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.
"The installation is very easy."
"It highlights what the developers have done, and it shows the impact from an intellectual property point of view."
"The solution is very good at scanning and evaluating open source software."
"The UI is the solution's most valuable feature since it allows for easy pipeline integration."
"The stability is okay."
"The solution is stable."
"It is able to drill down to the source level."
"Black Duck is pretty extensive in terms of the scan reserves and the vulnerability exposures. From that perspective, I'm happy with it."
"The most valuable features are the reporting, customizing libraries "In-house, White list, license selection", comparing the products/projects, and License & Copyright resolution."
"The solution boasts a broad range of features and covers much of what an ideal SCA tool should."
"There are multiple different integrations there. We use Mend for CI/CD that goes through Azure as well. It works seamlessly. We never have any issues with it."
"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 vulnerability analysis is the best aspect of the solution."
"We set the solution up and enabled it and we had everything running pretty quickly."
"The most valuable feature is the inventory, where it compiles a list of all of the third-party libraries that we have on our estate."
"The most valuable feature is the unified JAR to scan for all langs (wss-scanner jar)."
"The scanner client is limited by the size of software it can handle."
"The tool needs to improve its pricing. Its configuration is complex and can be improved."
"The documentation is quite scattered."
"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."
"I would like to see more integration with other solutions, such as IntelliJ IDEA."
"They are giving a lot of APIs and Python scripts for certain functionalities, but instead of using APIs and Python scripts, they should provide these functionalities through the UI. Users should be able to customize and add more fields through the UI. Users should be able to add more fields and generate reports. Currently, they are not giving flexibility in the UI. They're providing a script that simply generates an Excel file or CSV file. There is no flexibility."
"The initial setup could be simplified. It was somewhat complex."
"We're not too sure about the extension of the firewall. It never shows up in the Hub."
"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."
"The UI is not that friendly and you need to learn how to navigate easily."
"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."
"At times, the latency of getting items out of the findings after they're remediated is higher than it should be."
"It should support multiple SBOM formats to be able to integrate with old industry standards."
"The solution lacks the code snippet part."
"We have ended our relationship with WhiteSource. We were using an agent that we built in the pipeline so that you can scan the projects during build time. But unfortunately, that agent didn't work at all. We have more than 500 projects, and it doubled or tripled the build time. For other projects, we had the failure of the builds without any known reason. It was not usable at all. We spent maybe one year working on the issues to try to make it work, but it didn't in the end. We should be able to integrate it with ID and Shift Left so that the developers are able to see the scan results without waiting for the build to fail."
"Needs better ACL and more role definitions. This product could be used by large organisations and it definitely needs a better role/action model."
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.