We performed a comparison between GitLab and Sonatype Nexus Firewall based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Result: Based on the parameters we compared, Sonatype Nexus Firewall came out ahead of GitLab. Although both products have valuable features and can be estimated as high-end solutions, our reviewers found that GitLab's complexity is its main drawback, which some users find overwhelming and difficult to navigate.
"The inventory management as well as the ability to identify security vulnerabilities has been the most valuable for our business."
"The dashboard view and the management view are most valuable."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"What is very nice is that the product is very easy to set up. When you want to implement Mend.io, it just takes a few minutes to create your organization, create your products, and scan them. It's really convenient to have Mend scanning your products in less than one hour."
"Mend has reduced our open-source software vulnerabilities and helped us remediate issues quickly. My company's policy is to ensure that vulnerabilities are fixed before it gets to production."
"The SaaS setup is impressive, and it has DAST solutioning."
"It is scalable."
"GitLab is a solution for source code management, container registry, pipelines, testing, and deployment."
"CI/CD is very good. The version control system is also good. These are the two features that we use."
"It scales well."
"As a developer, this solution is useful as a repository holder because most of the POC projects that we have are on GitLab."
"The most valuable features of GitLab are the review, patch repo, and plans are in YAML."
"GitLab's best feature is Actions."
"The product's network and intrusion protection features are valuable. It also has rules and compliance features for security."
"It should support multiple SBOM formats to be able to integrate with old industry standards."
"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."
"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."
"At times, the latency of getting items out of the findings after they're remediated is higher than it should be."
"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."
"They're working on a UI refresh. That's probably been one of the pain points for us as it feels like a really old application."
"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."
"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."
"GitLab could add a plugin to integrate with Kubernetes stuff."
"GitLab can improve by integrating with more tools, such as servers with Docker."
"Their RBAC is role-based access, which is fine but not very good."
"We would like to have easier tutorials. Their tutorials are too technical for a user to understand. They should be more detailed but less technical."
"It's more related to the supporting layer of features, such as issue management and issue tracking. We tend to always use, for example, Jira next to it. That doesn't mean that GitLab should build something similar to Jira because that will always have its place, but they could grow a bit in those kinds of supporting features. I see some, for example, covering ITSM on a DevOps team level, and that's one of the things that I and my current client would find really helpful. It's understandably not going to be their main focus and their core, and whenever you are with a company that needs a bit more advanced features on that specific topic, you're probably still going to integrate with another tool like Jira Service Management, for example. However, some basic features on things like that could be really helpful."
"The initial setup was quite challenging because it takes some time to understand how to pull out or push the code."
"Merge conflicts and repository maintenance could improve. If there is someone new to the system they would not know if there is a conflict."
"Even if I say I want some improvement, they will say it is already planned in the first quarter, second quarter, or third quarter. That said, most everything is quite improved already, and they're improving even further still."
"The tool needs to improve its file systems. The product should also include zero test feature."
GitLab is ranked 5th in Software Composition Analysis (SCA) with 49 reviews while Sonatype Repository Firewall is ranked 11th in Software Composition Analysis (SCA) with 2 reviews. GitLab is rated 8.6, while Sonatype Repository Firewall is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of GitLab writes "Powerful, mature, and easy to set up and manage". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Sonatype Repository Firewall writes "You will get clean code every time, and that's a great achievement". GitLab is most compared with Microsoft Azure DevOps, Bamboo, AWS CodePipeline, TeamCity and Tekton, whereas Sonatype Repository Firewall is most compared with JFrog Security Essentials, Cisco Secure Firewall, Snyk, Black Duck and Sonatype Lifecycle. See our GitLab vs. Sonatype Repository Firewall report.
See our list of best Software Composition Analysis (SCA) vendors and best Application Security Tools 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.
