We performed a comparison between Gitlab and Sonatype Nexus Lifecycle based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Based on the parameters we compared, Sonatype Nexus Lifecycle comes out ahead of GitLab. Although both products have valuable features and can be estimated as high-end solutions, our reviewers found that GitLab’s price is higher and has uncertain long-term support.
"The dashboard view and the management view are most valuable."
"We use a lot of open sources with a variety of containers, and the different open sources come with different licenses. Some come with dual licenses, some are risky and some are not. All our three use cases are equally important to us and we found WhiteSource handles them decently."
"We set the solution up and enabled it and we had everything running pretty quickly."
"WhiteSource is unique in the scanning of open-source licenses. Additionally, the vulnerabilities aspect of the solution is a benefit. We don't use WhiteSource in the whole organization, but we use it for some projects. There we receive a sense of the vulnerabilities of the open-source components, which improves our security work. The reports are automated which is useful."
"I am the organizational deployment administrator for this tool, and I, along with other users in our company, especially the security team, appreciate the solution for several reasons. The UI is excellent, and scanning for security threats fits well into our workflow."
"There are multiple different integrations there. We use Mend for CI/CD that goes through Azure as well. It works seamlessly. We never have any issues with it."
"The vulnerability analysis is the best aspect of the solution."
"WhiteSource helped reduce our mean time to resolution since the adoption of the product."
"GitLab is kind of an image of GitHub, so it gives us the flexibility to monitor our changes in the repos."
"The most valuable feature of GitLab is its convenience. I am able to trace back most of my changes up to a far distance in time and it helps me to analyze and see the older version of the code."
"GitLab's best features are continuous integration and fast deployment."
"The stability is good."
"The merging feature makes it easy later on for the deployment."
"This is a scalable solution. We had around 200 users working with it."
"GitLab is a solution for source code management, container registry, pipelines, testing, and deployment."
"GitLab is being used as a repository for our codebase and it is a one stop DevOps tool we use in our team."
"The integrations into developer tooling are quite nice. I have the integration for Eclipse and for Visual Studio. Colleagues are using the Javascript IDE from JetBrains called WebStorm and there is an integration for that from Nexus Lifecycle. I have not heard about anything that is not working. It's also quite easy to integrate it. You just need to set up a project or an app and then you just make the connection in all the tools you're using."
"Lifecycle lets developers see any vulnerabilities or AGPL license issues associated with code in the early stages of development. The nice thing is that it's built into the ID so that they can see all versions of a specific code."
"Vulnerability detection accuracy is good."
"Sonatype support is quite responsive. When we needed something, we could reach out and set up a meeting. They provide the best support possible."
"The most important features of the Sonatype Nexus Lifecycle are the vulnerability reports."
"Due to the sheer amount of vulnerabilities and the fact that my company is still working on eliminating all vulnerabilities, it's still too early for me to say what I like most about Sonatype Nexus Lifecycle. Still, one of the best functions of the product is the guidance it gives in finding which components or applications have vulnerabilities. For example, my team had a vulnerability or a CVE connected to Apache last week. My team couldn't find which applications had the vulnerability initially, but using Sonatype Nexus Lifecycle helped. My team deployed new versions on that same day and successfully eliminated the vulnerabilities, so right now, the best feature of Sonatype Nexus Lifecycle is finding which applications have vulnerabilities."
"The most valuable features of the Sonatype Nexus Lifecycle are the evaluation of the unit test coverage, vulnerability scanning, duplicate code lines, code smells, and unnecessary loops."
"The IQ server and repo are the most valuable."
"Mend supports most of the common package managers, but it doesn't support some that we use. I would appreciate it if they can quickly make these changes to add new package managers when necessary."
"At times, the latency of getting items out of the findings after they're remediated is higher than it should be."
"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."
"The turnaround time for upgrading databases for this tool as well as the accuracy could be improved."
"Mend lets you create custom policies. They're not too complicated to set up, but it would be helpful if they had some preconfigured policies to match what we have in Azure DevOps. That would save us a lot of time. It's tedious to configure the policies manually, and I lack the capacity to do it right now. Other products have preconfigured packs and templates, and Mend doesn't."
"I would like to have an additional compliance pack. Currently, it does not have anything for the CIS framework or the NIST framework. If we directly run a scan, and it is under the CIS framework, we can directly tell the auditor that this product is now CIS compliant."
"The only thing that I don't find support for on Mend Prioritize is C++."
"This solution could be improved by adding modifications such as slack notifications."
"I would like configuration of a YML file to be done via UI rather than a code file."
"Atlassian offers more products than GitLab. GitLab offers source control management, version control and collaboration between developers. Atlassian offers features on top of this as well as more integration points for developers."
"The pricing model of GitLab is an issue for me."
"There is room for improvement in GitLab Agents."
"The integration could be slightly better."
"Expand features to match other tools such as a static code analysis tool so third-party integrations are not required."
"It is a little complex to set up the pipelines within the solution."
"The team managing Nexus Lifecycle reported that their internal libraries were not being identified, so they have asked Sonatype's technical team to include that in the upcoming version."
"It could be because I need to learn more about Sonatype Nexus Lifecycle, but as a leader, if I want to analyze the vulnerability situation and how it is and the forecast, I'd like to look at the reports and understand what the results mean. It's been challenging for me to understand the reports and dashboards on Sonatype Nexus Lifecycle, so I'll need to take a course or watch some YouTube tutorials about the product. If Sonatype Nexus Lifecycle has documentation that could help me properly analyze the vulnerability situation and what the graphs mean, then that would be helpful. I need help understanding what each graph is showing, and it seems my company is the worst, based on the chart. Still, I need clarification, so if there were some documentation, a more extensive knowledge base, or a question mark icon you could hover over that would explain what each data on the graph means, that would make Sonatype Nexus Lifecycle better."
"We got a lot of annotations for certain libraries when it comes to Java, but my feeling, and the feeling of a colleague as well, is that we don't get as many for critical libraries when it comes to .NET, as if most of them are really fine... It would be good if Sonatype would check the status of annotations for .NET packages."
"In the beginning, we sometimes struggle to access the customer environment. The customer must issue the required certificates because many customers use cell phone certificates, and Sonatype needs a valid CA certificate."
"Sonatype Nexus Lifecycle can improve by having a feature to automatically detect vulnerabilities. Additionally, if it could automatically push the dependencies or create notifications it would be beneficial."
"The solution is not an SaaS product."
"The reporting could be better."
"Sonatype Nexus Lifecycle can improve the functionality. Some functionalities are missing from the UI that could be accessed using the API but they are not available. For example, seeing more than the 100 first reports or, seeing your comments when you process a waiver for a vulnerability or a violation."
GitLab is ranked 6th in Application Security Tools with 49 reviews while Sonatype Lifecycle is ranked 11th in Application Security Tools with 9 reviews. GitLab is rated 8.6, while Sonatype Lifecycle is rated 7.8. The top reviewer of GitLab writes "Powerful, mature, and easy to set up and manage". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Sonatype Lifecycle writes "Integrates easily with many IDEs, and enables development and security teams to work together". GitLab is most compared with Microsoft Azure DevOps, Bamboo, AWS CodePipeline, TeamCity and Fortify Static Code Analyzer, whereas Sonatype Lifecycle is most compared with SonarQube, Black Duck, Fortify Static Code Analyzer, Checkmarx and Snyk. See our GitLab vs. Sonatype Lifecycle report.
See our list of best Application Security Tools vendors and best Software Composition Analysis (SCA) vendors.
We monitor all Application Security Tools 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.
