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Black Duck SCA vs Semgrep 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:
 

ROI

Sentiment score
3.6
Black Duck improved efficiency by identifying vulnerabilities early, saving time, streamlining audits, reducing manual effort, and enhancing code security.
Sentiment score
6.6
Semgrep improves ROI by accelerating development, reducing manual labor, and addressing vulnerabilities early, enhancing efficiency and profitability.
If you're using it on critical external programs where there is regulatory compliance on ensuring that the source code is clean from open-source, there's substantial ROI.
IP Head at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees
This can be translated to being able to do the same amount of work with less technicians.
SecOps Engineer at IriusRisk
Tasks that previously took days are completed in significantly less time.
DevOps Engineer at Exponential Craft
I can say it saves us time related to coding and also saves money, making it a very reliable tool for our organization with great features.
Angular Developer at Flourish Software
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
5.1
Black Duck SCA's support is praised for expertise but criticized for inconsistency and delays, with calls for process improvements.
Sentiment score
6.4
Semgrep's customer service is efficient, with comprehensive documentation and community support reducing the need for direct assistance.
There are some pain points with the response time and first-level support quality.
Director at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees
When I created custom rules, I had some doubts, and the documentation was very helpful, simple, and easy to understand.
Senior Software Engineer 2 at Porch
Their documentation and community are very active, so most of the time when problems occur, I get a solution.
Security Researcher at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Customer support and services for Semgrep are very reliable and good.
Angular Developer at Flourish Software
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
6.6
Black Duck SCA is highly rated for scalability, supporting diverse environments, but its cost may limit smaller companies.
Sentiment score
8.2
Semgrep scales efficiently for both small and large teams, adapting well to diverse environments with cloud-native features.
I would rate the scalability of Black Duck 8 or 9.
IP Head at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees
I was able to control it from 10 repositories or 10 services to thousands of repositories in a couple of minutes very simply.
Cloud & Application Security at Sixt SE
This is an open-source tool, so it absolutely does the job, but if you were to implement a tool such as this in an enterprise, this would probably not be scalable.
DevSecOps Security Engineer at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees
Semgrep makes it easy to integrate and grow within any environment without concern for crashes.
DevOps Engineer at Exponential Craft
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.9
Black Duck SCA is reported as stable and reliable, with occasional delays and standard maintenance requirements noted by users.
Sentiment score
7.8
Semgrep generally operates stably, though AI scanning limitations and integration improvements are needed for large repositories.
If there is no master branch or default branch, the tool fails to identify it and will never scan it unless manually somebody looks into it and fixes the issue.
Cloud & Application Security at Sixt SE
Since I have been using it, I have not experienced any downtime.
Angular Developer at Flourish Software
Semgrep is stable, as far as my experience indicates.
Senior Software Engineer 2 at Porch
 

Room For Improvement

Black Duck SCA needs an intuitive interface, better documentation, faster scans, enhanced integration, and improved cost-effectiveness and support.
Semgrep needs user-friendly enhancements, better documentation, efficient scanning, integration flexibility, AI advancements, and improved notifications and databases.
It can improve on the security side of it, specifically vulnerabilities identification.
IP Head at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees
The documentation is not really on the mark.
Project Lead at ABB
There are areas for improvement such as false positives and the scanning of containers.
Director at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees
The UI and additional dashboarding and other details would definitely make the tool more user-friendly and more of a candidate to be implemented in an enterprise.
DevSecOps Security Engineer at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees
Currently, they are working on identifying business logic vulnerabilities or privilege escalation vulnerabilities by looking at the code, and they should continue to focus on and improve this effort.
Cloud & Application Security at Sixt SE
More advanced dependency analysis features in the SCA part and deeper vulnerability databases would be beneficial.
SecOps Engineer at IriusRisk
 

Setup Cost

Black Duck SCA pricing is flexible but can be costly, with options based on user count or code size.
Once we fully integrated it into our company, it has proven to be price-efficient at around $30 a month.
Senior Software Engineer 2 at Porch
It is basically open-source, so the cost to set up is no cost.
Security Researcher at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
It offers very reasonable pricing and costs.
Angular Developer at Flourish Software
 

