FOSSA vs Fortify Static Code Analyzer comparison

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1,403 views|953 comparisons
92% willing to recommend
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3,069 views|1,863 comparisons
100% willing to recommend
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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Fortify Static Code Analyzer and FOSSA based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about Veracode, OpenText, JetBrains and others in Static Code Analysis.
To learn more, read our detailed Static Code Analysis Report (Updated: April 2024).
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Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"You can really see what's happening after you've developed something.""I like the Fortify taxonomy as it provides us with a list of all of the vulnerabilities found. Fortify release updated rule packs quarterly, with accompanying documentation, that lets us know what new features are being released.""We write software, and therefore, the most valuable aspect for us is basically the code analysis part.""Automating the Jenkins plugins and the build title is a big plus.""Integrating the Fortify Static Code Analyzer into our software development lifecycle was straightforward. It highlights important information beyond just syntax errors. It identifies issues like password credentials and access keys embedded in the code.""I like Fortify Software Security Center or Fortify SSC. This tool is installed on each developer's machine, but Fortify Software Security Center combines everything. We can meet there as security professionals and developers. The developers scan their code and publish the results there. We can then look at them from a security perspective and see whether they fixed the issues. We can agree on whether something is a false positive and make decisions.""The reference provided for each issue is extremely helpful.""Fortify Static Code Analyzer tells us if there are any security leaks or not. If there are, then it's notifying us and does not allow us to pass the DevOps pipeline. If it is finds everything's perfect, as per our given guidelines, then it is allowing us to go ahead and start it, and we are able to deploy it."

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"What I really need from FOSSA, and it does a really good job of this, is to flag me when there are particular open source licenses that cause me or our legal department concern. It points out where a particular issue is, where it comes from, and the chain that brought it in, which is the most important part to me.""I found FOSSA's out-of-the-box policy engine to be accurate and that it was tuned appropriately to the settings that we were looking for. The policy engine is pretty straightforward... I find it to be very straightforward to make small modifications to, but it's very rare that we have to make modifications to it. It's easy to use. It's a four-category system that handles most cases pretty well.""The scalability is excellent.""I am impressed with the tool’s seamless integration and quick results.""One of the things that I really like about FOSSA is that it allows you to go very granular. For example, if there's a package that's been flagged because it's subject to a license that may be conflicts with or raises a concern with one of the policies that I've set, then FOSSA enables you to go really granular into that package to see which aspects of the package are subject to which licenses. We can ultimately determine with our engineering teams if we really need this part of the package or not. If it's raising this flag, we can make really actionable decisions at a very micro level to enable the build to keep pushing forward.""The support team has just been amazing, and it helps us to have a great support team from FOSSA. They are there to triage and answer all our questions which come up by using their product.""The most valuable feature is definitely the ease and speed of integrating into build pipelines, like a Jenkins pipeline or something along those lines. The ease of a new development team coming on board and integrating FOSSA with a new project, or even an existing project, can be done so quickly that it's invaluable and it's easy to ask the developers to use a tool like this. Those developers greatly value the very quick feedback they get on any licensing or security vulnerability issues.""Their CLI tool is very efficient. It does not send your source code over to their servers. It just does fingerprinting. It is also very easy to integrate into software development practices."

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Cons
"Not all languages are supported in Fortify.""Fortify Static Code Analyzer has a bit of a learning curve, and I don't find it particularly helpful in narrowing down the vulnerabilities we should prioritize.""Fortify Static Code Analyzer is a good solution, but sometimes we receive false positives. If they could reduce the number of false positives it would be good.""The price can be improved.""The troubleshooting capabilities of this solution could be improved. This would reduce the number of cases that users have to submit.""The pricing is a bit high.""It comes with a hefty licensing fee.""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."

