We performed a comparison between Black Duck and FOSSA based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Software Composition Analysis (SCA) solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."The stability is okay."
"The most valuable feature for me in Black Duck is its ability to scan binary files effectively."
"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 UI is the solution's most valuable feature since it allows for easy pipeline integration."
"The installation is very easy."
"The most valuable feature of Black Duck is the seamless integration to scan our Docker binary files, it provides us all open vulnerabilities, and it ensures a reference point from where it finds the vulnerability is up to date. For example, if there is any new vulnerability found, they are immediately available in the Black Duck. There is no delay in finding the vulnerabilities, they are called out in our code immediately."
"The knowledge base and the management system are the most valuable features of Black Duck Hub. It has a very helpful management environment. They offer an editor where we can check the discovered license, which is retrieved from their knowledge base. They have a huge knowledge base build over the years. It gives you some possibilities, such as this license with possibility A could cause a vulnerability issue or a potential breach."
"The cloud option of the product is always available and a positive aspect of the solution."
"The scalability is excellent."
"The support team has just been amazing, and it helps us to have a great support team from FOSSA. They are there to triage and answer all our questions which come up by using their product."
"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."
"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."
"Being able to know the licenses of the libraries is most valuable because we sell products, and we need to provide to the customers the licenses that we are using."
"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."
"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."
"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 documentation is quite scattered."
"I would like to see improvements in Black Duck's reporting capabilities."
"The scanner client is limited by the size of software it can handle."
"It needs to be more user-friendly for developers and in general, to ensure compliance."
"It's still a bit inconsistent. For example, if I scan today, it might not show the same results tomorrow."
"The tool's documentation and support are areas of concern where improvements are required."
"We're not too sure about the extension of the firewall. It never shows up in the Hub."
"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."
"Security scanning is an area for improvement. At this point, our experience is that we're only scanning for license information in components, and we're not scanning for security vulnerability information. We don't have access to that data. We use other tools for that. It would be an improvement for us to use one tool instead of two, so that we just have to go through one process instead of two."
"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."
"The technical support has room for improvement."
"I would like more customized categories because our company is so big. This is doable for them. They are still in the stages of trying to figure this out since we are one of their biggest companies that they support."
"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 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."
"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."
Black Duck is ranked 1st in Software Composition Analysis (SCA) with 19 reviews while FOSSA is ranked 9th in Software Composition Analysis (SCA) with 12 reviews. Black Duck is rated 7.8, while FOSSA is rated 8.6. 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 FOSSA writes "Compatibility with a wide range of dev tools, web and "C-type", enables us to scan across our ecosystem, including legacy software". Black Duck is most compared with Snyk, Fortify Static Code Analyzer, JFrog Xray, Mend.io and Sonatype Lifecycle, whereas FOSSA is most compared with Snyk, Mend.io, Fortify Static Code Analyzer, JFrog Xray and Checkmarx Software Composition Analysis. See our Black Duck vs. FOSSA report.
See our list of best Software Composition Analysis (SCA) vendors.
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