Black Duck Reviews

Our company uses the solution to check open source software that is embedded in our products. 

The solution is very good at scanning and evaluating open source software. In the past, we had misunderstandings about the open source files in our products. 

The solution checks for open source license compliance. You provide the license for a software such as MIT and the solution scans documents, tabs, and files by date. 

It can be cumbersome to use or invalidate open source software because there is a hold time to check requirements or common regulations and ensure compliance. 

Sometimes the solution produces incorrect or ambiguous results so that needs improvement to ensure there are no misunderstandings. 

I have been using the solution for three years. 

The solution is scalable. We have different departments and it is easy to process change orders or add users. 

The scalability is rated an eight out of ten. 

The technical support is very, very good and their response time is very quick. 

I don't have experience with other solutions. 

The setup and implementation was completed by the supplier. We just waited for them to complete the process and then began using the solution.

The solution is the most popular open software scanning tool. I rate the solution an eight out of ten. 

I am not working with Black Duck. I manage a team that works with Black Duck.

We are happy with this solution.

We have not yet explored all of the functionalities of Black Duck.

Black Duck is pretty extensive in terms of the scan reserves and the vulnerability exposures. From that perspective, I'm happy with it.

We have been having some issues with the latest releases where we are not able to scan our applications with the help of Black Duck. I feel that it is just a matter of time and it should be fine.

We have been working with Black Duck for a little more than one year.

It is a very small group of people who are using this solution in our organization.

My team is the open-source program office and we have three people who are using Black Duck and the other teams would be in the range of fewer than 20 people.

We contacted technical support as we were not able to fix this issue ourselves. We are not the primary contact who has procured the product, they are based out of Paris. We are using the license but we have to go through them to contact Black Duck to get their help.

I am not able to share an opinion on the support because we raised the issue only a few weeks back, and this being the summer vacation period, a lot of people were unavailable. I don't know whether that delay is being caused by our counterparts in Paris or if it is really caused by Black Duck.

We have been using other tools, but our IT division acquired Black Duck and we wanted to use it across the organization.

As far as security is concerned, it has always been a priority in our organization. We had different tools that we were using for security, but when it comes to operational risk and compliance and licensing, we didn't have any specific approach before Black Duck.

We are not the primary team to procure this solution. My counterparts in Paris are the only ones who are aware of the pricing.

We are only using a few of the licenses because they had acquired several licenses, but I'm not involved in the pricing and the contract negotiations.

I would rate Black Duck an eight out of ten.

We use Black Duck mainly for the DevSecOps pipeline. For the microservices-based application, we have to deploy Black Duck into the Kubernetes environment. 

I have worked for multiple clients across the world, such as the US and Europe in the banking, retail, and energy sectors.

The most valuable feature of Black Duck is the seamless integration to scan our Docker binary files, it provides us all open vulnerabilities, and it ensures a reference point from where it finds the vulnerability is up to date. For example, if there is any new vulnerability found, they are immediately available in the Black Duck. There is no delay in finding the vulnerabilities, they are called out in our code immediately.

Black Duck can improve the time it takes for a scan. Most of the time it's not ideal when integrated with the live DevSecOps pipeline. We have to create a separate job to scan the library because it takes a couple of hours to scan all those libraries. The scanning could be faster.

I have been using Black Duck for a few years.

The stability of Black Duck is very good.

Black Duck is scalable.

The technical support from Black Duck is very good.

Black Duck is easy to install. The full implementation took a couple of hours.

I do the implementation of the solution.

We have seen a very high return on investment using Black Duck.

I rate Black Duck a nine out of ten.

It's a well-recognized tool in our industry. We have a lot of requests for the product from clients. 

The solution is very easy to use. 

The stability has been good over the years.

The installation is very easy.

Due to the fact that, with our software developer life cycle, we don't need to scan our source code every day or every week. For that reason, we find the cost is too high. We might only actually use it five to ten times a year, which makes it expensive.

We've used the solution for about three or four years at this point. 

The stability is very good. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable. 

Not everyone uses the solution at our company. Mainly, just developers use it, and we have about 60 people on it. 

Right now, we are considering changing to WhiteSource, however, we still might just keep Black Duck.

