Black Duck vs FOSSA comparison

Black Duck and FOSSA are both solutions in the Software Composition Analysis (SCA) category. Black Duck is ranked #1 with an average rating of 7.5, while FOSSA is ranked #9 with an average rating of 8.0. Black Duck holds a 19.7% mindshare in SCA, compared to FOSSA’s 3.4% mindshare. Additionally, 84% of Black Duck users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 92% of FOSSA users who would recommend it.

Black Duck

Read 21 Black Duck reviews

11,362 Views
7,170 Comparison Views

84% willing to recommend

FOSSA

Read 15 FOSSA reviews

1,966 Views
1,288 Comparison Views

92% willing to recommend

Black Duck

FOSSA

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Nov 5, 2024

Black Duck and FOSSA compete in the open-source management space, with Black Duck excelling in integration capabilities and FOSSA known for comprehensive vulnerability analyses.

Features: Black Duck provides robust security, focusing on license compliance, vulnerability detection, and powerful integration options across diverse development tools. FOSSA offers real-time monitoring, automated compliance capabilities, and detailed analytics, making it suitable for continuous integration environments.

Room for Improvement: Black Duck could enhance its user interface and streamline some advanced features to improve user accessibility. It may also benefit from boosting performance speed for large-scale scans. FOSSA can improve by reducing the complexity of its policy engine, offering more in-depth proprietary code analysis, and expanding its support for more niche developer tools.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Black Duck provides a streamlined deployment process with extensive support, ideal for complex infrastructures, though it may require a more significant setup effort. FOSSA's cloud-first approach simplifies initial deployment, and its customer support is responsive, although its model may not suit highly customized on-premise environments as effectively.

Pricing and ROI: Black Duck involves higher initial costs but offers long-term value through its comprehensive features. FOSSA presents a competitive pricing strategy with a strong ROI for companies focused on automated compliance solutions, with less need for customization, making it a cost-effective option.

To learn more, read our detailed Black Duck vs. FOSSA Report (Updated: March 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Black Duck vs. FOSSA

March 2025

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Helped 845,564 peers since 2012

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

Ranking in Software Composition Analysis (SCA)

1st

Average Rating

7.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.2

Number of Reviews

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

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Software Composition Analysis (SCA) category, the mindshare of Black Duck is 19.7%, down from 22.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of FOSSA is 3.4%, down from 4.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Software Composition Analysis (SCA)

Featured Reviews

Saravanan_Radhakrishnan

Senior Manager at Happiest Minds Technologies

Enables applications to be secure, but it must provide more open APIs

The product enables other applications to be secure. We use it to onboard 400 to 500 applications into the DevOps platform, protect them, and have a secure environment. The tool integrates well with different technologies, application stacks, and databases. The APIs are available. We can read the blogs in the community for open-source compliance and security. The community feeds are important. Black Duck is a leader in Gartner. It is a reliable solution.

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Hanumanth Ramsetty

Software Engineer at Tech Mahindra Limited

Proactively mitigate deployment vulnerabilities with seamless dependency tracking

Before using FOSSA, we could only identify issues after deployment in the Cloud Run. Now, with FOSSA, we identify dependency issues or vulnerabilities during the CI phase itself. This proactive approach has eliminated the need to search the internet for solutions, as FOSSA provides updated recommendations automatically. This has made the process more efficient and mitigated risks before deployment.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The most valuable feature of Black Duck is the composition analysis feature, which is effective for security risk management."

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

"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."

"The cloud option of the product is always available and a positive aspect of the solution."

"We accidentally use third-party library APIs, which may not be secure. Our technical team may not have the end time or expertise to figure it out. Black Duck helps us with that and saves us time."

"The product enables other applications to be secure."

"It is able to drill down to the source level."

More Black Duck pros

"What I really need from FOSSA, and it does a really good job of this, is to flag me when there are particular open source licenses that cause me or our legal department concern. It points out where a particular issue is, where it comes from, and the chain that brought it in, which is the most important part to me."

