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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 most valuable feature for me in Black Duck is its ability to scan binary files effectively."
"The solution is very good at scanning and evaluating open source software."
"The most valuable feature of Black Duck is the composition analysis feature, which is effective for security risk management."
"The most valuable feature is the vulnerability scanning, and that it's easy to use."
"The cloud option of the product is always available and a positive aspect of the solution."
"Black Duck's ability to identify dependencies very accurately has been most valuable in identifying and mitigating risks."
"It is able to drill down to the source level."
"The installation is very easy."
"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."
"It needs to be more user-friendly for developers and in general, to ensure compliance."
"The tool needs to improve its pricing. Its configuration is complex and can be improved."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"The documentation is quite scattered."
"I would like to see improvements in Black Duck's reporting capabilities."
"I found the user interface cumbersome and difficult to use."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"It is expensive."
"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 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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
18%
Manufacturing Company
15%
Computer Software Company
12%
Insurance Company
5%
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...
Ask a question
Earn 20 points
 

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: September 2025.
869,883 professionals have used our research since 2012.