The initial setup isn't too difficult. It's a pretty straightforward, simple process. We have only installed it once, and I cannot recall how long the deployment actually took. It was a long time ago.

The cost of the solution is very high. We'd prefer if the product offered a monthly subscription.

We are a customer and an end-user.

We are using Black Duck Hub.

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten. We're mostly quite happy with the capabilities. 

Black Duck is a good, but not an inexpensive tool. If others want stability or a well-respected tool, I would recommend it. 

We use Black Duck Hub to discover commercial and open-source licenses and the licensed software used by a company. Whenever a company enters the M&A process, a preliminary step called due diligence is done. A part of it is the technical discovery that includes finding out what software the company is using and whether the software is linked with any open-source software or commercial product for which you have to pay a license.

Our main use case is to discover the license and find out if there is an obligation for the paid license. We also check the exposure of the software to open-source libraries. Open source is great, and it is a preferred solution for many companies. Around 90% of the software is now open source, but it is also exposed to vulnerabilities. So, through the dependencies that we were discovering, we were also working on the security exposure of the software product. For this purpose, we use Black Duck Hub.

The knowledge base and the management system are the most valuable features of Black Duck Hub. It has a very helpful management environment. They offer an editor where we can check the discovered license, which is retrieved from their knowledge base. They have a huge knowledge base build over the years. It gives you some possibilities, such as this license with possibility A could cause a vulnerability issue or a potential breach. 

It is a cloud-only solution. In many cases, companies like to evaluate the software, but they're very reluctant to give you the software. It would be great if they could offer an on-prem component that could be used to scan the code and then upload the discovery results to the cloud and get all the information from there, but there is no such possibility. You have to upload the code to the Black Duck cloud system. Of course, they have a strong legal department, and they offer some configuration, but it is never enough. You have to give the code, which is a drawback. In modern designs like Snyk or FOSSA, you don't need to give the code.

It requires more native integration with Coverity because they go together technically. You need both Coverity and Black Duck Hub. It would be really helpful for companies working in this space to get a combined offer from the same company. They should provide an option to buy Coverity for an additional fee. Coverity combined with Black Duck Hub will provide a one-step analysis to get everything you need and a unified report. It would be really great to be able to connect Black Duck Hub with Coverity unified reports.

I have been using this solution for two and a half years. I was serving as vice president of engineering and integration in a company in Austin, Texas. I was assigned to acquisitions of companies, more specifically to the technical due diligence that takes place during acquisition. So, we used Black Duck Hub very extensively. We had the biggest ever contract with Synopsys for almost $1 million per year, and we used Black Duck Hub to scan the license for each acquired company. We had a very aggressive acquisition plan of almost one acquisition every 15 days. So, I have accumulated quite a big experience with the Black Duck Hub tool.

It is stable.

From the company side, it's super scalable, but from the client's side, it's not that scalable. The issue with scalability is that if you have reserved 100 megabytes on Black Duck Hub, and eventually, you like to use 200 or 300 megabytes, the pricing policy requires extending your product permanently. This is really painful because you just need instant access to the higher, bigger space, but you don't want to buy it permanently. They should give the possibility to extend instantly by 50% or 80% more for a week or two weeks. This is quite common, and I have seen many cloud providers that let you pay instantly for a limited time, and you have the possibility to use a little bit more.

I have a team of six users who use Black Duck for the discovery, but the results are forwarded to many more things.

In some cases, we have faced delays. We had reported issues, and we got the reply in 15 days or 20 days. Being a big organization, their support is rather slow. They prioritize these issues based on some logic unknown to me. If we have a big problem, we should get priority.

The initial setup is super simple for the user because it is set up on the cloud. You just get an account and upload the code. You don't have to install it. There is no deployment. You just access the service from the cloud.

Black Duck is more suitable if you require a lot of licensing compliance. For smaller organizations, WhiteSource is better because its pricing policies are not really suitable for huge organizations.

I'm also currently testing WhiteSource, Black Duck Hub, FOSSA, Snyk, and a few more solutions. My assignment is to provide an evaluation for a blockchain platform.