"Their CLI tool is very efficient. It does not send your source code over to their servers. It just does fingerprinting. It is also very easy to integrate into software development practices."

"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."

"FOSSA allows us to keep track of all dependencies to ensure they are up to date and not causing any vulnerabilities."

"One of the things that I really like about FOSSA is that it allows you to go very granular. For example, if there's a package that's been flagged because it's subject to a license that may be conflicts with or raises a concern with one of the policies that I've set, then FOSSA enables you to go really granular into that package to see which aspects of the package are subject to which licenses. We can ultimately determine with our engineering teams if we really need this part of the package or not. If it's raising this flag, we can make really actionable decisions at a very micro level to enable the build to keep pushing forward."

"FOSSA provided us with contextualized, easily actionable intelligence that alerted us to compliance issues. I could tell FOSSA exactly what I cared about and they would tell me when something was out of policy. I don't want to hear from the compliance tool unless I have an issue that I need to deal with. That was what was great about FOSSA is that it was basically "Here's my policy and only send me an alert if there's something without a policy." I thought that it was really good at doing that."

"The scalability is excellent."

"The most valuable feature is its ability to identify all of the components in a build, and then surface the licenses that are associated with it, allowing us to make a decision as to whether or not we allow a team to use the components. That eliminates the risk that comes with running consumer software that contains open source components."

More FOSSA pros

Cons

"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."

"The product's pricing is higher compared to other competitor products."

"It needs to be more user-friendly for developers and in general, to ensure compliance."

"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 have been having some issues with the latest releases where we are not able to scan our applications with the help of Black Duck."

"There are areas for improvement such as false positives and the scanning of containers."

"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."

"Black Duck does not have the SBOM management part. I would like to see this feature added in the future."

More Black Duck cons

"The technical support has room for improvement."

"On the legal and policy sides, there is some room for improvement. I know that our legal team has raised complaints about having to approve the same dependency multiple times, as opposed to having them it across the entire organization."

"One thing that can sometimes be difficult with FOSSA is understanding all that it can do. One of the ways that I've been able to unlock some of those more advanced features is through conversations with the absolutely awesome customer success team at FOSSA, but it has been a little bit difficult to find some of that information separately on my own through FAQs and other information channels that FOSSA has. The improvement is less about the product itself and more about empowering FOSSA customers to know and understand how to unlock its full potential."

"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."

"For open-source management, FOSSA's out-of-the-box policy engine is easy to use, but the list of licenses is not as complete as we would like it to be. They should add more open-source licenses to the selection."

"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."

"If you have thousands of applications, organizing them all into teams or tags is challenging."

"On the dashboard, there should be an option to increase the column width so that we can see the complete name of the GitHub repository. Currently, on the dashboard, we see the list of projects, but to see the complete name, you have to hover your mouse over an item, which is annoying."

More FOSSA cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price is low. It's not an expensive solution."

"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."

"It is expensive."

"The pricing is a little high."

"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 price charged by Black Duck is exorbitant."

"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."

"The solution's cost is a five out of ten."

"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 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."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

20%

Manufacturing Company

17%

Computer Software Company

14%

Healthcare Company

Manufacturing Company

29%

Computer Software Company

15%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Educational Organization

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

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...

See all answers

What do you like most about Black Duck?

The cloud option of the product is always available and a positive aspect of the solution.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Black Duck?

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...

