We performed a comparison between WhiteSource and SonarQube based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: SonarQube comes out on top in this comparison. It is high performing and user-friendly. In addition, it is less expensive than WhiteSource.
"Good static analysis and dynamic analysis."
"In terms of secure development, the SAST scan is very useful because we are able to identify security flaws in the code base itself, for the application."
"My experience with Veracode across the board every time, in all products, the technology, the product, the service, and the salespeople is fabulous."
"It is SaaS hosted. That makes it very convenient to use. There is no initial time needed to set up an application. Scanning is a matter of minutes. You just log in, create an application profile, associate a security configuration, and that's about it. It takes 10 minutes to start. The lack of initial lead time or initial overhead to get going is the primary advantage."
"The reporting being highly accurate is pretty cool. I use another product and I was always looking for answers as to what line, which part of the code, was wrong, and what to do about it. Veracode seems to have a solid database to look things up and a website to look things up."
"The visibility into application status helps reduce risk exposure for our software. Today, any findings provided by the DAST are reviewed by the developers and we have internal processes in place to correct those findings before there can be a release. So it absolutely does prevent us from releasing weak code."
"Their dashboard is really good, overall. In my opinion, it's one of the best in the market, and I say that because we have used other service providers."
"Veracode's technical support is great. They assigned us a TAM and once a week, we have a brief engagement with the TAM to verify that everything's going well. If we have any outstanding issues, they get serviced and addressed."
"Its ease of use and good results are the 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."
"WhiteSource helped reduce our mean time to resolution since the adoption of the product."
"The solution is scalable."
"The license management of WhiteSource was at a good level. As compared to other tools that I have used, its functionality for the licenses for the code libraries was quite good. Its UI was also fine."
"The results and the dashboard they provide are good."
"The solution boasts a broad range of features and covers much of what an ideal SCA tool should."
"We set the solution up and enabled it and we had everything running pretty quickly."
"The product itself has a friendly UI."
"I like that it helps us maintain our work quality and code security."
"The most valuable features are the segregation containment and the suspension of product services."
"One of the most valuable features of SonarQube is its ability to detect code quality during development. There are rules that define various technologies—Java, C#, Python, everything—and these rules declare the coding standards and code quality. With SonarQube, everything is detectable during the time of development and continuous integration, which is an advantage. SonarQube also has a Quality Gate, where the code should reach 85%. Below that, the code cannot be promoted to a further environment, it should be in a development environment only. So the checks are there, and SonarQube will provide that increase. It also provides suggestions on how the code can be fixed and methods of going about this, without allowing hackers to exploit the code. Another valuable feature is that it is tightly integrated with third-party tools. For example, we can see the SonarQube metrics in Bitbucket, the code repository. Once I raise the full request, the developer, team lead, or even the delivery lead can see the code quality metrics of the deliverable so that they can make a decision. SonarQube will also cover all of the top OWASP vulnerabilities, however it doesn't have penetration testing or hacker testing. We use other tools, like Checkmarx, to do penetration testing from the outside."
"The fact that the solution does security scanning is valuable."
"I like that it's easy to navigate not just in terms of code findings but you can actually see them in the context of your source code because it gives you a copy of your code with the items that it found and highlights them. You can see it directly in your code, so you can easily go back and make the corrections in the code. It basically finds the problems for you and tells you where they are."
"I am only interested in the security features in SonarQube. There are plenty of features other features, such as test coverage, code anomalies, and pointer access are handled by the business logic teams. They get the reports and they have to fix them in JIRA or Bugzilla."
"It is a good deal compared to all other tools on the market."
"Veracode has plenty of data. The problem is the information on the dashboards of Veracode, as the user interface is not great. It's not immediately usable. Most of the time, the best way to use it is to just create issues and put them in JIRA... But if I were a startup, and only had products with a good user interface, I wouldn't use Veracode because the UI is very dated."
"If Veracode was more diversified, as far as the number of platforms and the number of applications it could do in our favor, we would be using it even more. But there are a number of platforms it doesn't support. For example, I know they support C+, .NET, and Java, but there are certain platforms they don't support and that was disappointing."