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"I want the product to include binary scanning which is missing at the moment. Binary scanning includes code and component matching through dependency management. It also includes the actual scanning and reverse engineering of the boundaries and finding out what is inside.""The solution provides contextualized, actionable, intelligence that alerts us to compliance issues, but there is still a little bit of work to be done on it. One of the issues that I have raised with FOSSA is that when it identifies an issue that is an error, why is it in error? What detail can they give to me? They've improved, but that still needs some work. They could provide more information that helps me to identify the dependencies and then figure out where they originated from.""I would like more customized categories because our company is so big. This is doable for them. They are still in the stages of trying to figure this out since we are one of their biggest companies that they support.""Security scanning is an area for improvement. At this point, our experience is that we're only scanning for license information in components, and we're not scanning for security vulnerability information. We don't have access to that data. We use other tools for that. It would be an improvement for us to use one tool instead of two, so that we just have to go through one process instead of two.""For open-source management, FOSSA's out-of-the-box policy engine is easy to use, but the list of licenses is not as complete as we would like it to be. They should add more open-source licenses to the selection.""I would like the FOSSA API to be broader. I would like not to have to interact with the GUI at all, to do the work that I want to do. I would like them to do API-first development, rather than a focus on the GUI.""We have seen some inaccuracies or incompleteness with the distribution acknowledgments for an application, so there's certainly some room for improvement there. Another big feature that's missing that should be introduced is snippet matching, meaning, not just matching an entire component, but matching a snippet of code that had been for another project and put in different files that one of our developers may have created.""On the dashboard, there should be an option to increase the column width so that we can see the complete name of the GitHub repository. Currently, on the dashboard, we see the list of projects, but to see the complete name, you have to hover your mouse over an item, which is annoying."

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Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "It has a couple of license models. The one that we use most frequently is called their flexible deployment. We use this one because it is flexible and based on the number of code-contributing developers in the organization. It includes almost everything in the Fortify suite for one developer price. It gives access to not just the secure code analyzer (SCA) but also to FSC, the secure code. It gives us accessibility to scan central, which is the decentralized scanning farm. It also gives us access to the software security center, which is the vulnerability management platform."
  • "The price of Fortify Static Code Analyzer could be reduced."
  • "The licensing is expensive and is in the 50K range."
  • "There is a licensing fee, and if you bring them to the company and you want them to do the installation and the implementation in the beginning, there is a separate cost. Similarly, if you want consultation or training, there is a separate cost. I see it as suitable only for enterprises. I do not see it suitable for a small business or individual use."
  • "From our standpoint, we are significantly better off with Fortify due to the favorable pricing we secured five years ago."
  • "Although I am not responsible for the budget, Fortify SAST is expensive."
  • More Fortify Static Code Analyzer Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "FOSSA is not cheap, but their offering is top-notch. It is very much a "you get what you pay for" scenario. Regardless of the price, I highly recommend FOSSA."
  • "Its price is reasonable as compared to the market. It is competitively priced in comparison to other similar solutions on the market. It is also quite affordable in terms of the value that it delivers as compared to its alternative of hiring a team."
  • "FOSSA is a fairly priced product. It is not either cheaper or expensive. The pricing lies somewhere in the middle. The solution is worth the money that we are spending to use it."
  • "The solution's cost is a five out of ten."
  • More FOSSA Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer:Integrating the Fortify Static Code Analyzer into our software development lifecycle was straightforward. It highlights important information beyond just syntax errors. It identifies issues like… more »
    Top Answer:The product shows false positives for Python applications.
    Top Answer:I am impressed with the tool’s seamless integration and quick results.
    Top Answer:FOSSA is a fairly priced product. It is not either cheaper or expensive. The pricing lies somewhere in the middle. The solution is worth the money that we are spending to use it.
    Top Answer:I want the product to include binary scanning which is missing at the moment. Binary scanning includes code and component matching through dependency management. It also includes the actual scanning… more »
    Ranking
    2nd
    Views
    1,403
    Comparisons
    953
    Reviews
    9
    Average Words per Review
    1,139
    Rating
    8.8
    Views
    3,069
    Comparisons
    1,863
    Reviews
    1
    Average Words per Review
    282
    Rating
    8.0
    Comparisons
    Also Known As
    Fortify Static Code Analysis SAST
    Learn More
    FOSSA
    Video Not Available
    Overview

    Fortify Static Code Analyzer (SCA) utilizes numerous algorithms in addition to a dynamic intelligence base of secure coding protocols to investigate an application’s source code for any potential risk of malicious or dangerous threats. Additionally, the solution will prioritize the most critical concerns and give direction on how users can repair those concerns. This solution researches each and every potential route that workflow and data can travel to discover and repair all possible vulnerabilities. Fortify SCA allows users to create safe and secure software quickly. Users are able to discover potential security gaps more quickly with precise outcomes and repair them immediately.

    Fortify Static Code Analyzer Benefits

    • CI/CD pipeline security: Fortify SCA integrates well with third-party tools such as ALM Octane, Atlassian Bamboo, Azure DevOps, Eclipse, Jenkins, and Jira. It offers real-time scan results, immediate recommendations, and collaborative auditing, and finds threats faster. It also discovers and prioritizes weaknesses to reduce risk.