I would advise others to be careful with the provisioning of the space that you need. Black Duck has been the key player in the market for many years. It is totally in conjunction with Coverity and forms a suite of security and quality. It is frequently used in M&A or mergers and acquisition cases. It is the top product in the market.

I would rate Black Duck a nine out of ten. 

We're primarily using the solution for compliance. It's part of an audit process.

The solution has some pretty good features on offer.

It helps protect our information. It has good security.

The solution works well on Mac products.

The solution requires us to manually identify codes and other forms of identification, and this takes up a lot of time. The patterns the solution uses for identification need to be constantly reviewed by our team. There's also no time stamps. Everything needs to be reviewed. It takes double the time to identify things. Features just don't come up in the Hub.

We'd like to be able to authenticate through our two companies.

We're not too sure about the extension of the firewall. It never shows up in the Hub.

The Hub doesn't like that we have binary sides, so, once again, we need to check everything, meaning we get double the work.

The scanning aspect of the resolution needs to be improved. Right now, as it is, it's not okay.

It would be ideal if the solution offered features to add one or more components to a file.

We've been using the solution for three years at this point. It's been a while.

The solution is stable. We find it pretty reliable in that sense. It doesn't crash or freeze. It doesn't have bugs or glitches.

That said, if a company is moving from any other tool to the Hub, it's not a good idea to move the Hub itself as there are a few bugs in that scenario.

I can't comment on the scalability. I've never personally tried to scale the solution.

Currently, we have 300-400 people using it in our organization.

The technical support has been fine. They help us a lot and we actually find them to be quite helpful. They will alert us when items become available or when new features are coming. We may not know how long it will take, however, we will know they are on the way.

We didn't previously work with a different solution. Black Duck has been our first technology for these types of tasks. As we are using it for an audit, I basically just learned the tool and started applying it to the process. I don't know how to use any other tool for this purpose.

However, the company is currently migrating from another Hub to Black Duck Hub.

The initial setup is unique. We're actually migrating from our current Hub to Black Duck Hub. It has its own specific challenges.

I'm not sure of what the exact pricing is for the solution. That's not something I handle. My company deals with those aspects of the solution.

We're just a customer. We don't have a business relationship with Black Duck.

I'm not sure how the solution is deployed within our organization (whether it's cloud or on-premises).

We've had to migrate our current Hub to Black Duck Hub, which is not efficient for the identification process. We do projects. Due to our identification process, it's not as accurate as we'd like. 

Overall, I'd rate the solution six out of ten.

I'm a technology leader and an open source compliant and risk expert. I lead two domains, both are open source compliant. We use Black Duck in order to make internal audits on software during development, for license compliance, open source compliance, and open source vulnerability. We have an open source audit team, which has some administration rights on the tool and can make changes to the reports based on feedback from business units. Remaining users have permission via tokens to view reports. We would have around 300 users. Up to 20 users can access the system at any one time. The product is used on a daily basis. 

I like the fact that the product auto analyzes components. In comparison to Protecode where you're given a suggestion and you have to manually choose the correct one, Black Duck analyzes automatically. However, there is a degree of error, possibly around 5%. 

In terms of improvement, there are several areas. The scanner client is limited by the size of software it can handle. If you're scanning software larger than five gigs, it needs to be split and is separated into sub-scans. If you want the status on a certain scan, you can't get it automatically and it can sometimes take a couple of hours. If you want to attach the scan into a CI process and then get an actual result it cannot provide an accurate status.

We are running a Proscan developed in-house and this manipulates the result. It doesn't change the result but it adds some attributes to it. For instance, it gets an alter source and it gives you a link for the domain where you can read more about it. Or if the GUI suggests the conversion, and provides an excel report, you do not really need to go to the GUI, it can be accessed by email after the scan. These attributes and manipulations are done by the API developed in-house for the GUI.

For additional features, I'd like to be able to see SQL on demand, side by side. I'd like to be able to change a room with managed components inside the project, and still have it affect other projects. There is currently no internal database for manual changes which would be a good addition. Also, it would be helpful to include isolation of parts from the doctor image, for instance.

We've been using Black Duck for three years.

Stability is quite good. 

