We performed a comparison between FOSSA and GitLab 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."The scalability is excellent."
"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 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 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."
"FOSSA provided us with contextualized, easily actionable intelligence that alerted us to compliance issues. I could tell FOSSA exactly what I cared about and they would tell me when something was out of policy. I don't want to hear from the compliance tool unless I have an issue that I need to deal with. That was what was great about FOSSA is that it was basically "Here's my policy and only send me an alert if there's something without a policy." I thought that it was really good at doing that."
"The most valuable feature is its ability to identify all of the components in a build, and then surface the licenses that are associated with it, allowing us to make a decision as to whether or not we allow a team to use the components. That eliminates the risk that comes with running consumer software that contains open source components."
"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."
"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."
"The most valuable features of GitLab are ease of use and highly intuitive UI and performance."
"The most valuable features of Gitlab are integration with CIE and the ability to rapidly deploy solutions, projects, and applications. It is very easy to use, and there are no complaints."
"The merging feature makes it easy later on for the deployment."
"The stability is good."
"The solution is stable."
"GitLab is very useful for pipelines, continuous integration, and continuous deployment. It is also stable."
"I have had no problem with the stability of the solution."
"GitLab is kind of an image of GitHub, so it gives us the flexibility to monitor our changes in the repos."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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 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."
"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."
"We'd always like to see better pricing on the product."
"As GitLab is not perfect, what needs improvement in the solution is the Wiki feature of the groups or the repertories because currently, it's not searchable by default. You'll need an indexing service such as Elasticsearch to make it searchable, and that requires too much work, so for me, it's the main feature that should be improved in GitLab. In the next version of the solution, from the top of my head, the documentation could be improved. Besides the Wiki, it would be good if there's documentation that would be automatically generated based on the code repository. In other words, there should be some tutorials from GitLab for developers in the next release."
"I would like to have some features to support peer review."
"I believe there's room for improvement in the advanced features, particularly in enhancing the pipeline functionalities."
"I rate the support from GitLab a four out of five."
"GitLab's UI could be improved."
"The solution could be faster."
"There is a need to improve or adopt AI into the ecosystem like a co-pilot, which Microsoft has done with GitHub."
FOSSA is ranked 9th in Software Composition Analysis (SCA) with 12 reviews while GitLab is ranked 6th in Software Composition Analysis (SCA) with 70 reviews. FOSSA is rated 8.6, while GitLab is rated 8.6. 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 GitLab writes "Powerful, mature, and easy to set up and manage". FOSSA is most compared with Black Duck, Snyk, Mend.io and Fortify Static Code Analyzer, whereas GitLab is most compared with Microsoft Azure DevOps, Bamboo, SonarQube, AWS CodePipeline and Tekton. See our FOSSA vs. GitLab report.
See our list of best Software Composition Analysis (SCA) vendors.
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