    • Cost-effective: Improves coding actions by training users as they work to better understand the relationship of static application security testing (SAST). Fortify SCA is able to find more vulnerabilities than other solutions and delivers significantly fewer false positives.

    • Quick and reliable scanning: Fortify SCA will discover and eradicate weaknesses in byte, binary, or source code. SAST is able to stop the bulk of code issues at the start of development. The solution is able to discover 815 specific categories of risk, works through 27 programming languages and more than one million different APIs. Fortify SCA has a positive rate of 100% in the OWASP 1.2 benchmark.

    Fortify Static Code Analyzer Features

    • Flexible deployment: Using Fortify On Demand, users can work in a complete SaaS environment. Fortify Hosted allows users to use on-premises and SaaS to work in a secure virtual space with complete control. Fortify-On-Prem gives users absolute control of the Fortify SCA solution.

    • Security assistant: Users have an interactive guide as they create code that provides risk analysis and anticipated outcomes. Security Assistant is an outstanding immediate feedback tool that gives instant results with significantly fewer false positives.

    • Audit assistant: This feature uses machine learning to reduce manual audit time while prioritizing the most important risks to users' networks. It provides automated audits in minutes. Any manual examinations are reduced, all issues are prioritized in accordance with organizational needs, and Fortify SCA consistently provides audit results to all projects.

    Results from Real Users

    Fortify Static Code Analyzer tells us if there are any security leaks or not. If there are, then it's notifying us and does not allow us to pass the DevOps pipeline. If it finds everything's perfect, as per our given guidelines, then it is allowing us to go ahead and start it, and we are able to deploy it.” - Arun D., Senior Architect at a healthcare company.

    “Its flexibility is most valuable. It is such a flexible tool. It can be implemented in a number of ways. It can do anything you want it to do. It can be fully automated within a DevOps pipeline. It can also be used in an ad hoc, special test case scenario and anywhere in between.” - Tom H., Director of Security at Merito

    Up to 90% of any piece of software is from open source, creating countless dependencies and areas of risk to manage. FOSSA is the most reliable automated policy engine for legal teams to maintain license compliance, security to fix vulnerabilities, and engineering to improve code quality across the entire software supply chain. As the only developer-native open source management platform, FOSSA fully integrates with your existing CI/CD pipeline to provide complete visibility and context earlier in the software development lifecycle. For the first time, teams can collaboratively shift left and audit, analyze, control, and remediate license issues and vulnerabilities right in their existing workflows.
    Sample Customers
    Information Not Available
    AppDyanmic, Uber, Twitter, Zendesk, Confluent
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    Financial Services Firm33%
    Computer Software Company17%
    Healthcare Company8%
    Government8%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Financial Services Firm28%
    Computer Software Company14%
    Manufacturing Company10%
    Government7%
    REVIEWERS
    Computer Software Company45%
    Legal Firm9%
    Comms Service Provider9%
    Financial Services Firm9%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Manufacturing Company24%
    Computer Software Company19%
    Financial Services Firm11%
    Healthcare Company5%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business58%
    Large Enterprise42%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business17%
    Midsize Enterprise9%
    Large Enterprise74%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business45%
    Midsize Enterprise9%
    Large Enterprise45%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business20%
    Midsize Enterprise13%
    Large Enterprise68%
    Buyer's Guide
    Static Code Analysis
    April 2024
    Find out what your peers are saying about Veracode, OpenText, JetBrains and others in Static Code Analysis. Updated: April 2024.
    768,857 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    Fortify Static Code Analyzer is ranked 2nd in Static Code Analysis with 13 reviews while FOSSA is ranked 9th in Software Composition Analysis (SCA) with 12 reviews. Fortify Static Code Analyzer is rated 8.4, while FOSSA is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Fortify Static Code Analyzer writes "Seamless to integrate and identify vulnerabilities and frees up staff time". On the other hand, the top reviewer of FOSSA writes "Compatibility with a wide range of dev tools, web and "C-type", enables us to scan across our ecosystem, including legacy software". Fortify Static Code Analyzer is most compared with Black Duck, Snyk, Veracode, Sonatype Lifecycle and CodeSonar, whereas FOSSA is most compared with Black Duck, Snyk, Mend.io, JFrog Xray and Sonatype Lifecycle.

    We monitor all Static Code Analysis 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.