Scalability is quite good, because they manage to support a range of scales, but it's not unlimited. We can scan six in a row with no problem, but there might be some delay. This is the threshold that we set, we don't scan more than six at once. It's a good product for enterprise companies and smaller ones too, although it is quite expensive for a small company. 

There are some very professional support people. No one tool is perfect, but if you're comparing to the rest of the tools on the market, Black Duck comes out on top. They have some really unique features, especially from the perspective of seeing a wide range of open source versions. It's something that is not available in other tools.

I am happy with the support, although I work in Israel and the work week is from Sunday to Thursday - they work Monday to Friday. It means there are only four days in the week when we overlap. If I need something on a Sunday I have to wait. It's challenging. They do have some good training videos.

The complexity of setup depends on the scale. If it's an out-of-the-box scan, it's basically scaled for the port, but once we started to utilize it, we wanted a system that automatically scaled up, so we moved to Upper Shift. It was challenging and required some support from their R&D. Then we applied integration, which required consulting with experts. You can use their documentation and set up your own software, it works smoothly. but depends on the size of the setup.

The product requires someone familiar with the tool. It's not that complicated, but it's not intuitive to find your way through the tool easily. There are two kinds of setup that I am aware of in Black Duck. One is a complete SAS solution where you upload your software to the cloud. Alternatively, you have your on-premise hub, which is attached to the knowledge base. This is a secure solution and can be compared with the knowledge base. The way this hub communicates outside is very important because it needs a stable and wide metro connection.

Deployment was with external support but the integration had some challenges and took some extra days. We had a very professional expert on site, we pay for premium support.

There are some features that cost extra but we don't use them because I'm not sure there's added value. The product is not cheap. There are several methods of payment - by product, by scale, or by code-based size. I suggest those buying Black Duck know their code size in relation to the code size that the system registers. This gives a good estimation of how to negotiate the pricing model. If you're buying extremely high capacity, it costs a lot.

The set up is on-premises but the knowledge base is through the cloud. As mentioned, it's a hybrid solution.

The main difference between Black Duck and other solutions is the way the software identifies the open source. If it's being used out of the box and there's no need for any changes or modification or integration, probably a software based on SHA-1 would be good enough. If the company's customizing its software based on a customer requirements, changes will be needed. Software that works on a single match point probably will miss that. And that's the advantage of Black Duck.

I would rate this product an eight out of 10.

In terms of advantages, Black Duck offers a big database.

From a customer satisfaction point of view, I am not satisfied with the product. I am also not satisfied with the documentation part of the product. If you want to use the tool, you will have to indulge in self-learning. In terms of customer interaction, I read the product three out of ten.

If you provide a feature in a product, either you should provide training to customers or provide clear documentation with an example of how to use it. The aforementioned aspect is not covered by the solution. You get no response from Black Duck's end if you ask for support to help you deal with the features provided by the product, which doesn't work even though the documentation claims that its functionalities work. The tool's team provides a reason that doesn't even closely relate to the problems faced by the user. In general, certain features in the product don't work. The tool's documentation and support are areas of concern where improvements are required.

I have been using Black Duck for four years. I am a customer of the product.

I have experience with FossID and FOSSA. There are good products available in the market, and I would only be able to choose them based on my company's decision. From a user perspective, Black Duck is not viable for an organization since you cannot rely on a tool that offers not-so-good support or documentation. In the near future, I believe that my company should switch over from Black Duck.

My company does not take care of the installation part of the tool, as it is something that is taken care of in the cloud. The cloud option of the product is always available and a positive aspect of the solution.

The price charged by Black Duck is exorbitant. For the features provided by the product, I would not want to pay a high price. There are many other products in the market that offer better features and support services compared to Black Duck at a lower cost.

Even though my company is ready to pay extra charges for additional support from Black Duck, if a feature is given in a product and if it needs to be used by a user, then proper training and good documentation should be made available by the solution. If a certain set of users want to purchase a product, I believe that the solution should not charge them extra to teach them how to use the tool. A product can charge for the customization requested by users so that the tool is able to meet their specific needs. If a product offers a feature and somebody wants to use it even though they don't know how to use it, it is not acceptable for the solution to charge such users for training on how to use the tool's functionalities.

If there are other products with a better database, then my company would prefer to move to such tools.