Try our new research platform with insights from 80,000+ expert users

FOSSA vs Snyk comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jun 4, 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

FOSSA
Ranking in Software Composition Analysis (SCA)
9th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.9
Number of Reviews
15
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Snyk
Ranking in Software Composition Analysis (SCA)
2nd
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
48
Ranking in other categories
Application Security Tools (5th), Static Application Security Testing (SAST) (8th), Cloud Management (14th), Container Security (5th), Software Development Analytics (2nd), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (16th), DevSecOps (2nd), Application Security Posture Management (ASPM) (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Software Composition Analysis (SCA) category, the mindshare of FOSSA is 3.3%, down from 4.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Snyk is 14.1%, down from 17.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Software Composition Analysis (SCA)
 

Featured Reviews

Hanumanth Ramsetty - PeerSpot reviewer
Proactively mitigate deployment vulnerabilities with seamless dependency tracking
Before using FOSSA, we could only identify issues after deployment in the Cloud Run. Now, with FOSSA, we identify dependency issues or vulnerabilities during the CI phase itself. This proactive approach has eliminated the need to search the internet for solutions, as FOSSA provides updated recommendations automatically. This has made the process more efficient and mitigated risks before deployment.
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

"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 most valuable feature is its ability to identify all of the components in a build, and then surface the licenses that are associated with it, allowing us to make a decision as to whether or not we allow a team to use the components. That eliminates the risk that comes with running consumer software that contains open source components."
"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 allows us to keep track of all dependencies to ensure they are up to date and not causing any vulnerabilities."
"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."
"FOSSA is easy to use and set up, provides relatively accurate results, and doesn't require armies of people to get value from its use."
"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."
"I find SCA to be valuable. It can read your libraries, your license and bring the best way to resolve your problem in the best scenario."
"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 customers find container scans most valuable. They are always talking about it."
"Snyk's focus on security is a valuable feature. Also Snyk supports multiple programming languages, which has positively affected my security practices. I use only two or three languages, and when I change the language in a file, it detects it in the same suite. I find the AI-powered scanning overall beneficial.Using Snyk's AI-powered scanning, I can detect around ten or twenty errors in my project with about twenty thousand lines of code, so it helps improve my project by identifying a lot of potential vulnerabilities."
"Snyk has given us really good results because it is fully automated. We don't have to scan projects every time to find vulnerabilities, as it already stores the dependencies that we are using. It monitors 24/7 to find out if there are any issues that have been reported out on the Internet."
"The dependency checks of the libraries are very valuable, but the licensing part is also very important because, with open source components, licensing can be all over the place. Our project is not an open source project, but we do use quite a lot of open source components and we want to make sure that we don't have surprises in there."
"The solution's Open Source feature gives us notifications and suggestions regarding how to address vulnerabilities."
"The most important feature of Snyk is its cost-effectiveness compared to other solutions such as Check Point."
 

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."
"I would like the FOSSA API to be broader. I would like not to have to interact with the GUI at all, to do the work that I want to do. I would like them to do API-first development, rather than a focus on the GUI."
"The technical support has room for improvement."
"FOSSA does not show the exact line of code with vulnerabilities, which adds time to the process as we have to locate these manually."
"I would like more customized categories because our company is so big. This is doable for them. They are still in the stages of trying to figure this out since we are one of their biggest companies that they support."
"If you have thousands of applications, organizing them all into teams or tags is challenging."
"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."
"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."
"Snyk has several limitations, including issues with Gradle, NPM, and Xcode, and trouble with AutoPR."
"We use Bamboo for CI.CD, and we had problems integrating Snyk with it. Ultimately, we got the two solutions to work together, but it was difficult."
"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."
"For the areas that they're new in, it's very early stages for them. For example, their expertise is in looking at third-party components and packages, which is their bread-and-butter and what they've been doing for ages, but for newer features such as static analysis I don't think they've got compatibility for all the languages and frameworks yet."
"There are some new features that we would like to see added, e.g., more visibility into library usage for the code. Something along the lines where it's doing the identification of where vulnerabilities are used, etc. This would cause them to stand out in the market as a much different platform."
"It would be helpful if we get a recommendation while doing the scan about the necessary things we need to implement after identifying the vulnerabilities."
"The feature for automatic fixing of security breaches could be improved."
"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

"The solution's pricing is good and reasonable because you can literally use a lot of it for free."
"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."
"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."
"The solution's cost is a five out of ten."
"Snyk is an expensive solution."
"It is pretty expensive. It is not a cheap product."
"It's good value. That's the primary thing. It's not cheap-cheap, but it's good value."
"The license model is based on the number of contributing developers. Snyk is expensive, for a startup company will most likely use the community edition, while larger companies will buy the licensed version. The price of Snyk is more than other SLA tools."
"On a scale of one to ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive, I rate the pricing a three. It is a cheap solution."
"Snyk is a premium-priced product, so it's kind of expensive. The big con that I find frustrating is when a company charges extra for single sign-on (SSO) into their SaaS app. Snyk is one of the few that I'm willing to pay that add-on charge, but generally I disqualify products that charge an extra fee to do integrated authentication to our identity provider, like Okta or some other SSO. That is a big negative. We had to pay extra for that. That little annoyance aside, it is expensive. You get a lot out of it, but you're paying for that premium."
"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."
"The pricing is reasonable."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Software Composition Analysis (SCA) solutions are best for your needs.
860,632 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
25%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Computer Software Company
11%
Educational Organization
7%
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

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?
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...
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

No data available
Fugue
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

AppDyanmic, Uber, Twitter, Zendesk, Confluent
StartApp, Segment, Skyscanner, DigitalOcean, Comic Relief
Find out what your peers are saying about FOSSA vs. Snyk and other solutions. Updated: June 2025.
860,632 professionals have used our research since 2012.