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.
"All the features of the solution are quite good."
"Strong code evaluation for budget-minded clients."
"We consider it a handy tool that helps to resolve our issues immediately."
"The most valuable function is its usability."
"Using SonarQube benefits us because we are able to avoid the inclusion of malware in our applications."
"The initial setup is simple. It requires some security, but it's simple."
"I like the by-default policies that are they, as they seem to cover most of what I need."
"SonarQube is one of the more popular solutions because it supports 29 languages."
"Automating the Jenkins plugins and the build title is a big plus."
"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."
"The value I get from IQ Server is that I get information on real business risks. Is something compliant, are we using the proper license?"
"Its engine itself is most valuable in terms of the way it calculates and decides whether a security vulnerability exists or not. That's the most important thing. Its security is also pretty good, and its listing about the severities is also good."
"The dashboard is usable and gives us clear visibility into what is happening. It also has a very cool feature, which allows us to see the clean version available to be downloaded. Therefore, it is very easy to go and trace which version of the component does not have any issues. The dashboard can be practical, as well. It can wave a particular version of a Java file or component. It can even grandfather certain components, because in a real world scenarios we cannot always take the time to go and update something because it's not backward compatible. Having these features make it a lot easier to use and more practical. It allows us to apply the security, without having an all or nothing approach."
"The scanning capability is its most valuable feature, discovering vulnerable open source libraries."
"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 reference provided for each issue is extremely helpful."
"I would like to see SonarQube implement a good amount of improvements to the product's security features. Another aspect of SonarQube that could be improved is the search functionality."
"I would like to see more options for security, beyond the basics like SQL injection."
"I find it is light on the security side."
"If I configure a project in SonarQube, it generates a token. When we're compiling our code with SonarQube, we have to provide the token for security reasons. If IP-based connectivity is established with the solution, the project should automatically be populated without providing any additional token. It will be easy to provide just the IP address. It currently supports this functionality, but it makes a different branch in the project dashboard. From the configuration and dashboard point of view, it should have some transformations. There can be dashboard integration so that we can configure the dashboard for different purposes."
"There are limitations to the free version that limit development options as far as languages."
"We had some issues scanning the master branch but when we upgraded to version 7.9 we noticed it does scan the master branch but we had to do a workaround for it to happen. This process could be improved in a future release."
"The learning curve can be fairly steep at first, but then, it's not an entry-level type of application. It's not like an introduction to C programming. You should know not just C programming and how to make projects but also how to apply its findings to the bigger picture. I've had users who said that they wish it was easier to understand how to configure, but I don't know if that's doable because what it's doing is a very complicated thing. I don't know if it is possible to make a complicated thing trivially simple."
"The reporting can be improved."
"The team managing Nexus Lifecycle reported that their internal libraries were not being identified, so they have asked Sonatype's technical team to include that in the upcoming version."
"The reporting could be better."
"We use Azure DevOps as our application lifecycle management tool. It doesn't integrate with that as well as it does with other tools at the moment, but I think there's work being done to address that. In terms of IDEs, it integrates well. We would like to integrate it into our Azure cloud deployment but the integration with Azure Active Directory isn't quite as slick as we would like it to be. We have to do some workarounds for that at the moment."
"The GUI is simple, so it's easy to use. It started as great to use, but for larger scale companies, it also comes with some limitations. This is why we tried to move to more of an API approach. So, the GUI could use some improvements potentially."
"If there is something which is not in Maven Central, sometimes it is difficult to get the right information because it's not found."
"Overall it's good, but it would be good for our JavaScript front-end developers to have that IDE integration for their libraries. Right now, they don't, and I'm told by my Sonatype support rep that I need to submit an idea, from which they will submit a feature request. I was told it was already in the pipeline, so that was one strike against sales."
"Their licensing is expensive."
"The biggest thing that I have run into, which there are ways around, is being able to easily access the auditing data from a third-party tool; being able to pull all of that into one place in a cohesive manner where you can report off of that. We've had a little bit of a challenge with that. There are a number of things available to work with, to help with that in the tool, but we just haven't explored them yet."
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.
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