We performed a comparison between Black Duck and Mend (formerly WhiteSource) based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Mend is the clear winner in this comparison. Compared with Black Duck, it is easier to set up and has better reporting and analysis features and superior customer support. Mend also has a proven ROI.
"The solution works well on Mac products."
"Black Duck is pretty extensive in terms of the scan reserves and the vulnerability exposures. From that perspective, I'm happy with it."
"The installation is very easy."
"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."
"It is able to drill down to the source level."
"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."
"Policy management is a valuable feature."
"The product enables other applications to be secure."
"The license management of WhiteSource was at a good level. As compared to other tools that I have used, its functionality for the licenses for the code libraries was quite good. Its UI was also fine."
"The dashboard view and the management view are most valuable."
"With the fix suggestions feature, not only do you get the specific trace back to where the vulnerability is within your code, but you also get fix suggestions."
"The most valuable features are the reporting, customizing libraries "In-house, White list, license selection", comparing the products/projects, and License & Copyright resolution."
"We find licenses together with WhiteSource which are associated with a certain library, then we get a classification of the license. This is with respect to criticality and vulnerability, so we could take action and improve some things, or replace a third-party library which seems to be too risky for us to use on legal grounds."
"The inventory management as well as the ability to identify security vulnerabilities has been the most valuable for our business."
"The vulnerability analysis is the best aspect of the solution."
"The best feature is that the Mend R&D team does their due diligence for all the vulnerabilities. In case they observe any important or critical vulnerabilities, such as the Log4j-related vulnerability, we usually get a dedicated email from our R&D team saying that this particular vulnerability has been exploited in the world, and we should definitely check our project for this and take corrective actions."
"It is a cloud-only solution. In many cases, companies like to evaluate the software, but they're very reluctant to give you the software. It would be great if they could offer an on-prem component that could be used to scan the code and then upload the discovery results to the cloud and get all the information from there, but there is no such possibility. You have to upload the code to the Black Duck cloud system. Of course, they have a strong legal department, and they offer some configuration, but it is never enough. You have to give the code, which is a drawback. In modern designs like Snyk or FOSSA, you don't need to give the code. It requires more native integration with Coverity because they go together technically. You need both Coverity and Black Duck Hub. It would be really helpful for companies working in this space to get a combined offer from the same company. They should provide an option to buy Coverity for an additional fee. Coverity combined with Black Duck Hub will provide a one-step analysis to get everything you need and a unified report. It would be really great to be able to connect Black Duck Hub with Coverity unified reports."
"I would like to see more integration with other solutions, such as IntelliJ IDEA."
"The solution must provide more open APIs."
"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 solution's pricing model and documentation areas of concern where improvement is needed."
"The documentation is quite scattered."
"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."
"It needs to be more user-friendly for developers and in general, to ensure compliance."
"We have been looking at how we could improve the automation to human involvement ratio from 60:40 to 70:30, or even potentially 80:20, as there is room for improvement here. We are discussing this internally and with Mend; they are very accommodating to us. We think they openly receive our feedback and do their best to implement our thoughts into the roadmap."
"I rated the solution an eight out of ten because WhiteSource hasn't built in a couple of features that we would have loved to use and they say they're on their roadmap. I'm hoping that they'll be able to build and deliver in 2022."
"On the reporting side, they could make some improvements. They are making the reports better and better, but sometimes it takes a lot of time to generate a report for our entire organization."
"At times, the latency of getting items out of the findings after they're remediated is higher than it should be."
"The only thing that I don't find support for on Mend Prioritize is C++."
"If anything, I would spend more time making this more user-friendly, better documenting the CLI, and adding more examples to help expand the current documentation."
"I would like to see the static analysis included with the open-source version."
"We specifically use this solution within our CICD pipelines in Azure DevOps, and we would like to have a gate so that if the score falls below a certain value then we can block the pipeline from running."
Black Duck is ranked 1st in Software Composition Analysis (SCA) with 16 reviews while Mend.io is ranked 4th in Software Composition Analysis (SCA) with 29 reviews. Black Duck is rated 7.8, while Mend.io is rated 8.4. 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 Mend.io writes "Easy to use, great for finding vulnerabilities, and simple to set up". Black Duck is most compared with Snyk, Fortify Static Code Analyzer, JFrog Xray, FOSSA and Checkmarx Software Composition Analysis, whereas Mend.io is most compared with SonarQube, Snyk, Checkmarx, Veracode and JFrog Xray. See our Black Duck vs. Mend.io report.
See our list of best Software Composition Analysis (SCA) vendors.
We monitor all Software Composition Analysis (SCA) reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.