We performed a comparison between Fortify on Demand and Sonatype Lifecycle based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Application Security Tools solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."It is a very easy tool for developers to use in parallel while they're doing the coding. It does auto scanning as we are progressing with the CI/CD pipeline. It has got very simple and efficient API support."
"The SAST feature is the most valuable."
"The quality of application security testing reduces risk and gives very few false positives."
"Almost all the features are good. This solution has simplified designing and architecting for our solutions. We were early adopters of microservices. Their documentation is good. You don't need to put in much effort in setting it up and learning stuff from scratch and start using it. The learning curve is not too much."
"I don’t know of any other On-Demand enterprise solution like this one where we can load the details and within a few days, receive the results of intrusion attacks, and work with HP Security Experts when needed for clarification"
"Each bank may have its own core banking applications with proprietary support for different programming languages. This makes Fortify particularly relevant and advantageous in those cases."
"Fortify on Demand is easy to use and the reporting is good."
"It helps deploy and track changes easily as per time-to-time market upgrades."
"Vulnerability detection accuracy is good."
"When I started to install the Nexus products and started to integrate them into our development cycle, it helped us construct or fill out our development process in general. The build stage is a really good template for us and it helped establish a structure that we could build our whole continuous integration and development process around. Now our git repos are tagged for different build stages data, staging, and for release. That aligns with the Nexus Lifecycle build stages."
"It's online, which means if a change is made to the Nexus database today, or within the hour, my developers will benefit instantly. The security features are discovered continuously. So if Nexus finds out that a library is no longer safe, they just have to flag it and, automatically, my developers will know."
"It scans and gives you a low false-positive count... The reason we picked Lifecycle over the other products is, while the other products were flagging stuff too, they were flagging things that were incorrect. Nexus has low false-positive results, which give us a high confidence factor."
"When developers are consuming open-source libraries from the internet, it's able to automatically block the ones that are insecure. And it has the ability to make suggestions on the ones they should be using instead."
"The most valuable feature is that I get a quick overview of the libraries that are included in the application, and the issues that are connected with them. I can quickly understand which problems there are from a security point of view or from a licensing point of view. It's quick and very exact."
"The component piece, where you can analyze the component, is the most valuable. You can pull the component up and you can look at what versions are bad, what versions are clean, and what versions haven't been reported on yet. You can make decisions based off of that, in terms of where you want to go. I like that it puts all that information right there in a window for you."
"The grandfathering mode allows us to add legacy applications which we know we're not going to change or refactor for some time. New developments can be scanned separately and we can obviously resolve those vulnerabilities where there are new applications developed. The grandfathering is a good way to separate what can be factored now, versus long-term technical debt."
"If you have a continuous integration in place, for example, and you want it to run along with your build and you want it to be fast, you're not going to get it. It adds to your development time."
"I would like to see improvement in CI integration and integration with GitLab or Jenkins. It needs to be more simple."
"It lacks of some important features that the competitors have, such as Software Composition Analysis, full dead code detection, and Agile Alliance's Best Practices and Technical Debt."
"The technical support is actually a problem that needs to be addressed. Since the acquisition and merger with Hewlett Packard, it has been really hard to know who the technical or salesperson to talk to."
"Takes up a lot of resources which can slow things down."
"It could have a little bit more streamlined installation procedure. Based on the things that I've done, it could also be a bit more automated. It is kind of taking a bunch of different scanners, and SSC is just kind of managing the results. The scanning doesn't really seem to be fully integrated into the SSC platform. More automation and any kind of integration in the SSC platform would definitely be good. There could be a way to initiate scans from SSC and more functionality on the server-side to initiate desk scans if it is not already available."
"Sometimes when we run a full scan, we have a bunch of issues in the code. We should not have any issues."
"It's still a little bit too complex for regular developers. It takes a little bit more time than usual. I know static code scan is not the main focus of the tool, but the overall time span to scan the code, and even to set up the code scanning, is a bit overwhelming for regular developers."
"It can be tricky if you want to exclude some files from scanning. For instance, if you do not want to scan and push testing files to Fortify Software Security Center, that is tricky with some IDEs, such as IntelliJ. We found that there is an Exclude feature that is not working. We reported that to them for future fixing. It needs some work on the plugins to make them consistent across IDEs and make them easier."
"In terms of features, the reports natively come in as PDF or JSON. They should start thinking of another way to filter their reports. The reporting tool used by most enterprises, like Splunk and Elasticsearch, do not work as well with JSON."
"Sometimes we face difficulties with Maven Central... if I'm using the 1.0.0 version, after one or two years, the 1.0.0 version will be gone from Maven Central but our team will still be using that 1.0.0 version to build. When they do builds, it won't build completely because that version is gone from Maven Central. There is a difference in our Sonatype Maven Central."
"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."
"The reporting capability is good but I wish it was better. I sent the request to support and they raised it as an enhancement within the system. An example is filtering by version. If I have a framework that is used in all applications, but version 1 is used in 50 percent of them and version 2 in 25 percent, they will show as different libraries with different usage. But in reality, they're all using one framework."
"Sonatype Nexus Lifecycle can improve the functionality. Some functionalities are missing from the UI that could be accessed using the API but they are not available. For example, seeing more than the 100 first reports or, seeing your comments when you process a waiver for a vulnerability or a violation."
"One of the things that we specifically did ask for is support for transitive dependencies. Sometimes a dependency that we define in our POM file for a certain library will be dependent on other stuff and we will pull that stuff in, then you get a cascade of libraries that are pulled in. This caused confusing to us at first, because we would see a component that would have security ticket or security notification on it and wonder "Where is this coming in from?" Because when we checked what we defined as our dependencies it's not there. It didn't take us too long effort to realize that it was a transitive dependency pulled in by something else, but the question then remains "Which dependency is doing that?""
"Sonatype Nexus Lifecycle can improve by having a feature to automatically detect vulnerabilities. Additionally, if it could automatically push the dependencies or create notifications it would be beneficial."
Fortify on Demand is ranked 11th in Application Security Tools with 56 reviews while Sonatype Lifecycle is ranked 6th in Application Security Tools with 42 reviews. Fortify on Demand is rated 8.0, while Sonatype Lifecycle is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Fortify on Demand writes "Provides good depth of scanning but is unfortunately not fully integrated with CIT processes ". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Sonatype Lifecycle writes "Seamless to integrate and identify vulnerabilities and frees up staff time". Fortify on Demand is most compared with SonarQube, Checkmarx One, Veracode, Coverity and Mend.io, whereas Sonatype Lifecycle is most compared with SonarQube, Black Duck, Fortify Static Code Analyzer, GitLab and Debricked Security. See our Fortify on Demand vs. Sonatype Lifecycle report.
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