate policy for public-facing applications and a separate policy for the internal applications. That is cool."
"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 component piece, where you can analyze the component, is the most valuable. You can pull the component up and you can look at what versions are bad, what versions are clean, and what versions haven't been reported on yet. You can make decisions based off of that, in terms of where you want to go. I like that it puts all that information right there in a window for you."
"The most valuable function of Sonatype Lifecycle is its code analysis capability, especially within the specific sub-product focusing on static analysis."
"We really like the Nexus Firewall. There are increasing threats from npm, rogue components, and we've been able to leverage protection there. We also really like being able to know which of our apps has known vulnerabilities."
"It was very easy to integrate into our build pipeline, with Jenkins and Nexus Repository as the central product."
"We had some issues where the Quality Gate check sometimes gets stuck and it is unclear."
"It does not provide deeper scanning of vulnerabilities in an application, on a live session. This is something we are not happy about. Maybe the reason for that is we are running the community edition currently, but other editions may improve on that aspect."
"The product's pricing could be lower."
"One thing to improve would be the integration. There is a steep learning curve to get it integrated."
"We did have some trouble with the LDAP integration for the console."
"There are times that we have the database crash. However, this might be an issue with how we have configured it and not a software issue. Apart from this, I do not see any issues with the solution."
"I would like to see more options for security, beyond the basics like SQL injection."
"I would also like SonarQube to be able to write custom scanning rules. More documentation would be helpful as well because some of our guys were struggling with the customization script."
"Fortify's software security center needs a design refresh."
"One of the things that we specifically did ask for is support for transitive dependencies. Sometimes a dependency that we define in our POM file for a certain library will be dependent on other stuff and we will pull that stuff in, then you get a cascade of libraries that are pulled in. This caused confusing to us at first, because we would see a component that would have security ticket or security notification on it and wonder "Where is this coming in from?" Because when we checked what we defined as our dependencies it's not there. It didn't take us too long effort to realize that it was a transitive dependency pulled in by something else, but the question then remains "Which dependency is doing that?""
"Sometimes we face difficulties with Maven Central... if I'm using the 1.0.0 version, after one or two years, the 1.0.0 version will be gone from Maven Central but our team will still be using that 1.0.0 version to build. When they do builds, it won't build completely because that version is gone from Maven Central. There is a difference in our Sonatype Maven Central."
"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."
"One thing that it is lacking, one thing I don't like, is that when you label something or add a status to it, you do it as an overall function, but you can't go back and isolate a library that you want to call out individually and remove a status from it. It's still lacking some functionality-type things for controlling labels and statuses. I'd like to be able to apply it across all of my apps, but then turn it off for one, and I can't do that."
"Some of the APIs are just REST APIs and I would like to see more of the functionality in the plugin side of the world. For example, with the RESTful API I can actually delete or move an artifact from one Nexus repository to another. I can't do that with the pipeline API, as of yet. I'd like to see a bit more functionality on that side."
"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."
"We created the Wiki page for each team showing an overview of their outstanding security issues because the Lifecycle reporting interface isn't as intuitive. It is good for people on my team who use it quite often. But for a tech engineer who doesn't interact with it regularly, it's quite confusing."
SonarQube is ranked 1st in Application Security Tools with 110 reviews while Sonatype Lifecycle is ranked 6th in Application Security Tools with 42 reviews. SonarQube is rated 8.0, while Sonatype Lifecycle is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of SonarQube writes "Easy to integrate and has a plug-in that supports both C and C++ languages". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Sonatype Lifecycle writes "Seamless to integrate and identify vulnerabilities and frees up staff time". SonarQube is most compared with Checkmarx One, SonarCloud, Coverity, Veracode and Fortify on Demand, whereas Sonatype Lifecycle is most compared with Black Duck, Fortify Static Code Analyzer, GitLab, Checkmarx One and Mend.io. See our SonarQube vs. Sonatype Lifecycle report.
See our list of best Application Security Tools vendors.
We monitor all Application Security Tools 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.
