We performed a comparison between WhiteSource and SonarQube based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: SonarQube comes out on top in this comparison. It is high performing and user-friendly. In addition, it is less expensive than WhiteSource.
"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."
"WhiteSource is unique in the scanning of open-source licenses. Additionally, the vulnerabilities aspect of the solution is a benefit. We don't use WhiteSource in the whole organization, but we use it for some projects. There we receive a sense of the vulnerabilities of the open-source components, which improves our security work. The reports are automated which is useful."
"We can take some measures to improve things, replace a library, or update a library which was too old or showed severe bugs."
"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."
"We use a lot of open sources with a variety of containers, and the different open sources come with different licenses. Some come with dual licenses, some are risky and some are not. All our three use cases are equally important to us and we found WhiteSource handles them decently."
"The most valuable feature is the unified JAR to scan for all langs (wss-scanner jar)."
"The static code analysis of the solution is the most important aspect for us. When it comes to security breaches within the code, we can leverage some rules to allow us to identify the repetition in our code and the possible targets that we may have. It makes it very easy to review our code for security purposes."
"The most valuable feature is the security hotspot feature that identifies where your code is prone to have security issues."
"It's enabled us to improve software quality and help us to disseminate best practices."
"Code Convention: Using the tool to implement some sort of coding convention is really useful and ensures that the code is consistent no matter how many contributors."
"One of the most valuable features of SonarQube is its ability to detect code quality during development. There are rules that define various technologies—Java, C#, Python, everything—and these rules declare the coding standards and code quality. With SonarQube, everything is detectable during the time of development and continuous integration, which is an advantage. SonarQube also has a Quality Gate, where the code should reach 85%. Below that, the code cannot be promoted to a further environment, it should be in a development environment only. So the checks are there, and SonarQube will provide that increase. It also provides suggestions on how the code can be fixed and methods of going about this, without allowing hackers to exploit the code. Another valuable feature is that it is tightly integrated with third-party tools. For example, we can see the SonarQube metrics in Bitbucket, the code repository. Once I raise the full request, the developer, team lead, or even the delivery lead can see the code quality metrics of the deliverable so that they can make a decision. SonarQube will also cover all of the top OWASP vulnerabilities, however it doesn't have penetration testing or hacker testing. We use other tools, like Checkmarx, to do penetration testing from the outside."
"SonarQube: Recording of issues over a period of time, with an indication of the addition in the new issues or the reduction of existing issues (which were fixed)."
"We've configured it to run on each commit, providing feedback on our software quality. ]"
"It is very good at identifying technical debt."
"The initial setup could be simplified."
"The dashboard UI and UX are problematic."
"Some detected libraries do not specify a location of where in the source they were matched from, which is something that should be enhanced to enable quicker troubleshooting."
"Mend supports most of the common package managers, but it doesn't support some that we use. I would appreciate it if they can quickly make these changes to add new package managers when necessary."
"If anything, I would spend more time making this more user-friendly, better documenting the CLI, and adding more examples to help expand the current documentation."
"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."
"I would like to have an additional compliance pack. Currently, it does not have anything for the CIS framework or the NIST framework. If we directly run a scan, and it is under the CIS framework, we can directly tell the auditor that this product is now CIS compliant."
"At times, the latency of getting items out of the findings after they're remediated is higher than it should be."
"The time it took for me to do the whole process was approximately two hours because I had to download, read the documentation, and do the configurations."
"It does not provide deeper scanning of vulnerabilities in an application, on a live session. This is something we are not happy about. Maybe the reason for that is we are running the community edition currently, but other editions may improve on that aspect."
"The documentation is not clear and it needs to be updated."
"It would be better if SonarQube provided a good UI for external configuration."
"If I configure a project in SonarQube, it generates a token. When we're compiling our code with SonarQube, we have to provide the token for security reasons. If IP-based connectivity is established with the solution, the project should automatically be populated without providing any additional token. It will be easy to provide just the IP address. It currently supports this functionality, but it makes a different branch in the project dashboard. From the configuration and dashboard point of view, it should have some transformations. There can be dashboard integration so that we can configure the dashboard for different purposes."
"I would like to see improvements in defining the quality sets of rules and the quality to ensure code with low-performance does not end up in production."
"The reporting is good, but I am not able to download a specific report as a PDF, so downloading reports is something that should be looked at."
"SonarQube needs to improve its support model. They do not work 24/7, and they do not provide weekend support in case things go wrong. They only have a standard 8:00 am to 5:00 pm support model in which you have to raise a support ticket and wait. The support model is not effective for premium customers."
Mend.io is ranked 5th in Application Security Tools with 29 reviews while SonarQube is ranked 1st in Application Security Tools with 108 reviews. Mend.io is rated 8.4, while SonarQube is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of Mend.io writes "Easy to use, great for finding vulnerabilities, and simple to set up". On the other hand, the top reviewer of SonarQube writes "Easy to integrate and has a plug-in that supports both C and C++ languages". Mend.io is most compared with Black Duck, Snyk, Checkmarx One, Veracode and JFrog Xray, whereas SonarQube is most compared with Checkmarx One, SonarCloud, Coverity, Veracode and GitLab. See our Mend.io vs. SonarQube report.
See our list of best Application Security Tools vendors.
We monitor all Application Security Tools 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.
