JFrog Artifactory vs Sonatype Nexus Repository comparison

JFrog and Sonatype are both solutions in the Repository Managers category. JFrog is ranked #2 with an average rating of 8.0, while Sonatype is ranked #1 with an average rating of 8.3. JFrog holds a 39.4% mindshare in RM, compared to Sonatype’s 32.6% mindshare. Additionally, 87% of JFrog users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Sonatype users who would recommend it.

JFrog Artifactory

Read 7 JFrog Artifactory reviews

5,372 Views
1,201 Comparison Views

87% willing to recommend

Sonatype Nexus Repository

Read 15 Sonatype Nexus Repository reviews

5,616 Views
2,422 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

JFrog Artifactory

Sonatype Nexus Repository

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Apr 20, 2025

Sonatype Nexus Repository and JFrog Artifactory are leading competitors in the artifact management domain. JFrog Artifactory has an upper hand due to its diverse feature set that appeals to larger enterprises.

Features: Sonatype Nexus Repository supports various package formats, offers simplified access control, and provides a valuable internal scanner feature that scans external artifacts before storage. JFrog Artifactory provides universal repository compatibility, an effective JFrog CLI for file management without a CI/CD pipeline, and a proxy method for remote repositories, ideal for accessing artifacts across different environments.

Room for Improvement: Sonatype Nexus Repository could enhance its enterprise integration, improve external artifact handling efficiency, and expand its documentation for better usability with advanced features. JFrog Artifactory needs to better document its CLI with improved error messages, enhance upload performance, and provide clearer documentation examples for smoother user experience.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Sonatype Nexus Repository offers straightforward deployment with sufficient documentation suitable for small teams, whereas JFrog Artifactory provides a comprehensive deployment model with extensive integrations. JFrog Artifactory's customer service is exceptional, offering substantial support for its broad functionality.

Pricing and ROI: Sonatype Nexus Repository is notably cost-effective, benefiting companies with simpler needs. Although JFrog Artifactory has higher initial costs, its advanced functionality leads to a potential increase in ROI for environments requiring complex artifact management. The pricing model of Artifactory, while higher, offers great value with its rich features and support.

To learn more, read our detailed JFrog Artifactory vs. Sonatype Nexus Repository Report (Updated: June 2025).

Buyer's Guide

JFrog Artifactory vs. Sonatype Nexus Repository

June 2025

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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

JFrog Artifactory

Ranking in Repository Managers

2nd

Average Rating

7.8

Reviews Sentiment

7.4

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Sonatype Nexus Repository

Ranking in Repository Managers

1st

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

6.8

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Software Distribution (1st)

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2025, in the Repository Managers category, the mindshare of JFrog Artifactory is 39.4%, up from 35.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Sonatype Nexus Repository is 32.6%, down from 33.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Repository Managers

Q&A Highlights

Mike_Wu

Senior Manager, IT at cgs-cimb

Aug 02, 2023

Sonatype Nexus Repository vs JFrog Artifactory: which one is better for Binary Repository and deployment?

We are facing a similar assessment, Nexus is more robust than Artifactory

See all answers

Featured Reviews

Matthew Iijima

Head of Infrastructure and DevOps at a manufacturing company with 5,001-10,000 employees

Stores all our artifacts, allows users to manage permissions for their data, and is very stable

We're looking for something that has additional reporting capabilities on data growth and data aging. This goes back to storage lifecycle management so that the actual Artifactory itself can provide these reports to either the administrators or the users. I don't know if it has those capabilities. That's something we have to look into regarding the self-service dashboard, but the tool itself having those capabilities would be great rather than trying to do it at the underlying storage hardware layer. We moved from the internal Derby DB to the Postgres database last year or the year before. Because of the size and amount of objects in our instance, we were probably going to exceed the recommended number of objects for the default Derby DB. So, we moved to Postgres. The other option was MySQL. There weren't a lot of options. It could've been better. I felt that there wasn't a lot of knowledge base or support available to help with that migration for us. We had reached up to Artifactory support to see if they had a professional services type of engagement to do that, and they didn't have anything of that nature. So, we were left to our own devices to manage that database migration.

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CuneytGurses

DevOps Engineer at Sonne Technology, Inc.

A stable solution that provides a central platform for storing build artifacts, saving us significant maintenance and hardware costs.

Particularly concerning OSF-type licenses, while they support a multitude of features, there's room for improvement in the single point transform, especially for grouping. It appears that currently, the grouping functionality is not robust, particularly for Docker images within a group. The support for this aspect seems to be contingent on the license type. For instance, with the Voss license type, there is a noticeable absence of support for this feature. This is an area that could benefit from enhancement in the upcoming updates.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"HPE was using it for a lot of things, and they certainly had a massive implementation."

