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FOSSA vs Polaris Platform comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 22, 2026

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

FOSSA
Ranking in Software Composition Analysis (SCA)
11th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.9
Number of Reviews
15
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Polaris Platform
Ranking in Software Composition Analysis (SCA)
17th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
3.2
Number of Reviews
1
Ranking in other categories
Static Code Analysis (12th), Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST) (12th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2026, in the Software Composition Analysis (SCA) category, the mindshare of FOSSA is 2.3%, down from 3.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Polaris Platform is 1.7%, up from 1.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Software Composition Analysis (SCA) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
FOSSA2.3%
Polaris Platform1.7%
Other96.0%
Software Composition Analysis (SCA)
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer2588340 - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
Alina-Eugenia Negulescu - PeerSpot reviewer
Head of Procurement and Vendor Manger at twoday
Company consistently identifies security vulnerabilities with current solution but considers moving to a more developer-oriented tool due to complexity and costs
I wouldn't recommend it for small and medium customers, both in terms of the complexity and organizational processes and operational processes around it. I wouldn't go with Black Duck. It's not straightforward as it is with more developer-oriented and plug-and-play versions, so it requires a bit of knowledge and documentation to set it up. On the support part, in the past, we had some issues regarding the availability of the information on the knowledge portal. That was particularly due to the fact that when they integrated their knowledge hub or knowledge portal different kind of documentation, they have not adapted the text. There were circular references on the documentation that was misleading and confusing our people rather than helping them.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"I am impressed with the tool’s seamless integration and quick results."
"It reduced the duration and the effort required to identify open-source licensing 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."
"Overall, it's a great product."
"Prior to a Puppet Enterprise release, it would take approximately two to three weeks of dedicated engineering time by a single release engineer to go through license compliance, and we just did a release in late July or early August, and with FOSSA our license compliance review took five to ten minutes."
"I found FOSSA's out-of-the-box policy engine to be accurate and that it was tuned appropriately to the settings that we were looking for. The policy engine is pretty straightforward... I find it to be very straightforward to make small modifications to, but it's very rare that we have to make modifications to it. It's easy to use. It's a four-category system that handles most cases pretty well."
"The scalability is excellent."
"FOSSA is at the heart of the license compliance part of our open-source management program."
"We have detected security vulnerabilities, which is absolutely one big benefit."
 

Cons

"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."
"If you have thousands of applications, organizing them all into teams or tags is challenging."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"The reports don't really work that well for us. They do provide good information but they perform poorly with either the number of projects, or components, in the system."
"While running a FOSSA scan, it takes time for the results to reflect in the FOSSA UI portal."
"I wouldn't recommend it for small and medium customers, both in terms of the complexity and organizational processes and operational processes around it."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"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."
"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 pricing is good and reasonable because you can literally use a lot of it for free."
Information not available
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
20%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Outsourcing Company
6%
Manufacturing Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Construction Company
10%
Healthcare Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise8
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with FOSSA?
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 lin...
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...
What advice do you have for others considering FOSSA?
For those seeking to ensure their application is updated with the latest features, FOSSA can be a beneficial add-on. However, it should not replace your existing primary security solutions such as ...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Polaris Platform?
In my opinion, I think that it's a very good product for mature companies. It is quite expensive compared with competitors, with other providers of similar services of application security manageme...
What needs improvement with Polaris Platform?
I wouldn't recommend it for small and medium customers, both in terms of the complexity and organizational processes and operational processes around it. I wouldn't go with Black Duck. It's not str...
What is your primary use case for Polaris Platform?
The product teams use them under supervision from the security department. I'm not extremely familiar with the details on how the product teams are using it, but I think they have integrated it int...
 

Comparisons

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

AppDyanmic, Uber, Twitter, Zendesk, Confluent
Information Not Available
Find out what your peers are saying about Snyk, Veracode, Black Duck and others in Software Composition Analysis (SCA). Updated: October 2026.
919,809 professionals have used our research since 2012.