We performed a comparison between Black Duck and Snyk based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Snyk is the clear winner in this comparison. It is easy to deploy, secure, and powerful. In addition, it has excellent customer support and an impressive ROI.
"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 stability is okay."
"I like the fact that the product auto analyzes components."
"It is able to drill down to the source level."
"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."
"It highlights what the developers have done, and it shows the impact from an intellectual property point of view."
"The solution is stable."
"The solution works well on Mac products."
"It's very easy for developers to use. Onboarding was an easy process for all of the developers within the company. After a quick, half-an-hour to an hour session, they were fully using it on their own. It's very straightforward. Usability is definitely a 10 out of 10."
"The dependency checks of the libraries are very valuable, but the licensing part is also very important because, with open source components, licensing can be all over the place. Our project is not an open source project, but we do use quite a lot of open source components and we want to make sure that we don't have surprises in there."
"From the software composition analysis perspective, it first makes sure that we understand what is happening from a third-party perspective for the particular product that we use. This is very difficult when you are building software and incorporating dependencies from other libraries, because those dependencies have dependencies and that chain of dependencies can go pretty deep. There could be a vulnerability in something that is seven layers deep, and it would be very difficult to understand that is even affecting us. Therefore, Snyk provides fantastic visibility to know, "Yes, we have a problem. Here is where it ultimately comes from." It may not be with what we're incorporating, but something much deeper than that."
"Static code analysis is one of the best features of the solution."
"The product's most valuable features are an open-source platform, remote functionality, and good pricing."
"It has improved our vulnerability rating and reduced our vulnerabilities through the tool during the time that we've had it. It's definitely made us more aware, as we have removed scoping for existing vulnerabilities and platforms since we rolled it out up until now."
"The most valuable feature is that they add a lot of their own information to the vulnerabilities. They describe vulnerabilities and suggest their own mitigations or version upgrades. The information was the winning factor when we compared Snyk to others. This is what gave it more impact."
"Snyk performs software composition analysis (SCA) similar to other expensive tools."
"The solution's pricing model and documentation areas of concern where improvement is needed."
"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."
"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."
"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 tool needs to improve its pricing. Its configuration is complex and can be improved."
"The scanner client is limited by the size of software it can handle."
"Black Duck can improve the time it takes for a scan. Most of the time it's not ideal when integrated with the live DevSecOps pipeline. We have to create a separate job to scan the library because it takes a couple of hours to scan all those libraries. The scanning could be faster."
"For the areas that they're new in, it's very early stages for them. For example, their expertise is in looking at third-party components and packages, which is their bread-and-butter and what they've been doing for ages, but for newer features such as static analysis I don't think they've got compatibility for all the languages and frameworks yet."
"It lists projects. So, if you have a number of microservices in an enterprise, then you could have pages of findings. Developers will then spend zero time going through the pages of reports to figure out, "Is there something I need to fix?" While it may make sense to list all the projects and issues in these very long lists for completeness, Snyk could do a better job of bubbling up and grouping items, e.g., a higher level dashboard that draws attention to things that are new, the highest priority things, or things trending in the wrong direction. That would make it a lot easier. They don't quite have that yet in container security."
"All such tools should definitely improve the signatures in their database. Snyk is pretty new to the industry. They have a pretty good knowledge base, but Veracode is on top because Veracode has been in this business for a pretty long time. They do have a pretty large database of all the findings, and the way that the correlation engine works is superb. Snyk is also pretty good, but it is not as good as Veracode in terms of maintaining a large space of all the historical data of vulnerabilities."
"The product is very expensive."
"I would like to give further ability to grouping code repositories, in such a way that you could group them by the teams that own them, then produce alerting to those teams. The way that we are seeing it right now, the alerting only goes to a couple of places. I wish we could configure the code to go to different places."
"There is always more work to do around managing the volume of information when you've got thousands of vulnerabilities. Trying to get those down to zero is virtually impossible, either through ignoring them all or through fixing them. That filtering or information management is always going to be something that can be improved."
"The solution's integration with JFrog Artifactory could be improved."
"Could include other types of security scanning and statistical analysis"
Black Duck is ranked 1st in Software Composition Analysis (SCA) with 19 reviews while Snyk is ranked 2nd in Software Composition Analysis (SCA) with 41 reviews. Black Duck is rated 7.8, while Snyk is rated 8.2. 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 Snyk writes "Performs software composition analysis (SCA) similar to other expensive tools". Black Duck is most compared with Fortify Static Code Analyzer, JFrog Xray, Mend.io, FOSSA and Sonatype Lifecycle, whereas Snyk is most compared with SonarQube, GitHub Advanced Security, Fortify Static Code Analyzer, Veracode and Checkmarx One. See our Black Duck vs. Snyk 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.