"The package registries have been helpful. GitLab, our previous solution, wasn't managing that well."

"The most valuable feature I have found is the JFrog CLI."

"The most valuable feature is that it is a centralized repository and that you can open multiple repositories for different types of artifacts."

"For the most part, it's pretty stable."

"The feature that I like is Permission Targets. If I want to give permission to only deploy the cache, I can give that permission to a set of users. Similarly, if I want to overwrite an artifact with the same name from the same pipeline, I can give permission for that as well to particular users."

"The core functionality is most valuable for indexing and metadata of all the artifacts, but within the last year or two, we've been using the Projects feature, which has been very helpful. We can now assign individual admins for different projects and repos so that they can self-manage their own user permissions for their data. My IT DevOps team doesn't have to be the facilitators of that. It's now more of a self-service capability for them."

"Navigation on the UI is easy and simple to understand."

"While there aren't many features, they're all useful, particularly the ability to store and retrieve content, and to proxy all of the features that an enterprise repository manager should have."

"The key benefit we get from it is speed to delivery. It has improved our overall time to get new applications out with new code. That's true whether from a platform perspective, where we are quickly deploying up-to-date docker containers, or whether we are looking to deploy new code out to deliver a new application."

"The core features are the most important: We can host libraries, upload them, and they can be used across multiple teams."

"I onboarded .NET, then I onboarded JS. And about six or eight months back, I onboarded Python. And I am about to onboard Docker. The availability of integrations allows me to do this."

"One of the most valuable features is the variety of permissions you can use on the repository. That helps us protect access to the information inside of the repository."

"For us, the ability to do proxying and federations of repositories is very important. It gives us flexibility. We are the largest physics research laboratory in the world. With 12,000 people, we need to have good solutions to federate organizations inside our lab."

"Primarily, the extensive support for a wide range of packages is a crucial factor. The effectiveness of new-age package managers is often determined by the breadth of packages they can handle. In this regard, Nexus Repository Manager 3 stands out for its comprehensive coverage, accommodating a vast array of packages widely utilized across the globe. This inclusivity enables easy access to a diverse range of packages, making it a pivotal aspect of its functionality."

More Sonatype Nexus Repository pros

Cons

"Sometimes the documentation was sort of messy because there are many possibilities for where and how to install Artifactory."

"It's an enterprise product that acts like an enterprise product. In other words, it's not a product where they focus on user experience. I wasn't an administrator, so I primarily worked with the command line tool to upload and download parts of the product. I was not impressed with that because it wasn't well documented. It was challenging to figure out how to get things to work."

"I would like to see written technical support instead of having to contact them directly."

"The documentation is a bit sparse. That's our only complaint."

"We're looking for something that has additional reporting capabilities on data growth and data aging. This goes back to storage lifecycle management so that the actual Artifactory itself can provide these reports to either the administrators or the users. I don't know if it has those capabilities. That's something we have to look into regarding the self-service dashboard, but the tool itself having those capabilities would be great rather than trying to do it at the underlying storage hardware layer."

"The latest version that I am using is 7.41. It has been upgraded graphics-wise, but there is a bit of slowness. They can improve the graphical interface for the admin jobs and make it faster."

"In some of the latest versions of JFrog's SaaS solution, they changed the user interface, the SSO settings, how you interact with them over API, and how you generate tokens. It was very confusing for me. The overall user management is very complicated."

"Sonatype Nexus Repository could improve by making the experience working with CI/CD pipelines, such as GitHub Action or GitLab better."

"Particularly concerning OSF-type licenses, while they support a multitude of features, there's room for improvement in the single point transform, especially for grouping. It appears that currently, the grouping functionality is not robust, particularly for Docker images within a group. The support for this aspect seems to be contingent on the license type. For instance, with the Voss license type, there is a noticeable absence of support for this feature. This is an area that could benefit from enhancement in the upcoming updates."

"[A] main feature that is missing in Nexus IQ is the ability to explore the history of the different reports that have been generated for a given product. For the time being, in the Nexus IQ UI, we are only able to browse the latest reports that have been generated for a given product. It would be really useful for us to be able to go back in time by browsing through the reports and to have a tool that would give us the evolution of the metrics."

"They should have the ability to support multiple data centers. That is actual scalability and, in effect, high-availability."

"I would like to see them build in some scanning features out-of-the-box, as opposed to only getting them by buying the add-ons of Nexus IQ Server. I would like to see some level of ability to filter in the tool itself, through scanning the binaries in there."

