We performed a comparison between Black Duck and Mend (formerly WhiteSource) based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Mend is the clear winner in this comparison. Compared with Black Duck, it is easier to set up and has better reporting and analysis features and superior customer support. Mend also has a proven ROI.
"Policy management is a valuable feature."
"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 solution is very good at scanning and evaluating open source software."
"We accidentally use third-party library APIs, which may not be secure. Our technical team may not have the end time or expertise to figure it out. Black Duck helps us with that and saves us time."
"It is able to drill down to the source level."
"I like the fact that the product auto analyzes components."
"It highlights what the developers have done, and it shows the impact from an intellectual property point of view."
"Black Duck is pretty extensive in terms of the scan reserves and the vulnerability exposures. From that perspective, I'm happy with it."
"The inventory management as well as the ability to identify security vulnerabilities has been the most valuable for our business."
"The most valuable features are the reporting, customizing libraries "In-house, White list, license selection", comparing the products/projects, and License & Copyright resolution."
"The results and the dashboard they provide are good."
"The most valuable feature is the unified JAR to scan for all langs (wss-scanner jar)."
"The vulnerability analysis is the best aspect of the solution."
"The overall support that we receive is pretty good. "
"Its ease of use and good results are the most valuable."
"Mend has reduced our open-source software vulnerabilities and helped us remediate issues quickly. My company's policy is to ensure that vulnerabilities are fixed before it gets to production."
"The documentation is quite scattered."
"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 solution's pricing model and documentation areas of concern where improvement is needed."
"The initial setup could be simplified. It was somewhat complex."
"The tool needs to improve its pricing. Its configuration is complex and can be improved."
"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."
"I would like to see more integration with other solutions, such as IntelliJ IDEA."
"It is a cloud-only solution. In many cases, companies like to evaluate the software, but they're very reluctant to give you the software. It would be great if they could offer an on-prem component that could be used to scan the code and then upload the discovery results to the cloud and get all the information from there, but there is no such possibility. You have to upload the code to the Black Duck cloud system. Of course, they have a strong legal department, and they offer some configuration, but it is never enough. You have to give the code, which is a drawback. In modern designs like Snyk or FOSSA, you don't need to give the code. It requires more native integration with Coverity because they go together technically. You need both Coverity and Black Duck Hub. It would be really helpful for companies working in this space to get a combined offer from the same company. They should provide an option to buy Coverity for an additional fee. Coverity combined with Black Duck Hub will provide a one-step analysis to get everything you need and a unified report. It would be really great to be able to connect Black Duck Hub with Coverity unified reports."
"Mend lets you create custom policies. They're not too complicated to set up, but it would be helpful if they had some preconfigured policies to match what we have in Azure DevOps. That would save us a lot of time. It's tedious to configure the policies manually, and I lack the capacity to do it right now. Other products have preconfigured packs and templates, and Mend doesn't."
"The UI can be slow once in a while, and we're not sure if it's because of the amount of data we have, or it is just a slow product, but it would be nice if it could be improved."
"The initial setup could be simplified."
"I would like to see the static analysis included with the open-source version."
"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."
"WhiteSource needs improvement in the scanning of the containers and images with distinguishing the layers."
"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."
"We specifically use this solution within our CICD pipelines in Azure DevOps, and we would like to have a gate so that if the score falls below a certain value then we can block the pipeline from running."
Black Duck is ranked 1st in Software Composition Analysis (SCA) with 16 reviews while Mend.io is ranked 4th in Software Composition Analysis (SCA) with 29 reviews. Black Duck is rated 7.8, while Mend.io is rated 8.4. 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 Mend.io writes "Easy to use, great for finding vulnerabilities, and simple to set up". Black Duck is most compared with Snyk, Fortify Static Code Analyzer, JFrog Xray, FOSSA and Sonatype Lifecycle, whereas Mend.io is most compared with SonarQube, Snyk, Checkmarx One, Veracode and JFrog Xray. See our Black Duck vs. Mend.io 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.