Try our new research platform with insights from 80,000+ expert users

Black Duck vs FlexNet Code Insight comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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
Ranking in Software Composition Analysis (SCA)
1st
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)
20th
Average Rating
4.0
Number of Reviews
1
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2025, in the Software Composition Analysis (SCA) category, the mindshare of Black Duck is 18.6%, down from 22.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of FlexNet Code Insight is 0.7%, up from 0.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
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

"Policy management is a valuable feature."
"Black Duck's ability to identify dependencies very accurately has been most valuable in identifying and mitigating risks."
"The most valuable feature is the vulnerability scanning, and that it's easy to use."
"The software composition analysis is most effective for security risk management."
"The most valuable feature of Black Duck is the composition analysis feature, which is effective for security risk management."
"The product enables other applications to be secure."
"The automated code scanning feature and Black Duck's integration with our development tools have enhanced our software compliance process and overall audit readiness."
"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."
"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 can be cumbersome to use or invalidate open source software because there is a hold time to check requirements or common regulations to ensure compliance."
"Black Duck can improve the time it takes for a scan. Most of the time it's not ideal when integrated with the live DevSecOps pipeline. We have to create a separate job to scan the library because it takes a couple of hours to scan all those libraries. The scanning could be faster."
"The tool's documentation and support are areas of concern where improvements are required."
"Black Duck does not have the SBOM management part. I would like to see this feature added in the future."
"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."
"It needs to be more user-friendly for developers and in general, to ensure compliance."
"We're not too sure about the extension of the firewall. It never shows up in the Hub."
"Due to the fact that, with our software developer life cycle, we don't need to scan our source code every day or every week. For that reason, we find the cost is too high. We might only actually use it five to ten times a year, which makes it expensive."
"I found the user interface cumbersome and difficult to use."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price is low. It's not an expensive solution."
"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 quite high because the behavior of the software during the scan is similar to competing products."
"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 charged by Black Duck is exorbitant."
"The pricing is a little high."
"It is expensive."
"Depending on the use case, the cost could range from $10,000 USD to $70,000 USD."
Information not available
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Software Composition Analysis (SCA) solutions are best for your needs.
856,873 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
20%
Manufacturing Company
15%
Computer Software Company
13%
Insurance Company
4%
Manufacturing Company
27%
Computer Software Company
25%
Consumer Goods Company
6%
Energy/Utilities Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
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...
Ask a question
Earn 20 points
 

Comparisons

 

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 Black Duck, Snyk, Veracode and others in Software Composition Analysis (SCA). Updated: June 2025.
856,873 professionals have used our research since 2012.