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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...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

Comparisons

Fortify Static Code Analyzer vs Black Duck

Compared 20% of the time

Snyk vs Black Duck

Compared 16% of the time

JFrog Xray vs Black Duck

Compared 15% of the time

Mend.io vs Black Duck

Compared 9% of the time

Veracode vs Black Duck

Compared 6% of the time

More Black Duck Competitors

Snyk vs FOSSA

Compared 18% of the time

Mend.io vs FOSSA

Compared 11% of the time

JFrog Xray vs FOSSA

Compared 8% of the time

GitLab vs FOSSA

Compared 5% of the time

Sonatype Lifecycle vs FOSSA

Compared 5% of the time

More FOSSA Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Black Duck

April 2025

Download Black Duck product report

Buyer's Guide

FOSSA

April 2025

Download FOSSA product report

Also Known As

Blackduck Hub, Black Duck Protex, Black Duck Security Checker

No data available

Overview

Organizations use Black Duck for compliance, internal audits, license management, and security, scanning software to identify vulnerabilities, non-compliant code, and dependencies in open-source projects.

Black Duck integrates into CI/CD pipelines and DevSecOps processes, helping multiple industries detect and handle risks associated with open-source usage. Users leverage it for source and binary analysis to ensure security and compliance before software release. Automatic component analysis, effective vulnerability scanning, and a comprehensive knowledge base are some of its valuable features. Despite needing improvements in scanning speed, UI, and documentation, Black Duck remains crucial for ensuring open-source security and compliance.

What are Black Duck's most important features?

Automatic Component Analysis: Provides automatic identification and analysis of open-source components.
Effective Vulnerability Scanning: Scans for vulnerabilities in both source code and binary files.
Comprehensive Knowledge Base: Offers expansive information on open-source components.
Policy Management: Enables the creation and enforcement of security and compliance policies.
Binary File Scanning: Capable of scanning binary files for in-depth security checks.
Ease of Use: Demonstrates ease of use, particularly on Mac products.
Stability: Known for its stable performance.
Docker Integration: Smooth integration with Docker for enhanced deployment.
Open-source Evaluation: Excellent evaluation capabilities for open-source software.
License Management: Manages open-source licenses effectively.
Easy Installation: Simple installation process.
Secure Onboarding: Ensures secure application onboarding.
API Availability: Provides APIs for custom integrations.
Community Support: Backed by an active community.
Dependency Tree Visualization: Visualizes dependencies for better management.

What benefits or ROI should users look for in reviews?

Improved Compliance: Helps maintain compliance with legal and regulatory requirements.
Risk Mitigation: Reduces risks associated with open-source vulnerabilities.
Enhanced Security: Strengthens software security by identifying and addressing potential issues early.
Time-saving: Automates many aspects of vulnerability scanning and analysis, saving valuable time.
Cost Efficiency: Detects issues early, potentially saving costs related to compliance breaches and security incidents.
Integration Ease: Seamlessly integrates with existing CI/CD pipelines and DevSecOps practices.
Knowledge Resource: Access to comprehensive information aiding better decision-making.

Black Duck is implemented by industries ranging from finance to healthcare, addressing security and compliance in open-source usage. Financial institutions employ it to manage license risks and ensure audit readiness. Healthcare organizations use it to comply with stringent data protection regulations, ensuring patient data security and privacy. Tech companies integrate Black Duck within CI/CD pipelines to maintain the security and compliance of software products before release. Its deployment varies, tailored to meet the specific risk management and compliance needs dictated by each sector's regulatory environment.

Black Duck

Up to 90% of any piece of software is from open source, creating countless dependencies and areas of risk to manage. FOSSA is the most reliable automated policy engine for legal teams to maintain license compliance, security to fix vulnerabilities, and engineering to improve code quality across the entire software supply chain. As the only developer-native open source management platform, FOSSA fully integrates with your existing CI/CD pipeline to provide complete visibility and context earlier in the software development lifecycle. For the first time, teams can collaboratively shift left and audit, analyze, control, and remediate license issues and vulnerabilities right in their existing workflows.

FOSSA

Sample Customers

Samsung, Siemens, ScienceLogic, BryterCX, Dynatrace

AppDyanmic, Uber, Twitter, Zendesk, Confluent

Buyer's Guide

Black Duck vs. FOSSA

March 2025

Free Report: Black Duck vs. FOSSA

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