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Black Duck SCA vs FOSSA comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 22, 2026

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)
3rd
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.2
Number of Reviews
23
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
FOSSA
Ranking in Software Composition Analysis (SCA)
13th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.9
Number of Reviews
15
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the Software Composition Analysis (SCA) category, the mindshare of Black Duck SCA is 9.0%, down from 17.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of FOSSA is 2.2%, down from 3.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Software Composition Analysis (SCA) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Black Duck SCA9.0%
FOSSA2.2%
Other88.8%
Software Composition Analysis (SCA)
 

Featured Reviews

SS
Project Lead at ABB
Compliance checks have improved while vulnerability coverage and SBOM accuracy still need work
I think Black Duck SCA needs to improve on the overall approach. I assume that the people who developed Black Duck SCA believe that users will use this tool for some time in a full-fledged way with all those features. However, the way it really works with product development or in a software development life cycle is that this is just one of the steps for checking whether something is license compliant, whether it has vulnerabilities, or whether the SBOM is generated. It is just one of those steps in the software development process. The expectation from the tool's perspective is that users have to go into the Black Duck SCA portal, look at each of those items, and if something is not correct, try to find it out and update or configure the right CPEs or PURLs or those kinds of things. In reality, most users would not have time for this because they would have done this as part of the build and would generate an SBOM as part of the build. The tool should be quite usable. If a feature works properly and correctly, then nobody will go back and try to spend time on that. For example, if I generate an SBOM and that SBOM has a particular CPE and there are multiple sources, the tool should produce those CPEs with vulnerabilities, put them into the SBOM, and allow me to move forward. If there are more bugs or more configuration requirements, the usage will come down. It is like a mobile application: if there is too much data that needs to be looked at, configured, and used, then the number of users would come down. The tool should be fast, usable, and accurate. Users should just be able to use it without needing to learn too much. The learning curve should be less when using a tool, and the usage should be easy with basic understanding. They should not need to go through complex processes and can assume that whatever data is given is correct. That is where the whole problem with Black Duck SCA lies. The documentation is not really on the mark. For example, if there is a functionality, such as wanting to see a CPE, the documentation should show how to get this via API or see it and how to configure that with examples. Most of the time the tool says it is all in the community, which is not ideal. The community is different from a conceptual view. The community is for bugs and issues that users want to report. However, people who are looking at the tool fresh and need to see functionality such as scan configuration need clear documentation. If I want to see the scan configurations and how to do it, there are videos, but there should be clear documentation with examples, such as how to configure for Docker using specific commands and methods. This example could be clear documentation and should not be redirected to the community every time. If there is a problem or those kinds of issues, they should go to the community and solutions will be found. However, for basic documentation on features being provided, I do not see that kind of clear documentation with clear examples.
reviewer2588340 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Software Engineer at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees
Dependency management enhanced with update suggestions but lacks precise vulnerability tracking
FOSSA does not show the exact line of code with vulnerabilities, which adds time to the process as we have to locate these manually. Some other tools like Check Point or SonarQube provide exact line numbers for bugs. Also, the process in FOSSA can be quite contradicting and not very straightforward for new users.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The software composition analysis is most effective for security risk management."
"The stability is okay."
"The solution works well on Mac products."
"The most valuable feature of Black Duck is the seamless integration to scan our Docker binary files, it provides us all open vulnerabilities, and it ensures a reference point from where it finds the vulnerability is up to date. For example, if there is any new vulnerability found, they are immediately available in the Black Duck. There is no delay in finding the vulnerabilities, they are called out in our code immediately."
"I like the fact that the product auto analyzes components."
"This solution helps our customers to understand what really lies in their application."
"The most valuable feature is the vulnerability scanning, and that it's easy to use."
"We accidentally use third-party library APIs, which may not be secure. Our technical team may not have the end time or expertise to figure it out. Black Duck helps us with that and saves us time."
"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."
"FOSSA is not cheap, but their offering is top-notch."
"FOSSA is at the heart of the license compliance part of our open-source management program."
"FOSSA allows us to keep track of all dependencies to ensure they are up to date and not causing any vulnerabilities."
"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 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."
"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."
"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."
 

Cons

"The scanner client is limited by the size of software it can handle."
"The SBOMs that are being generated from Black Duck SCA are not sometimes fully complete, and the vulnerabilities that are being verified after generating this SBOM seem to be incorrect or missing."
"The documentation is quite scattered."
"The product's pricing is higher compared to other competitor products."
"The pricing for this solution should definitely be lower."
"I would like to see more integration with other solutions, such as IntelliJ IDEA."
"The initial setup could be simplified. It was somewhat complex."
"It's still a bit inconsistent. For example, if I scan today, it might not show the same results tomorrow."
"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."
"If you have thousands of applications, organizing them all into teams or tags is challenging."
"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 reports don't really work that well for us. They do provide good information but they perform poorly with either the number of projects, or components, in the system."
"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."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Depending on the use case, the cost could range from $10,000 USD to $70,000 USD."
"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 pricing is a little high."
"The price charged by Black Duck is exorbitant."
"The price is quite high because the behavior of the software during the scan is similar to competing products."
"The price is low. It's not an expensive solution."
"It is expensive."
"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."
"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."
"The solution's pricing is good and reasonable because you can literally use a lot of it for free."
"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."
"The solution's cost is a five out of ten."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
16%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Computer Software Company
10%
University
5%
Manufacturing Company
19%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Educational Organization
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business6
Large Enterprise17
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise8
 

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 needs improvement with Black Duck?
I think Black Duck SCA needs to improve on the overall approach. I assume that the people who developed Black Duck SCA believe that users will use this tool for some time in a full-fledged way with...
What is your primary use case for Black Duck?
The primary use cases are compliance and scanning in terms of license compliance and trying to identify snippets, particularly if there are any snippets being identified that are coming from open s...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for FOSSA?
The solution's pricing is good and reasonable because you can literally use a lot of it for free. You have to pay for the features you need, which I think is fair. If you want to get value for free...
What needs improvement with FOSSA?
FOSSA does not show the exact line of code with vulnerabilities, which adds time to the process as we have to locate these manually. Some other tools like Check Point or SonarQube provide exact lin...
What is your primary use case for FOSSA?
I have worked with FOSSA primarily to manage the dependencies in our projects. For example, if I take a Spring Boot application, FOSSA helps in identifying mismatches or unsupported dependencies th...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

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

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Samsung, Siemens, ScienceLogic, BryterCX, Dynatrace
AppDyanmic, Uber, Twitter, Zendesk, Confluent
Find out what your peers are saying about Black Duck SCA vs. FOSSA and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
908,858 professionals have used our research since 2012.