"Lacks an end-to-end solution for developers to sign and store an image."

"I'm waiting for hot publication between several Nexus instances. That's more important for me right now because in our company we have several locations distributed all over the world, and each location is producing its own artifacts, sometimes for the same project. I really would appreciate a scenario where the developers could provide their data to the local repository and it would be hot-replicated to the other repository instances."

"They could improve the user interface and REST APIs."

More Sonatype Nexus Repository cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It is a bit expensive. It could be a little bit lower or have an a la carte option because, in our case, we had to go to the next version of Enterprise X because we needed one feature, which was more than three projects. We don't need all the other capabilities, but we're paying for all those. It's almost twice the cost of the previous version. So, it would be nice to have something along those lines."

"I am not aware of its cost, but it is worth investing in this. My guess is that its price is not much because we generally prefer open-source solutions, and if we are investing, we don't go for expensive ones. Our selection is based on the market demand and needs, and we invest only if something is worth the cost."

"There were costs in addition to the standard licensing fees. The standard is free."

"In my opinion, the pricing is very fair and very customer-oriented. It's much better than any other tool I have used so far."

"It's quite expensive. They are charging around $110 or $120 per user, per year. It's quite expensive in comparison to the other tools available in the market."

"The cost is managed by the client."

"Nexus Repository Manager Pro is quite affordable because it's about €100, per user, per year. Purchasing licenses was not really a big issue for us. Regarding Nexus IQ, it's much more expensive. We purchased 250 licenses and they cost us about €120,000."

"It seems like a fair price, based on other software solutions I've purchased."

"One of the challenges we had around licensing was how to deal with anonymous requests. According to the letter of the contract, an anonymous request consumes a license. We had to do some work to get over the fact that any anonymous interactions with the Repository product had to be put back to an end-user account."

"I use the open-source version of the product, which is free of cost."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

18%

Computer Software Company

16%

Manufacturing Company

Comms Service Provider

Financial Services Firm

20%

Computer Software Company

18%

Government

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

Sonatype Nexus Repository vs JFrog Artifactory: which one is better for Binary Repository and deployment?

We are facing a similar assessment, Nexus is more robust than Artifactory

See all answers

What needs improvement with JFrog Artifactory?

Sometimes the documentation was sort of messy because there are many possibilities for where and how to install Artifactory. So sometimes, I got a little bit lost, and it wasn't very clear which pa...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for JFrog Artifactory?

The main use case was to store the artifacts, store the binaries, basically. And then we used it as a container registry as well. One of my tasks was to get X-ray running. I got the product running...

See all answers

What do you like most about Sonatype Nexus Repository?

Primarily, the extensive support for a wide range of packages is a crucial factor. The effectiveness of new-age package managers is often determined by the breadth of packages they can handle. In t...

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Sonatype Nexus Repository?

I use the open-source version of the product, which is free of cost.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Sonatype Nexus Repository?

See all answers

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Compared 2% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

JFrog Artifactory

June 2025

Download JFrog Artifactory product report

Buyer's Guide

Sonatype Nexus Repository

May 2025

Download Sonatype Nexus Repository product report

Also Known As

No data available

Nexus Repository, Nexus Repository Manager

Overview

JFrog Artifactory is a powerful enterprise product designed for storing and managing different types of binaries, including artifacts, Dockery majors, and builds created as part of the CI process. It offers end-to-end binary management capabilities, integration with different environments and cloud providers, and a centralized repository with multiple repositories for different artifacts.

Artifactory has helped organizations modernize and automate their development operations, reducing the time it takes to develop and release software. It supports hybrid and multi-cloud environments, offers storage and database options flexibility, and integrates with other tools like Jira.

JFrog

Nexus Repository is powered by Repository Manager, the same technology engine found in our OSS version deployed at more than 100,000 organziations world-wide. It is Built on the shoulders of Maven, Repository Manager supports all popular component formats and brings your entire development organization together. It includes staging and release functionality that provides support for operations and quality assurance processes prior to production and gives you instant insight into potential component security, license, and quality issues, enabling teams to take corrective action early and quickly.

Sonatype

Sample Customers

Oracle, Cisco, Cars.com, Riot Games, Google, CA Technologies

Goldman Sachs, Toyota, Disney, Deutsche Bank

Buyer's Guide

JFrog Artifactory vs. Sonatype Nexus Repository

June 2025

Free Report: JFrog Artifactory vs. Sonatype Nexus Repository

Find out what your peers are saying about JFrog Artifactory vs. Sonatype Nexus Repository and other solutions. Updated: June 2025.

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