We performed a comparison between SonarQube 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, SonarQube and Sonatype Nexus Lifecycle seem to have a similar rating among users regarding ease of deployment, pricing, service and support, and ROI. In terms of features, users of SonarQube felt more scanning features were needed, while users of Sonatype Nexus Lifecycle felt the software needed to be more code-driven.
"Another feature of Veracode is that they provide e-learning, but the e-learning is not basic, rather it is quite advanced... in the e-learning you can check into best practices for developing code and how to prevent improper management of some component of the code that could lead to a vulnerability. The e-learning that Veracode provides is an extremely good tool."
"There are quite a few features that are very reliable, like the newly launched Veracode Pipelines Scan, which is pretty awesome. It supports the synchronous pipeline pretty well. We been using it out of the Jira plugin, and that is fantastic."
"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 Veracode technical support is very good. They are responsive and very knowledgeable."
"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."
"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."
"The centralized view of different testing types helps reduce our risk exposure. The development teams have the freedom to choose their own libraries and languages. What happens is sometimes developers feel like a particular library is okay to use, then they will start using it, developing some functionality around it. However, as per our mandate, for every new repository that gets added and scanned, a report gets published. Based on that report, we decide if we can continue. In the past, we have found, by mistake, some developers have used copyleft licenses, which are a bit risky to use. We immediately replace these with more permissive, open-source licenses, so we are safe in the end."
"The policy reporting for ensuring compliance with industry standards and regulations is pretty comprehensive, especially around PCI. If you do the static analysis, the dynamic analysis, and then a manual penetration test, it aggregates all of these results into one report. And then they create a PCI-specific report around it which helps to illustrate how the application adheres to different standards."
"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."
"This solution has the capability to analyze source code in almost all the languages in the market."
"The code coverage feature is very good."
"Using SonarQube benefits us because we are able to avoid the inclusion of malware in our applications."
"SonarQube is good in terms of code review and to report on basic vulnerabilities in your applications."
"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."
"The product has a friendly UI that is easy to use and understand."
"The quality or the profiles that you can set are most valuable. The remediation of issues that you can do and how the information is offered is also valuable."
"The most important features of the Sonatype Nexus Lifecycle are the vulnerability reports."
"Its engine itself is most valuable in terms of the way it calculates and decides whether a security vulnerability exists or not. That's the most important thing. Its security is also pretty good, and its listing about the severities is also good."
"Vulnerability detection accuracy is good."
"We really like the Nexus Firewall. There are increasing threats from npm, rogue components, and we've been able to leverage protection there. We also really like being able to know which of our apps has known vulnerabilities."
"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."
"The value I get from IQ Server is that I get information on real business risks. Is something compliant, are we using the proper license?"
"Sonatype support is quite responsive. When we needed something, we could reach out and set up a meeting. They provide the best support possible."
"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 static analysis is prone to a lot of false positives. But that's how it is with most static analysis tools... Also, the static analysis can sometimes take a little while. The time that it takes to do a scan should be improved."
"The ideal situation in terms of putting the results in front of the developers would be with Veracode integration into the developer environment (IDE). They do have a plugin, which we've used in the past, but we were not as positive about it."
"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."
"The training lab is not very user-friendly and takes a long time to set up."
"Sometimes the scans are not done quickly, but the solutions that it provides are really good. The quality is high, but the analysis is not done extremely quickly."
"The triage indicator was kind of hard to find. It's a very small arrow and I had no idea it was there."
"We tried to create an automatic scanning process for Veracode and integrate it into our billing process, but it was easier to adopt it to repositories based on GIT. Until now, our source control repository was Azure DevOps Server (Microsoft TFS) to managing our resources. This was not something that they supported. It took us some sessions together before we successfully implemented it."
"There is no automation. You need to put the code there and test. You then pull the results and put them back in the development environment. There is no integration with the development environment. We would like it to be integrated with our development environment, which is basically the CI/CD pipeline or the IDE that we have."
"You may need to purchase add-ons to get the useability you desire."
"SonarQube could be improved with more dynamic testing—basically, now, it's a static code analysis scan. For example, when the developer writes the code and does the corresponding unit test, he can cover functional and non-functional. So the SonarQube could be improved by helping to execute unit tests and test dynamically, using various parameters, and to help detect any vulnerabilities. Currently, it'll just give the test case and say whether it passes or fails—it won't give you any other input or dynamic testing. They could use artificial intelligence to build a feature that would help developers identify and fix issues in the early stages, which would help us deliver the product and reduce costs. Another area with room for improvement is in regard to automating things, since the process currently needs to be done manually."
"I like that it has a better dashboard compared to Clockwork. It's also stable."
"The learning curve can be fairly steep at first, but then, it's not an entry-level type of application. It's not like an introduction to C programming. You should know not just C programming and how to make projects but also how to apply its findings to the bigger picture. I've had users who said that they wish it was easier to understand how to configure, but I don't know if that's doable because what it's doing is a very complicated thing. I don't know if it is possible to make a complicated thing trivially simple."
"A little bit more emphasis on security and a bit more security scanning features would be nice."
"Code security scanning could be improved."
"There are sometimes security breaches in our code, which aren't be caught by SonarQube. In the security area, SonarCube has to improve. It needs to better compete with other products."
"Overall it's good, but it would be good for our JavaScript front-end developers to have that IDE integration for their libraries. Right now, they don't, and I'm told by my Sonatype support rep that I need to submit an idea, from which they will submit a feature request. I was told it was already in the pipeline, so that was one strike against sales."
"One area of improvement, about which I have spoken to the Sonatype architect a while ago, is related to the installation. We still have an installation on Linux machines. The installation should move to EKS or Kubernetes so that we can do rollover updates, and we don't have to take the service down. My primary focus is to have at least triple line availability of my tools, which gives me a very small window to update my tools, including IQ. Not having them on Kubernetes means that every time we are performing an upgrade, there is downtime. It impacts the 0.1% allocated downtime that we are allowed to have, which becomes a challenge. So, if there is Kubernetes installation, it would be much easier. That's one thing that definitely needs to be improved."
"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 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."
"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."
"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."
"Nexus Lifecycle is multiple products. One drawback I've noticed is that there are some differences in the features between the products within Lifecycle. They need to maintain the same structure, but there are some slight differences."
"The user interface needs to be improved. It is slow for us. We use Nexus IQ mostly via APIs. We don't use the interface that much, but when we use it, certain areas are just unresponsive or very slow to load. So, performance-wise, the UI is not fast enough for us, but we don't use it that much anyway."
Application security starts with secure code. Find out more about the benefits of using Veracode to keep your software secure throughout the development lifecycle.
SonarQube is ranked 1st in Application Security Tools with 59 reviews while Sonatype Nexus Lifecycle is ranked 8th in Application Security Tools with 9 reviews. SonarQube is rated 8.0, while Sonatype Nexus Lifecycle is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of SonarQube writes "Open-source, stable, and finds the problems for you and tells you where they are". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Sonatype Nexus Lifecycle writes "Helps us drive down our technical debt due to components with known issues". SonarQube is most compared with Checkmarx, Coverity, Snyk, Micro Focus Fortify on Demand and Mend, whereas Sonatype Nexus Lifecycle is most compared with Snyk, Black Duck, GitLab, Mend and Fortify Application Defender. See our SonarQube vs. Sonatype Nexus Lifecycle report.
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