Valuable Features

Black Duck SCA offers robust vulnerability scanning, seamless integration, efficient compliance management, and enhances security with dependency mapping.
Semgrep enhances security and efficiency with customizable rules, seamless integration, and user-friendly interfaces for rapid issue detection.
The most valuable feature of Black Duck is the composition analysis feature, which is effective for security risk management.
Director at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees
Black Duck's ability to identify dependencies very accurately has been most valuable in identifying and mitigating risks.
IP Head at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees
If that component has a vulnerability from any of the sources, it should be considered and shown regardless of whether it is vulnerable from different sources.
Project Lead at ABB
When you triage with AI, it gathers context around the finding and reduces the noise about 80 to 90 percent of the time, asking you to focus only on findings that really matter.
Cloud & Application Security at Sixt SE
The Software Composition Analysis is the most valuable feature in Semgrep.
DevSecOps Security Engineer at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees
The best feature of Semgrep is its ability to highlight high priority issues during scanning, making it critical for developers to address these vulnerabilities promptly.
DevOps Engineer at Exponential Craft
 

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
Semgrep
Ranking in Software Composition Analysis (SCA)
9th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
8
Ranking in other categories
Static Application Security Testing (SAST) (13th), Supply Chain Management Software (4th), Static Code Analysis (5th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the Software Composition Analysis (SCA) category, the mindshare of Black Duck SCA is 9.0%, down from 17.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Semgrep is 3.3%, up from 2.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Software Composition Analysis (SCA) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Black Duck SCA9.0%
Semgrep3.3%
Other87.7%
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.
Manjunath Maneppagol - PeerSpot reviewer
Cloud & Application Security at Sixt SE
Context-aware code analysis has reduced noise and now improves developer experience with actionable security findings
I have consistently observed that their scan time is an issue for mono repos. Sometimes with their AI-based scanning, when you triage that scan, the scan never completes or finishes(, which makes it difficult. Another consistent issue is that whenever you have a new repo to onboard to the platform, the tool ideally should detect the master branch by default. However, sometimes the tool fails to identify it and will never scan it unless manually somebody looks into it and fixes the issue. Although their support team is really good, this issue was present six or eight months ago during the POC and is still present now. If it is affecting multiple customers, it should be prioritized and fixed. I would say that their integration aspects could have been improved. I see a lot of different security solutions that provide flexibility to the security teams based on Jira project, team divisions, Slack, and all those can be very much easily customized. Semgrep needs to work on the enhancement of their notification capabilities. Currently, they are working on identifying business logic vulnerabilities or privilege escalation vulnerabilities by looking at the code, and they should continue to focus on and improve this effort. Regarding stability, whenever you have a mono-repo which is a very large repository, the scan never finishes or the scan never kicks in. At that time, you have to reach out to the support team and ask them to expand the resources in the back end to fix it. This is an issue I keep seeing often on that platform.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
16%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Computer Software Company
10%
University
5%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Computer Software Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business6
Large Enterprise17
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise5
 

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 needs improvement with Semgrep?
Semgrep can be improved by making it more user-friendly. There are tools in the market, such as Aqua Security, that have features worth utilizing. However, there are some comprehensive scanning cap...
What is your primary use case for Semgrep?
My main use case is to perform SAST, static application security testing. I have been using it for the last 10 months. Initially, I was planning to use it just for the code review part so that deve...
What advice do you have for others considering Semgrep?
It streamlines with the governance and compliance of the country where the company operates. It follows GDPR guidelines and EU guidelines. In India, I follow certain guidelines, so it also passes t...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

Blackduck Hub, Black Duck Protex, Black Duck Security Checker
Semgrep Code, Semgrep Supply Chain, Semgrep AppSec Platform
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Samsung, Siemens, ScienceLogic, BryterCX, Dynatrace
Policygenius, Tide, Lyft, Thinkific, FloQast, Vanta, and Fareportal
Find out what your peers are saying about Black Duck SCA vs. Semgrep and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
908,834 professionals have used our research since 2012.