Black Duck SCA vs FOSSA comparison

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Black Duck SCA

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 21, 2025

Black Duck SCA and FOSSA are competitors in the software composition analysis domain. Data comparisons indicate that FOSSA has an advantage in terms of overall satisfaction, thanks to its feature set and perceived value, while Black Duck SCA excels in compliance management.

Features: Black Duck SCA offers powerful compliance management, deep license risk analysis, and comprehensive security risk assessment. FOSSA is known for its seamless integrations, real-time vulnerability alerts, and efficient dependency management.

Room for Improvement: Black Duck SCA could enhance its user interface, simplify deployment processes, and improve real-time vulnerability detection. FOSSA could improve its analysis of proprietary code, broaden its vulnerability database beyond NVD, and offer more in-depth guidance on resolving issues.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Black Duck SCA provides a thorough deployment model with reliable support, though it can be time-consuming. FOSSA offers agile deployment and prompt customer service, facilitating a smoother adoption process.

Pricing and ROI: Black Duck SCA requires a larger initial investment but offers a strong return on investment through risk management. FOSSA's competitive pricing and efficient deployment offer an attractive ROI, maximizing its value proposition.

To learn more, read our detailed Black Duck SCA vs. FOSSA Report (Updated: February 2026).

Black Duck SCA vs. FOSSA

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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)

1st

Average Rating

7.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.4

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

FOSSA

Ranking in Software Composition Analysis (SCA)

9th

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.9

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2026, in the Software Composition Analysis (SCA) category, the mindshare of Black Duck SCA is 11.9%, down from 20.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of FOSSA is 3.1%, down from 3.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Software Composition Analysis (SCA) Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Black Duck SCA	11.9%
FOSSA	3.1%
Other	85.0%

Software Composition Analysis (SCA)

Featured Reviews

reviewer2587080

IP Head at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

Delivers robust accuracy for identifying and mitigating risks but setup and security can improve

My deployment of Black Duck will take a few hours minimum. In the earlier on-premise scenario, which I've seen in other organizations, it takes a few days because you have to get the server installed, then actually keep installing various patch upgrades as it happens. The cloud version is a lot faster, probably taking only a few hours to complete. Regarding Black Duck leveraging AI to enhance security scanning of open-source components, I would not be able to address that because I have not yet explored that area significantly. Based on my experience, I would recommend Black Duck to other people if they can digest the higher cost. It helps in many aspects. I would rate this solution overall at 7 to 8. Disclaimer: The review is provided in personal capacity as an individual and not the opinion of the organization or corporate to which I belong to.

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reviewer2588340

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.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The solution works well on Mac products."

"The solution is very good at scanning and evaluating open source software."

"Black Duck is pretty extensive in terms of the scan reserves and the vulnerability exposures. From that perspective, I'm happy with it."

"The most valuable feature of Black Duck is the composition analysis feature, which is effective for security risk management."

"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."

"Policy management is a valuable feature."

"The stability is okay."

"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."

More Black Duck SCA pros

"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."

"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."

"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."

"The scalability is excellent."

"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."

"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 suggests solutions for dependency mismatches."

More FOSSA pros

Cons

"There are areas for improvement such as false positives and the scanning of containers."

"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."

"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."

"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 solution's pricing model and documentation areas of concern where improvement is needed."

"The scanner client is limited by the size of software it can handle."

"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."

More Black Duck SCA cons

"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."

"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."

"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."

"Security scanning is an area for improvement. At this point, our experience is that we're only scanning for license information in components, and we're not scanning for security vulnerability information. We don't have access to that data. We use other tools for that. It would be an improvement for us to use one tool instead of two, so that we just have to go through one process instead of two."

"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."

"If you have thousands of applications, organizing them all into teams or tags is challenging."

"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."

More FOSSA cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price charged by Black Duck is exorbitant."

"The price is low. It's not an expensive solution."

"The price is quite high because the behavior of the software during the scan is similar to competing products."

"The pricing is a little high."

"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."

"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."

"It is expensive."

"Depending on the use case, the cost could range from $10,000 USD to $70,000 USD."

"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."

"The solution's cost is a five out of ten."

"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."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Manufacturing Company

17%

Financial Services Firm

17%

Computer Software Company

12%

Healthcare Company

Manufacturing Company

21%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Computer Software Company

Educational Organization

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	6
Large Enterprise	16

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	5
Midsize Enterprise	1
Large Enterprise	8

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...

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?

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...

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Compared 7% of the time

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Compared 9% of the time

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Compared 6% of the time

SCANOSS vs FOSSA

Compared 5% of the time

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Product Reports

Black Duck SCA

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Also Known As

Blackduck Hub, Black Duck Protex, Black Duck Security Checker

No data available

Overview

Black Duck is an essential tool for software composition analysis and license compliance. It identifies vulnerabilities effectively and supports security management in DevOps environments, offering integration, performance stability, and community support.

Organizations rely on Black Duck for seamless integration in CI/CD pipelines, thorough scanning of source and binary codes, and management of operational risks associated with open-source and commercial licenses. It plays a crucial role in security risk management and delivers a robust policy management framework. Users value its ease of use and reliable community support while benefiting from its comprehensive dependency visualization capabilities. Despite its strengths, there is room for enhancement in integration with other tools, UI friendliness, and reporting features.

What are Black Duck's key features?

Automated Component Analysis: Offers detailed insights into open-source components.
Vulnerability Scanning: Identifies and addresses potential security issues.
Knowledge Base: Extensive database for informed decision-making.
Policy Management: Comprehensive control over security policies.
Integration: Seamlessly fits into existing DevOps workflows.

What should users look for in ROI?

Security Assurance: Mitigates risks associated with open-source software.
Efficiency: Reduces time spent on manual auditing tasks.
License Compliance: Ensures compliance with open-source licenses.
Risk Management: Enhances operational risk management in software development.

Enterprise environments use Black Duck extensively for security, compliance, and risk management, ensuring software meets regulatory standards and mitigates vulnerabilities. Its implementation in specific industries aids in controlled and secure software development processes, underlining its role in maintaining rigorous security standards while delivering dependable performance.

Black Duck

Up to 90% of any piece of software is from open source, creating countless dependencies and areas of risk to manage. FOSSA is the most reliable automated policy engine for legal teams to maintain license compliance, security to fix vulnerabilities, and engineering to improve code quality across the entire software supply chain. As the only developer-native open source management platform, FOSSA fully integrates with your existing CI/CD pipeline to provide complete visibility and context earlier in the software development lifecycle. For the first time, teams can collaboratively shift left and audit, analyze, control, and remediate license issues and vulnerabilities right in their existing workflows.

Sample Customers

Samsung, Siemens, ScienceLogic, BryterCX, Dynatrace

AppDyanmic, Uber, Twitter, Zendesk, Confluent

Black Duck SCA vs. FOSSA