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Black Duck vs Snyk comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 9, 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
Ranking in Software Composition Analysis (SCA)
1st
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
21
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Snyk
Ranking in Software Composition Analysis (SCA)
3rd
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
45
Ranking in other categories
Application Security Tools (4th), Container Security (8th), Software Development Analytics (2nd), DevSecOps (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the Software Composition Analysis (SCA) category, the mindshare of Black Duck is 19.3%, down from 22.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Snyk is 14.8%, down from 17.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
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.
meetharoon - PeerSpot reviewer
Affordable tool boosts code scanning efficiency but faces integration hurdles
The most important feature of Snyk is its cost-effectiveness compared to other solutions such as Check Point. It is easy to consolidate Snyk across multiple entities within a large organization. Additionally, our integration of Snyk into GitHub allows us to automatically scan codebases and identify issues, which has improved efficiency.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The automated code scanning feature and Black Duck's integration with our development tools have enhanced our software compliance process and overall audit readiness."
"The most valuable feature for me in Black Duck is its ability to scan binary files effectively."
"The stability is okay."
"The solution works well on Mac products."
"It highlights what the developers have done, and it shows the impact from an intellectual property point of view."
"The most valuable feature of Black Duck is the composition analysis feature, which is effective for security risk management."
"Black Duck is pretty extensive in terms of the scan reserves and the vulnerability exposures. From that perspective, I'm happy with it."
"Policy management is a valuable feature."
"There are many valuable features. For example, the way the scanning feature works. The integration is cool because I can integrate it and I don't need to wait until the CACD, I can plug it in to our local ID, and there I can do the scanning. That is the part I like best."
"It is easy for developers to use. The documentation is clear as well as the APIs are good and easily readable. It's a good solution overall."
"Our overall security has improved. We are running fewer severities and vulnerabilities in our packages. We fixed a lot of the vulnerabilities that we didn't know were there."
"Its reports are nice and provide information about the issue as well as resolution. They also provide a proper fix. If there's an issue, they provide information in detail about how to remediate that issue."
"Snyk performs software composition analysis (SCA) similar to other expensive tools."
"Provides clear information and is easy to follow with good feedback regarding code practices."
"Snyk helps me pinpoint security errors in my code."
"It has improved our vulnerability rating and reduced our vulnerabilities through the tool during the time that we've had it. It's definitely made us more aware, as we have removed scoping for existing vulnerabilities and platforms since we rolled it out up until now."
 

Cons

"The initial setup could be simplified. It was somewhat complex."
"It's still a bit inconsistent. For example, if I scan today, it might not show the same results tomorrow."
"There are areas for improvement such as false positives and the scanning of containers."
"The tool's documentation and support are areas of concern where improvements are required."
"Black Duck does not have the SBOM management part. I would like to see this feature added in the future."
"The solution's pricing model and documentation areas of concern where improvement is needed."
"I would like to see improvements in Black Duck's reporting capabilities."
"The solution must provide more open APIs."
"Basically the licensing costs are a little bit expensive."
"It lists projects. So, if you have a number of microservices in an enterprise, then you could have pages of findings. Developers will then spend zero time going through the pages of reports to figure out, "Is there something I need to fix?" While it may make sense to list all the projects and issues in these very long lists for completeness, Snyk could do a better job of bubbling up and grouping items, e.g., a higher level dashboard that draws attention to things that are new, the highest priority things, or things trending in the wrong direction. That would make it a lot easier. They don't quite have that yet in container security."
"The reporting mechanism of Snyk could improve. The reporting mechanism is available only on the higher level of license. Adjusting the policy of the current setup of recording this report is something that can improve. For instance, if you have a certain license, you receive a rating, and the rating of this license remains the same for any use case. No matter if you are using it internally or using it externally, you cannot make the adjustment to your use case. It will always alert as a risky license. The areas of licenses in the reporting and adjustments can be improve"
"The documentation sometimes is not relevant. It does not cover the latest updates, scanning, and configurations. The documentation for some things is wrong and does not cover some configuration scannings for the multiple project settings."
"A feature we would like to see is the ability to archive and store historical data, without actually deleting it. It's a problem because it throws my numbers off. When I'm looking at the dashboard's current vulnerabilities, it's not accurate."
"Snyk has several limitations, including issues with Gradle, NPM, and Xcode, and trouble with AutoPR."
"We were using Microsoft Docker images. It was reporting some vulnerabilities, but we were not able to figure out the fix for them. It was reporting some vulnerabilities in the Docker images given by Microsoft, which were out of our control. That was the only limitation. Otherwise, it was good."
"They were a couple of issues which happened because Snyk lacked some documentation on the integration side. Snyk is lacking a lot of documentation, and I would like to see them improve this. This is where we struggle a bit. For example, if something breaks, we can't figure out how to fix that issue. It may be a very simple thing, but because we don't have the proper documentation around an issue, it takes us a bit longer."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"The price is quite high because the behavior of the software during the scan is similar to competing products."
"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."
"Depending on the use case, the cost could range from $10,000 USD to $70,000 USD."
"The pricing is a little high."
"It is expensive."
"The price is low. It's not an expensive solution."
"The price charged by Black Duck is exorbitant."
"Snyk is an expensive solution."
"We are using the open-source version for the scans."
"We do have some missing licenses issues, especially with non-SPDX compliant one, but we expect this to be fixed soon"
"The pricing is acceptable, especially for enterprises. I don't think it's too much of a concern for our customers. Something like $99 per user is reasonable when the stakes are high."
"Their licensing model is fairly robust and scalable for our needs. I believe we have reached a reasonable agreement on the licensing to enable hundreds of developers to participate in this product offering. The solution is very tailored towards developers and its licensing model works well for us."
"The price of the solution is expensive compared to other solutions."
"With Snyk, you get what you pay for. It is not a cheap solution, but you get a comprehensiveness and level of coverage that is very good. The dollars in the security budget only go so far. If I can maximize my value and be able to have some funds left over for other initiatives, I want to do that. That is what drives me to continue to say, "What's out there in the market? Snyk's expensive, but it's good. Is there something as good, but more affordable?" Ultimately, I find we could go cheaper, but we would lose the completeness of vision or scope. I am not willing to do that because Snyk does provide a pretty important benefit for us."
"I didn't think the price was that great, but it wasn't that bad, either. I'd rate their pricing as average in the market."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
20%
Manufacturing Company
16%
Computer Software Company
14%
Insurance Company
4%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Insurance Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

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...
How does Snyk compare with SonarQube?
Snyk does a great job identifying and reducing vulnerabilities. This solution is fully automated and monitors 24/7 to find any issues reported on the internet. It will store dependencies that you a...
What do you like most about Snyk?
The most effective feature in securing project dependencies stems from its ability to highlight security vulnerabilities.
What needs improvement with Snyk?
There are a lot of false positives that need to be identified and separated. The inclusion of AI to remove false positives would be beneficial. So far, I've not seen any AI features to enhance vuln...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

Blackduck Hub, Black Duck Protex, Black Duck Security Checker
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Samsung, Siemens, ScienceLogic, BryterCX, Dynatrace
StartApp, Segment, Skyscanner, DigitalOcean, Comic Relief
Find out what your peers are saying about Black Duck vs. Snyk and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
849,686 professionals have used our research since 2012.