We performed a comparison between FOSSA and Snyk based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Software Composition Analysis (SCA) solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."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."
"Being able to know the licenses of the libraries is most valuable because we sell products, and we need to provide to the customers the licenses that we are using."
"The scalability is excellent."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"I am impressed with the tool’s seamless integration and quick results."
"Policies and identification of open-source licensing issues are the most valuable features. It reduces the time needed to identify open-source software licensing issues."
"I find SCA to be valuable. It can read your libraries, your license and bring the best way to resolve your problem in the best scenario."
"The most valuable features include enriched information around the vulnerabilities for better triaging, in terms of the vulnerability layer origin and vulnerability tree."
"The most valuable features are their GitLab and JIRA integrations. The GitLab integration lets us pull projects in pretty easily, so that it's pretty minimal for developers to get it set up. Using the JIRA integration, it's also pretty easy to get the information that is generated, as a result of that GitLab integration, back to our teams in a non-intrusive way and in a workflow that we are already using."
"We have integrated it into our software development environment. We have it in a couple different spots. Developers can use it at the point when they are developing. They can test it on their local machine. If the setup that they have is producing alerts or if they need to upgrade or patch, then at the testing phase when a product is being built for automated testing integrates with Snyk at that point and also produces some checks."
"The most valuable feature of Snyk is the SBOM."
"The most effective feature in securing project dependencies stems from its ability to highlight security vulnerabilities."
"The solution's Open Source feature gives us notifications and suggestions regarding how to address vulnerabilities."
"Its reports are nice and provide information about the issue as well as resolution. They also provide a proper fix. If there's an issue, they provide information in detail about how to remediate that issue."
"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."
"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."
"I wish there was a way that you could have a more global rollout of it, instead of having to do it in each repository individually. It's possible, that's something that is offered now, or maybe if you were using the CI Jenkins, you'd be able to do that. But with Travis, there wasn't an easy way to do that. At least not that I could find. That was probably the biggest issue."
"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."
"The technical support has room for improvement."
"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."
"One thing that can sometimes be difficult with FOSSA is understanding all that it can do. One of the ways that I've been able to unlock some of those more advanced features is through conversations with the absolutely awesome customer success team at FOSSA, but it has been a little bit difficult to find some of that information separately on my own through FAQs and other information channels that FOSSA has. The improvement is less about the product itself and more about empowering FOSSA customers to know and understand how to unlock its full potential."
"On the legal and policy sides, there is some room for improvement. I know that our legal team has raised complaints about having to approve the same dependency multiple times, as opposed to having them it across the entire organization."
"We tried to integrate it into our software development environment but it went really badly. It took a lot of time and prevented the developers from using the IDE. Eventually, we didn't use it in the development area... I would like to see better integrations to help the developers get along better with the tool. And the plugin for the IDE is not so good. This is something we would like to have..."
"The documentation sometimes is not relevant. It does not cover the latest updates, scanning, and configurations. The documentation for some things is wrong and does not cover some configuration scannings for the multiple project settings."
"Scalability has some issues because we have a lot of code and its use is mandatory. Therefore, it can be slow at times, especially because there are a lot of projects and reporting. Some UI improvements could help with this."
"The tool should provide more flexibility and guidance to help us fix the top vulnerabilities before we go into production."
"We have to integrate with their database, which means we need to send our entire code to them to scan, and they send us the report. A company working in the financial domain usually won't like to share its code or any information outside its network with any third-party provider."
"It lists projects. So, if you have a number of microservices in an enterprise, then you could have pages of findings. Developers will then spend zero time going through the pages of reports to figure out, "Is there something I need to fix?" While it may make sense to list all the projects and issues in these very long lists for completeness, Snyk could do a better job of bubbling up and grouping items, e.g., a higher level dashboard that draws attention to things that are new, the highest priority things, or things trending in the wrong direction. That would make it a lot easier. They don't quite have that yet in container security."
"We have seen cases where tools didn't find or recognize certain dependencies. These are known issues, to some extent, due to the complexity in the language or stack that you using. There are some certain circumstances where the tool isn't actually finding what it's supposed to be finding, then it could be misleading."
"The product is very expensive."
FOSSA is ranked 9th in Software Composition Analysis (SCA) with 12 reviews while Snyk is ranked 2nd in Software Composition Analysis (SCA) with 41 reviews. FOSSA is rated 8.6, while Snyk is rated 8.2. 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". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Snyk writes "Performs software composition analysis (SCA) similar to other expensive tools". FOSSA is most compared with Black Duck, Mend.io, Fortify Static Code Analyzer, JFrog Xray and Sonatype Lifecycle, whereas Snyk is most compared with SonarQube, Black Duck, Fortify Static Code Analyzer, Veracode and GitHub Advanced Security. See our FOSSA vs. Snyk report.
See our list of best Software Composition Analysis (SCA) vendors.
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