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Black Duck SCA vs FOSSA comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 22, 2026

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

Black Duck SCA
Ranking in Software Composition Analysis (SCA)
3rd
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.2
Number of Reviews
23
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
FOSSA
Ranking in Software Composition Analysis (SCA)
9th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.9
Number of Reviews
15
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2026, in the Software Composition Analysis (SCA) category, the mindshare of Black Duck SCA is 9.2%, down from 18.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of FOSSA is 2.4%, down from 3.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Software Composition Analysis (SCA) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Black Duck SCA9.2%
FOSSA2.4%
Other88.4%
Software Composition Analysis (SCA)
 

Featured Reviews

SS
Project Lead at ABB
Compliance checks have improved while vulnerability coverage and SBOM accuracy still need work
I think Black Duck SCA needs to improve on the overall approach. I assume that the people who developed Black Duck SCA believe that users will use this tool for some time in a full-fledged way with all those features. However, the way it really works with product development or in a software development life cycle is that this is just one of the steps for checking whether something is license compliant, whether it has vulnerabilities, or whether the SBOM is generated. It is just one of those steps in the software development process. The expectation from the tool's perspective is that users have to go into the Black Duck SCA portal, look at each of those items, and if something is not correct, try to find it out and update or configure the right CPEs or PURLs or those kinds of things. In reality, most users would not have time for this because they would have done this as part of the build and would generate an SBOM as part of the build. The tool should be quite usable. If a feature works properly and correctly, then nobody will go back and try to spend time on that. For example, if I generate an SBOM and that SBOM has a particular CPE and there are multiple sources, the tool should produce those CPEs with vulnerabilities, put them into the SBOM, and allow me to move forward. If there are more bugs or more configuration requirements, the usage will come down. It is like a mobile application: if there is too much data that needs to be looked at, configured, and used, then the number of users would come down. The tool should be fast, usable, and accurate. Users should just be able to use it without needing to learn too much. The learning curve should be less when using a tool, and the usage should be easy with basic understanding. They should not need to go through complex processes and can assume that whatever data is given is correct. That is where the whole problem with Black Duck SCA lies. The documentation is not really on the mark. For example, if there is a functionality, such as wanting to see a CPE, the documentation should show how to get this via API or see it and how to configure that with examples. Most of the time the tool says it is all in the community, which is not ideal. The community is different from a conceptual view. The community is for bugs and issues that users want to report. However, people who are looking at the tool fresh and need to see functionality such as scan configuration need clear documentation. If I want to see the scan configurations and how to do it, there are videos, but there should be clear documentation with examples, such as how to configure for Docker using specific commands and methods. This example could be clear documentation and should not be redirected to the community every time. If there is a problem or those kinds of issues, they should go to the community and solutions will be found. However, for basic documentation on features being provided, I do not see that kind of clear documentation with clear examples.
reviewer2588340 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Software Engineer at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees
Dependency management enhanced with update suggestions but lacks precise vulnerability tracking
FOSSA does not show the exact line of code with vulnerabilities, which adds time to the process as we have to locate these manually. Some other tools like Check Point or SonarQube provide exact line numbers for bugs. Also, the process in FOSSA can be quite contradicting and not very straightforward for new users.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The technical support has been fine, they help us a lot and we actually find them to be quite helpful."
"The cloud option of the product is always available and a positive aspect of the solution."
"The software composition analysis is most effective for security risk management."
"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."
"It is able to drill down to the source level."
"The most valuable feature of Black Duck is the composition analysis feature, which is effective for security risk management."
"Policy management is a valuable feature."
"The solution is stable."
"Overall, it's a great product."
"It reduced the duration and the effort required to identify open-source licensing issues."
"FOSSA allows us to keep track of all dependencies to ensure they are up to date and not causing any vulnerabilities."
"FOSSA is not cheap, but their offering is top-notch."
"The support team has just been amazing, and it helps us to have a great support team from FOSSA. They are there to triage and answer all our questions which come up by using their product."
"Policies and identification of open-source licensing issues are the most valuable features. It reduces the time needed to identify open-source software licensing issues."
"Prior to a Puppet Enterprise release, it would take approximately two to three weeks of dedicated engineering time by a single release engineer to go through license compliance, and we just did a release in late July or early August, and with FOSSA our license compliance review took five to ten minutes."
"I found FOSSA's out-of-the-box policy engine to be accurate and that it was tuned appropriately to the settings that we were looking for. The policy engine is pretty straightforward... I find it to be very straightforward to make small modifications to, but it's very rare that we have to make modifications to it. It's easy to use. It's a four-category system that handles most cases pretty well."
 

