We performed a comparison between Black Duck and FOSSA based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Software Composition Analysis (SCA) solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."The solution is very good at scanning and evaluating open source software."
"The most valuable feature is the vulnerability scanning, and that it's easy to use."
"It is able to drill down to the source level."
"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."
"Black Duck is pretty extensive in terms of the scan reserves and the vulnerability exposures. From that perspective, I'm happy with it."
"The stability is okay."
"The UI is the solution's most valuable feature since it allows for easy pipeline integration."
"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."
"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."
"The scalability is excellent."
"Their CLI tool is very efficient. It does not send your source code over to their servers. It just does fingerprinting. It is also very easy to integrate into software development practices."
"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."
"FOSSA provided us with contextualized, easily actionable intelligence that alerted us to compliance issues. I could tell FOSSA exactly what I cared about and they would tell me when something was out of policy. I don't want to hear from the compliance tool unless I have an issue that I need to deal with. That was what was great about FOSSA is that it was basically "Here's my policy and only send me an alert if there's something without a policy." I thought that it was really good at doing that."
"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."
"The support team has just been amazing, and it helps us to have a great support team from FOSSA. They are there to triage and answer all our questions which come up by using their product."
"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 tool needs to improve its pricing. Its configuration is complex and can be improved."
"It needs to be more user-friendly for developers and in general, to ensure compliance."
"I would like to see more integration with other solutions, such as IntelliJ IDEA."
"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 product's pricing is higher compared to other competitor products."
"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."
"The solution's pricing model and documentation areas of concern where improvement is needed."
"I would like more customized categories because our company is so big. This is doable for them. They are still in the stages of trying to figure this out since we are one of their biggest companies that they support."
"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."
"I wish there was a way that you could have a more global rollout of it, instead of having to do it in each repository individually. It's possible, that's something that is offered now, or maybe if you were using the CI Jenkins, you'd be able to do that. But with Travis, there wasn't an easy way to do that. At least not that I could find. That was probably the biggest issue."
"The solution provides contextualized, actionable, intelligence that alerts us to compliance issues, but there is still a little bit of work to be done on it. One of the issues that I have raised with FOSSA is that when it identifies an issue that is an error, why is it in error? What detail can they give to me? They've improved, but that still needs some work. They could provide more information that helps me to identify the dependencies and then figure out where they originated from."
"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."
"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."
"We have seen some inaccuracies or incompleteness with the distribution acknowledgments for an application, so there's certainly some room for improvement there. Another big feature that's missing that should be introduced is snippet matching, meaning, not just matching an entire component, but matching a snippet of code that had been for another project and put in different files that one of our developers may have created."
"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."
Black Duck is ranked 1st in Software Composition Analysis (SCA) with 16 reviews while FOSSA is ranked 9th in Software Composition Analysis (SCA) with 12 reviews. Black Duck is rated 7.8, while FOSSA is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Black Duck writes "Enables applications to be secure, but it must provide more open APIs". On the other hand, the top reviewer of FOSSA writes "Compatibility with a wide range of dev tools, web and "C-type", enables us to scan across our ecosystem, including legacy software". Black Duck is most compared with Snyk, Fortify Static Code Analyzer, JFrog Xray, Mend.io and Sonatype Lifecycle, whereas FOSSA is most compared with Snyk, Mend.io, Fortify Static Code Analyzer, JFrog Xray and Sonatype Lifecycle. See our Black Duck vs. FOSSA report.
See our list of best Software Composition Analysis (SCA) vendors.
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