We performed a comparison between Black Duck and Sonatype Nexus Lifecycle based on our users’ reviews in four categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Result: Based on the parameters we compared, Sonatype Nexus Lifecycle comes out ahead of Black Duck. Although both products have valuable features and can be estimated as high-end solutions, our reviewers found that Black Duck has some limitations with its reporting and can be difficult to integrate.
"The installation is very easy."
"It is able to drill down to the source level."
"It highlights what the developers have done, and it shows the impact from an intellectual property point of view."
"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."
"The UI is the solution's most valuable feature since it allows for easy pipeline integration."
"The solution is very good at scanning and evaluating open source software."
"I like the fact that the product auto analyzes components."
"The solution is stable."
"The integrations into developer tooling are quite nice. I have the integration for Eclipse and for Visual Studio. Colleagues are using the Javascript IDE from JetBrains called WebStorm and there is an integration for that from Nexus Lifecycle. I have not heard about anything that is not working. It's also quite easy to integrate it. You just need to set up a project or an app and then you just make the connection in all the tools you're using."
"Lifecycle lets developers see any vulnerabilities or AGPL license issues associated with code in the early stages of development. The nice thing is that it's built into the ID so that they can see all versions of a specific code."
"The most valuable function of Sonatype Lifecycle is its code analysis capability, especially within the specific sub-product focusing on static analysis."
"Vulnerability detection accuracy is good."
"The quality or the profiles that you can set are most valuable. The remediation of issues that you can do and how the information is offered is also valuable."
"The Software Security Center, which is often overlooked, stands out as the most effective feature."
"Some of the more profound features include the REST APIs. We tend to make use of those a lot. They also have a plugin for our CI/CD; we use Jenkins to do continuous integration, and it makes our pipeline build a lot more streamlined. It integrates with Jenkins very well."
"For us, it's seeing not only the licensing and security vulnerabilities but also seeing the age of the open-sources included within our software. That allows us to take proactive steps to make sure we're updating the software to versions that are regularly maintained and that don't have any vulnerabilities."
"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."
"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."
"The product's pricing is higher compared to other competitor products."
"I would like to see more integration with other solutions, such as IntelliJ IDEA."
"The solution must provide more open APIs."
"The scanner client is limited by the size of software it can handle."
"The solution's pricing model and documentation areas of concern where improvement is needed."
"The documentation is quite scattered."
"One area of improvement, about which I have spoken to the Sonatype architect a while ago, is related to the installation. We still have an installation on Linux machines. The installation should move to EKS or Kubernetes so that we can do rollover updates, and we don't have to take the service down. My primary focus is to have at least triple line availability of my tools, which gives me a very small window to update my tools, including IQ. Not having them on Kubernetes means that every time we are performing an upgrade, there is downtime. It impacts the 0.1% allocated downtime that we are allowed to have, which becomes a challenge. So, if there is Kubernetes installation, it would be much easier. That's one thing that definitely needs to be improved."
"If there is something which is not in Maven Central, sometimes it is difficult to get the right information because it's not found."
"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."
"The biggest thing is getting it put uniformly across all the different teams. It's more of a process issue. The process needs to be thought out about how it's going to be used, what kind of training there will be, how it's going to be socialized, and how it's going to be rolled out and controlled, enterprise-wide. That's probably more of a challenge than the technology itself."
"Some of the APIs are just REST APIs and I would like to see more of the functionality in the plugin side of the world. For example, with the RESTful API I can actually delete or move an artifact from one Nexus repository to another. I can't do that with the pipeline API, as of yet. I'd like to see a bit more functionality on that side."
"One thing that it is lacking, one thing I don't like, is that when you label something or add a status to it, you do it as an overall function, but you can't go back and isolate a library that you want to call out individually and remove a status from it. It's still lacking some functionality-type things for controlling labels and statuses. I'd like to be able to apply it across all of my apps, but then turn it off for one, and I can't do that."
"It's the right kind of tool and going in the right direction, but it really needs to be more code-driven and oriented to be scaled at the developer level."
Black Duck is ranked 1st in Software Composition Analysis (SCA) with 16 reviews while Sonatype Lifecycle is ranked 5th in Software Composition Analysis (SCA) with 42 reviews. Black Duck is rated 7.8, while Sonatype Lifecycle 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 Sonatype Lifecycle writes "Seamless to integrate and identify vulnerabilities and frees up staff time". Black Duck is most compared with Snyk, Fortify Static Code Analyzer, JFrog Xray, Mend.io and Checkmarx Software Composition Analysis, whereas Sonatype Lifecycle is most compared with SonarQube, Fortify Static Code Analyzer, GitLab, Checkmarx One and Mend.io. See our Black Duck vs. Sonatype Lifecycle report.
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