Cons

"They are giving a lot of APIs and Python scripts for certain functionalities, but instead of using APIs and Python scripts, they should provide these functionalities through the UI. Users should be able to customize and add more fields through the UI. Users should be able to add more fields and generate reports. Currently, they are not giving flexibility in the UI. They're providing a script that simply generates an Excel file or CSV file. There is no flexibility."
"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."
"The tool's documentation and support are areas of concern where improvements are required."
"Right now, as it is, it's not okay."
"The tool needs to improve its pricing. Its configuration is complex and can be improved."
"The SBOMs that are being generated from Black Duck SCA are not sometimes fully complete, and the vulnerabilities that are being verified after generating this SBOM seem to be incorrect or missing."
"The solution's pricing model and documentation areas of concern where improvement is needed."
"I would like to see improvements in Black Duck's reporting capabilities."
"The technical support has room for improvement."
"I want the product to include binary scanning which is missing at the moment. Binary scanning includes code and component matching through dependency management. It also includes the actual scanning and reverse engineering of the boundaries and finding out what is inside."
"The reports don't really work that well for us. They do provide good information but they perform poorly with either the number of projects, or components, in the system."
"Security scanning is an area for improvement. At this point, our experience is that we're only scanning for license information in components, and we're not scanning for security vulnerability information. We don't have access to that data. We use other tools for that. It would be an improvement for us to use one tool instead of two, so that we just have to go through one process instead of two."
"The solution provides contextualized, actionable, intelligence that alerts us to compliance issues, but there is still a little bit of work to be done on it. One of the issues that I have raised with FOSSA is that when it identifies an issue that is an error, why is it in error? What detail can they give to me? They've improved, but that still needs some work. They could provide more information that helps me to identify the dependencies and then figure out where they originated from."
"I wish there was a way that you could have a more global rollout of it, instead of having to do it in each repository individually. It's possible, that's something that is offered now, or maybe if you were using the CI Jenkins, you'd be able to do that. But with Travis, there wasn't an easy way to do that. At least not that I could find. That was probably the biggest issue."
"We have seen some inaccuracies or incompleteness with the distribution acknowledgments for an application, so there's certainly some room for improvement there. Another big feature that's missing that should be introduced is snippet matching, meaning, not just matching an entire component, but matching a snippet of code that had been for another project and put in different files that one of our developers may have created."
"If you have thousands of applications, organizing them all into teams or tags is challenging."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It is expensive."
"The price charged by Black Duck is exorbitant."
"Depending on the use case, the cost could range from $10,000 USD to $70,000 USD."
"The price is quite high because the behavior of the software during the scan is similar to competing products."
"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."
"The pricing is a little high."
"I rate the product's price one on a scale of one to ten, where one is a high price, and ten is a low price."
"The price is low. It's not an expensive solution."
"Its price is reasonable as compared to the market. It is competitively priced in comparison to other similar solutions on the market. It is also quite affordable in terms of the value that it delivers as compared to its alternative of hiring a team."
"FOSSA is a fairly priced product. It is not either cheaper or expensive. The pricing lies somewhere in the middle. The solution is worth the money that we are spending to use it."
"FOSSA is not cheap, but their offering is top-notch. It is very much a "you get what you pay for" scenario. Regardless of the price, I highly recommend FOSSA."
"The solution's pricing is good and reasonable because you can literally use a lot of it for free."
"The solution's cost is a five out of ten."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
16%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Computer Software Company
11%
University
5%
Manufacturing Company
19%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Educational Organization
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business6
Large Enterprise17
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise8
 

Questions from the Community

How does WhiteSource compare with Black Duck?
We researched Black Duck but ultimately chose WhiteSource when looking for an application security tool. WhiteSource is a software solution that enables agile open source security and license compl...
What needs improvement with Black Duck?
I think Black Duck SCA needs to improve on the overall approach. I assume that the people who developed Black Duck SCA believe that users will use this tool for some time in a full-fledged way with...
What is your primary use case for Black Duck?
The primary use cases are compliance and scanning in terms of license compliance and trying to identify snippets, particularly if there are any snippets being identified that are coming from open s...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for FOSSA?
The solution's pricing is good and reasonable because you can literally use a lot of it for free. You have to pay for the features you need, which I think is fair. If you want to get value for free...
What needs improvement with FOSSA?
FOSSA does not show the exact line of code with vulnerabilities, which adds time to the process as we have to locate these manually. Some other tools like Check Point or SonarQube provide exact lin...
What is your primary use case for FOSSA?
I have worked with FOSSA primarily to manage the dependencies in our projects. For example, if I take a Spring Boot application, FOSSA helps in identifying mismatches or unsupported dependencies th...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

Blackduck Hub, Black Duck Protex, Black Duck Security Checker
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Samsung, Siemens, ScienceLogic, BryterCX, Dynatrace
AppDyanmic, Uber, Twitter, Zendesk, Confluent
Find out what your peers are saying about Black Duck SCA vs. FOSSA and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
900,838 professionals have used our research since 2012.