We performed a comparison between FOSSA and Mend.io 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."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."
"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."
"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."
"Policies and identification of open-source licensing issues are the most valuable features. It reduces the time needed to identify open-source software licensing issues."
"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."
"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 definitely the ease and speed of integrating into build pipelines, like a Jenkins pipeline or something along those lines. The ease of a new development team coming on board and integrating FOSSA with a new project, or even an existing project, can be done so quickly that it's invaluable and it's easy to ask the developers to use a tool like this. Those developers greatly value the very quick feedback they get on any licensing or security vulnerability issues."
"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."
"We set the solution up and enabled it and we had everything running pretty quickly."
"The most valuable features are the reporting, customizing libraries "In-house, White list, license selection", comparing the products/projects, and License & Copyright resolution."
"We use a lot of open sources with a variety of containers, and the different open sources come with different licenses. Some come with dual licenses, some are risky and some are not. All our three use cases are equally important to us and we found WhiteSource handles them decently."
"Our dev team uses the fix suggestions feature to quickly find the best path for remediation."
"With the fix suggestions feature, not only do you get the specific trace back to where the vulnerability is within your code, but you also get fix suggestions."
"The dashboard view and the management view are most valuable."
"The solution is scalable."
"The license management of WhiteSource was at a good level. As compared to other tools that I have used, its functionality for the licenses for the code libraries was quite good. Its UI was also fine."
"On the dashboard, there should be an option to increase the column width so that we can see the complete name of the GitHub repository. Currently, on the dashboard, we see the list of projects, but to see the complete name, you have to hover your mouse over an item, which is annoying."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"The technical support has room for improvement."
"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 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."
"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."
"We have been looking at how we could improve the automation to human involvement ratio from 60:40 to 70:30, or even potentially 80:20, as there is room for improvement here. We are discussing this internally and with Mend; they are very accommodating to us. We think they openly receive our feedback and do their best to implement our thoughts into the roadmap."
"It would be good if it can do dynamic code analysis. It is not necessarily in that space, but it can do more because we have too many tools. Their partner relationship support is a little bit confusing. They haven't really streamlined the support process when we buy through a reseller. They should improve their process."
"WhiteSource Prioritize should be expanded to cover more than Java and JavaScript."
"On the reporting side, they could make some improvements. They are making the reports better and better, but sometimes it takes a lot of time to generate a report for our entire organization."
"If anything, I would spend more time making this more user-friendly, better documenting the CLI, and adding more examples to help expand the current documentation."
"The solution lacks the code snippet part."
"Make the product available in a very stable way for other web browsers."
"WhiteSource only produces a report, which is nice to look at. However, you have to check that report every week, to see if something was found that you don't want. It would be great if the build that's generating a report would fail if it finds a very important vulnerability, for instance."
FOSSA is ranked 9th in Software Composition Analysis (SCA) with 12 reviews while Mend.io is ranked 4th in Software Composition Analysis (SCA) with 29 reviews. FOSSA is rated 8.6, while Mend.io is rated 8.4. 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". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Mend.io writes "Easy to use, great for finding vulnerabilities, and simple to set up". FOSSA is most compared with Black Duck, Snyk, Fortify Static Code Analyzer, JFrog Xray and Checkmarx Software Composition Analysis, whereas Mend.io is most compared with SonarQube, Black Duck, Veracode, Snyk and Fortify on Demand. See our FOSSA vs. Mend.io report.
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