

Black Duck SCA and JFrog Xray are competing tools in the software composition analysis category. Black Duck SCA is noted for its extensive integration capabilities, while JFrog Xray excels in providing cutting-edge security features and real-time analysis.
Features: Black Duck SCA provides comprehensive vulnerability detection, seamless integration with development tools, and extensive license management. JFrog Xray offers continuous metadata synchronization, advanced policy enforcement, and tight integration with JFrog Artifactory.
Room for Improvement: Black Duck SCA could enhance its real-time security insights, improve upon its vulnerability identification accuracy, and expand its policy management features. JFrog Xray could benefit from simplifying deployment, expanding integration capabilities beyond Artifactory, and refining its user interface for better usability.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Black Duck SCA offers flexible deployment options with strong customer support for easier implementation. JFrog Xray's deployment is slightly complex but is supported by consistent assistance during integration stages.
Pricing and ROI: Black Duck SCA requires a significant initial investment but offers justified long-term integration benefits. JFrog Xray, although more expensive, delivers substantial ROI through long-term security breach reduction despite the higher initial cost.
If you're using it on critical external programs where there is regulatory compliance on ensuring that the source code is clean from open-source, there's substantial ROI.
There are some pain points with the response time and first-level support quality.
On a scale of 1 to 10, I would rate the technical support of JFrog Xray an eight because they are very knowledgeable.
When we need clarifications, we contact our account manager, and they arrange demos.
I would rate the scalability of Black Duck 8 or 9.
According to my use case, it is highly scalable.
I use JFrog Xray primarily for security purposes, and I find it reliable.
We did experience crashes, downtimes, and performance issues with JFrog Xray.
It can improve on the security side of it, specifically vulnerabilities identification.
There are areas for improvement such as false positives and the scanning of containers.
Black Duck does not have the SBOM management part.
When we have given a very long tag, it doesn't work as expected and requires excessive scrolling.
somehow you need to adapt your GitLab pipeline and turn them into JFrog pipeline, and this is something they don't really advertise at first—you're obliged to use the JFrog CLI.
X-ray needs improvement in supporting more than one database, as it currently only supports PostgreSQL.
JFrog Xray provides a free trial of 14 days.
The basic scanning capabilities come with Artifactory, however, curation requires additional licenses.
The most valuable feature of Black Duck is the composition analysis feature, which is effective for security risk management.
Black Duck's ability to identify dependencies very accurately has been most valuable in identifying and mitigating risks.
The software composition analysis is most effective for security risk management.
The policy-driven approach of JFrog Xray helped me maintain security standards by integrating it in the development pipeline.
The most valuable features of JFrog Xray are its curation capabilities, its native integration with Artifactory, scanning for vulnerabilities, and license compliance features.
With other registries such as ECR, we can use the images only in the AWS cloud. With JFrog, we can use this registry from any cloud or work locally as well.
| Product | Market Share (%) |
|---|---|
| Black Duck SCA | 12.5% |
| JFrog Xray | 8.3% |
| Other | 79.2% |

| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 6 |
| Large Enterprise | 16 |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 1 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 3 |
| Large Enterprise | 6 |
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?
What should users look for in ROI?
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.
JFrog is on a mission to enable continuous updates through Liquid Software, empowering developers to code high-quality applications that securely flow to end-users with zero downtime. The world’s top brands such as Amazon, Facebook, Google, Netflix, Uber, VMware, and Spotify are among the 4500 companies that already depend on JFrog to manage binaries for their mission-critical applications. JFrog is a privately-held, global company, and is a proud sponsor of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation [CNCF].
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