"The solution could improve the Dynamic Analysis Security Testing(DAST)."
"The reports on offer are too verbose."
"Scheduling can be a little difficult. For instance, if you set up recurring scheduled scans and a developer comes in and says, "Hey, I have this critical release that happened outside of our normal release patterns and they want you to scan it," we actually have to change our schedule configuration and that means we lose the recurring scheduling settings we had."
"When it comes to the speed of the pipeline scan, one of the things we have found with Veracode is that it's very fast with Java-based applications but a bit slow with C/C++ based applications. So we have implemented the pipeline scan only for Java-based applications not for the C/C++ applications."
"I think if they could improve the operations around accepted vulnerabilities, we would see improvements in our productivity."
"Sometimes, I get feedback from a developer saying, "They are scanning a Python code, but getting feedback around Java code." While the remediation and guidelines are there, improvement is still required, e.g., you won't get the exact guidelines, but you can get some sort of a high-level insights."
"The turnaround time for upgrading databases for this tool as well as the accuracy could be improved."
"I would like to see the static analysis included with the open-source version."
"WhiteSource only produces a report, which is nice to look at. However, you have to check that report every week, to see if something was found that you don't want. It would be great if the build that's generating a report would fail if it finds a very important vulnerability, for instance."
"It would be good if it can do dynamic code analysis. It is not necessarily in that space, but it can do more because we have too many tools. Their partner relationship support is a little bit confusing. They haven't really streamlined the support process when we buy through a reseller. They should improve their process."
"We have ended our relationship with WhiteSource. We were using an agent that we built in the pipeline so that you can scan the projects during build time. But unfortunately, that agent didn't work at all. We have more than 500 projects, and it doubled or tripled the build time. For other projects, we had the failure of the builds without any known reason. It was not usable at all. We spent maybe one year working on the issues to try to make it work, but it didn't in the end. We should be able to integrate it with ID and Shift Left so that the developers are able to see the scan results without waiting for the build to fail."
"The solution lacks the code snippet part."
"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."
"The initial setup could be simplified."
"We previously experienced issues with security but a segregated security violation has been implemented and the issues we experienced are being fixed."
"The solution could improve the management reports by making them easier to understand for the technical team that needs to review them."
"If you don't have any experience with the configuration or how to configure the files, it can be complicated."
"SonarQube's detail in the security could be improved. It may be helpful to have additional details, with regards to Oracle PL/SQL. For example, it's neither as built nor as thorough as Java. For now, this is the only additional feature I would like to see."
"I would also like SonarQube to be able to write custom scanning rules. More documentation would be helpful as well because some of our guys were struggling with the customization script."
"There are times that we have the database crash. However, this might be an issue with how we have configured it and not a software issue. Apart from this, I do not see any issues with the solution."
"Their dashboarding is very limited. They can improve their dashboards for multiple areas, such as security review, maintainability, etc. They have all this information, so they should publish all this information on the dashboard so that the users can view the summary and then analyze it further. This is something that I would like to see in the next version."
"The scanning part could be improved in SonarQube. We have used Coverity for scanning, and we have the critical issues reported by Coverity. When we used SonarQube for scanning and looked at the results, it seems that some of them have incorrect input. This part can be improved for C and C++ languages."
Application security starts with secure code. Find out more about the benefits of using Veracode to keep your software secure throughout the development lifecycle.
Mend is ranked 8th in Application Security with 11 reviews while SonarQube is ranked 1st in Application Security with 63 reviews. Mend is rated 7.8, while SonarQube is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of Mend writes "Easy to use, great for finding vulnerabilities, and simple to set up". On the other hand, the top reviewer of SonarQube writes "Open-source, stable, and finds the problems for you and tells you where they are". Mend is most compared with Black Duck, Snyk, Sonatype Nexus Lifecycle, Checkmarx and JFrog Xray, whereas SonarQube is most compared with Checkmarx, Coverity, Sonatype Nexus Lifecycle, Snyk and Kiuwan. See our Mend vs. SonarQube report.
See our list of best Application Security vendors.
We monitor all Application Security 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.
