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Black Duck SCA vs FlexNet Code Insight comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 15, 2025

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Black Duck SCA
Ranking in Software Composition Analysis (SCA)
2nd
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
22
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
FlexNet Code Insight
Ranking in Software Composition Analysis (SCA)
17th
Average Rating
4.0
Number of Reviews
1
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Software Composition Analysis (SCA) category, the mindshare of Black Duck SCA is 15.7%, down from 21.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of FlexNet Code Insight is 0.8%, up from 0.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Software Composition Analysis (SCA) Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Black Duck SCA15.7%
FlexNet Code Insight0.8%
Other83.5%
Software Composition Analysis (SCA)
 

Featured Reviews

Saravanan_Radhakrishnan - PeerSpot reviewer
Enables applications to be secure, but it must provide more open APIs
The product enables other applications to be secure. We use it to onboard 400 to 500 applications into the DevOps platform, protect them, and have a secure environment. The tool integrates well with different technologies, application stacks, and databases. The APIs are available. We can read the blogs in the community for open-source compliance and security. The community feeds are important. Black Duck is a leader in Gartner. It is a reliable solution.
A decent web interface for reports, but the snippet style code matching requires too much effort
Due to the "snippet match" nature of the scans, we found that it was too much effort to properly validate and catalog each open source component with every new project/product. Incremental results were also difficult to achieve even after consulting with the vendor. We found there were too many false positives and the code-snippet validator had bugs and presented too many false positives. My experience with this tool has turned me away from "snippet"-focused composition analysis. We have switched to one that uses more complete code signatures that do not require validation and review of findings in most cases.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"The knowledge base and the management system are the most valuable features of Black Duck Hub. It has a very helpful management environment. They offer an editor where we can check the discovered license, which is retrieved from their knowledge base. They have a huge knowledge base build over the years. It gives you some possibilities, such as this license with possibility A could cause a vulnerability issue or a potential breach."
"I like the fact that the product auto analyzes components."
"The automated code scanning feature and Black Duck's integration with our development tools have enhanced our software compliance process and overall audit readiness."
"The software composition analysis is most effective for security risk management."
"The most valuable feature for me in Black Duck is its ability to scan binary files effectively."
"The cloud option of the product is always available and a positive aspect of the solution."
"We didn't have a central inventory to quickly identify issues or determine how many products were affected. Now under Black Duck, it's all consolidated. You search for a component and immediately see which products use it."
"The stability is okay."
"It had a web interface into the reporting tools that was decent, and open source components could be reported per project and/or aggregated similar to other software composition tools."
 

Cons

"It's still a bit inconsistent. For example, if I scan today, it might not show the same results tomorrow."
"The tool needs to improve its pricing. Its configuration is complex and can be improved."
"The initial setup could be simplified. It was somewhat complex."
"It is a cloud-only solution. In many cases, companies like to evaluate the software, but they're very reluctant to give you the software. It would be great if they could offer an on-prem component that could be used to scan the code and then upload the discovery results to the cloud and get all the information from there, but there is no such possibility. You have to upload the code to the Black Duck cloud system. Of course, they have a strong legal department, and they offer some configuration, but it is never enough. You have to give the code, which is a drawback. In modern designs like Snyk or FOSSA, you don't need to give the code. It requires more native integration with Coverity because they go together technically. You need both Coverity and Black Duck Hub. It would be really helpful for companies working in this space to get a combined offer from the same company. They should provide an option to buy Coverity for an additional fee. Coverity combined with Black Duck Hub will provide a one-step analysis to get everything you need and a unified report. It would be really great to be able to connect Black Duck Hub with Coverity unified reports."
"There are areas for improvement such as false positives and the scanning of containers."
"I would like to see improvements in Black Duck's reporting capabilities."
"They are giving a lot of APIs and Python scripts for certain functionalities, but instead of using APIs and Python scripts, they should provide these functionalities through the UI. Users should be able to customize and add more fields through the UI. Users should be able to add more fields and generate reports. Currently, they are not giving flexibility in the UI. They're providing a script that simply generates an Excel file or CSV file. There is no flexibility."
"The tool's documentation and support are areas of concern where improvements are required."
"I found the user interface cumbersome and difficult to use."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Depending on the use case, the cost could range from $10,000 USD to $70,000 USD."
"It is expensive."
"The pricing is a little high."
"Black Duck is more suitable if you require a lot of licensing compliance. For smaller organizations, WhiteSource is better because its pricing policies are not really suitable for huge organizations."
"The price is low. It's not an expensive solution."
"I rate the product's price one on a scale of one to ten, where one is a high price, and ten is a low price."
"The price is quite high because the behavior of the software during the scan is similar to competing products."
"The price charged by Black Duck is exorbitant."
Information not available
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
18%
Manufacturing Company
15%
Computer Software Company
12%
Insurance Company
4%
No data available
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business6
Large Enterprise16
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

How does WhiteSource compare with Black Duck?
We researched Black Duck but ultimately chose WhiteSource when looking for an application security tool. WhiteSource is a software solution that enables agile open source security and license compl...
What do you like most about Black Duck?
The cloud option of the product is always available and a positive aspect of the solution.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Black Duck?
The price charged by Black Duck is exorbitant. For the features provided by the product, I would not want to pay a high price. There are many other products in the market that offer better features...
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Also Known As

Blackduck Hub, Black Duck Protex, Black Duck Security Checker
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Samsung, Siemens, ScienceLogic, BryterCX, Dynatrace
Information Not Available
Find out what your peers are saying about Snyk, Black Duck, Veracode and others in Software Composition Analysis (SCA). Updated: October 2025.
872,778 professionals have used our research since 2012.