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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)
18th
Average Rating
4.0
Number of Reviews
1
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the Software Composition Analysis (SCA) category, the mindshare of Black Duck is 17.8%, down from 22.5% 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

Aaron  P - PeerSpot reviewer
A tool with a great UI to conduct a vulnerability scan that needs to provide better scalability options
The only thing I don't like about the product is that it is quite expensive and it is not very feasible as an open-source platform. One of the other things that I hate about the product stems from my dislike of contacting the support team of Black Duck to know if there are some issues since debugging some issues can be quite difficult. I don't find reliable or feasible documents to help me debug all those issues. The solution's pricing model and documentation areas of concern where improvement is needed. In our company, we get some issues or errors when we run a pipeline, and debugging those errors can be tedious and time-consuming. To minimize the time for debugging errors, I feel that Black Duck needs to add some documentation or something that will make it easy for users to debug the errors instead of seeking help from Black Duck's support team every time. Black Duck can add features, like viewing the vulnerability, to help users figure out the next step if they detect some vulnerability while also providing them some steps to help them follow some remedial steps, along with an explanation of measures to mitigate such issues. Black Duck's UI or server doesn't provide functionality to help users view the vulnerability, which is a process that needs to be automated. The solution's scalability is an area that needs to improve.
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."
"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."
"The installation is very easy."
"The software composition analysis is most effective for security risk management."
"The solution is very good at scanning and evaluating open source software."
"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."
"Black Duck is pretty extensive in terms of the scan reserves and the vulnerability exposures. From that perspective, I'm happy with 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

"The scanner client is limited by the size of software it can handle."
"I would like to see improvements in Black Duck's reporting capabilities."
"The initial setup of Black Duck is complex. It's not very straightforward. You need a lot of support and hand-holding from the Black Duck team itself for it to be deployed successfully across the organization."
"We have been having some issues with the latest releases where we are not able to scan our applications with the help of Black Duck."
"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."
"Black Duck does not have the SBOM management part. I would like to see this feature added in the future."
"The solution's pricing model and documentation areas of concern where improvement is needed."
"The solution must provide more open APIs."
"I found the user interface cumbersome and difficult to use."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing is a little high."
"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."
"Depending on the use case, the cost could range from $10,000 USD to $70,000 USD."
"The price is low. It's not an expensive solution."
"The price charged by Black Duck is exorbitant."
"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."
"It is expensive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
18%
Manufacturing Company
15%
Computer Software Company
13%
Insurance Company
5%
No data available
 

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...
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Also Known As

Blackduck Hub, Black Duck Protex, Black Duck Security Checker
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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: August 2025.
865,164 professionals have used our research since 2012.