CAST Highlight vs Mend.io comparison

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CAST Highlight

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Nov 5, 2024

Mend.io and CAST Highlight are software solutions in the open-source component management and vulnerability detection category. Mend.io appears to have the upper hand with its comprehensive approach to dependency scanning and vulnerability tracking, making it appealing for holistic open-source governance. CAST Highlight stands out for organizations prioritizing security without full code transparency, offering unique insights without needing codebase access.

Features: Mend.io offers advanced open-source dependency scanning, Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) detection, and automated integration of vulnerability reports into workflows. It allows users to customize license selections for improved governance. CAST Highlight provides insights into software quality and cloud readiness without direct codebase access, facilitating automated portfolio analysis.

Room for Improvement: Mend.io could enhance notification features, expand language support, and improve integration with diverse environments. Role definitions could also be refined for better user experience. CAST Highlight might benefit from reducing its abstraction level for clearer issue descriptions, and a unified user experience across products would be advantageous.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Mend.io supports flexible deployment options, compatible with both public and private clouds, and receives high praise for responsive and technically adept customer service. CAST Highlight's deployment is predominantly on-premises, with commendable responsiveness, though facing some challenges in support intricacies.

Pricing and ROI: Mend.io is competitively priced, offering plans for varying team sizes with ROI observed in reduced manual effort and enhanced security. CAST Highlight, while perceived as expensive with pricing based on scans and enterprise features, provides unique insights that some users find justify the cost, though pricing adjustments could better align with customer needs.

To learn more, read our detailed CAST Highlight vs. Mend.io Report (Updated: December 2025).

CAST Highlight vs. Mend.io

December 2025

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Helped 881,082 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

CAST Highlight

Ranking in Software Composition Analysis (SCA)

15th

Average Rating

7.8

Reviews Sentiment

7.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mend.io

Ranking in Software Composition Analysis (SCA)

7th

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Application Security Tools (18th), Static Code Analysis (5th), Software Supply Chain Security (2nd)

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Software Composition Analysis (SCA) category, the mindshare of CAST Highlight is 1.1%, up from 0.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Mend.io is 6.2%, down from 8.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Software Composition Analysis (SCA) Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Mend.io	6.2%
CAST Highlight	1.1%
Other	92.7%

Software Composition Analysis (SCA)

Featured Reviews

Jayanti Rode

Technical Associate Manager at Accenture

Identifies migration blockers and boosters while facing challenges with platform-specific roadblocks

The solution provides agnostic blockers for platforms as well as for containerization. Within that containerization, it offers generic blockers. However, my project might require it to provide Windows-specific blockers or Linux-specific blockers, as I often work with only one platform at a time. If I received categorization in containerization blockers, it would save time. Understanding only the OS-specific blockers means I would avoid resolving irrelevant issues, thus saving time. Initially, I receive a response from support, however, if there is involvement from R&D or other teams, it may take longer than expected. The support team is challenging when sharing source code. As this is a static code analysis tool, it sometimes requires source code for R&D. However, CAST clients may be restricted from sharing due to business logic and nondisclosure agreements. This creates a challenge, and I may have to share pseudo code or seek client approval, risking escalation.

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meetharoon

CEO at a computer software company with 10,001+ employees

Centralized security monitoring has reduced false positives and improves dependency governance

The only area for improvement I would say is that the false positives are nearly zero; everything is mostly like 99 to 99.99% or we can say 100% accurate. There were a few areas for improvement just from the last time I saw; I think the user experience had a little problem. We wanted to have certain reports based on our kind of scenario, but the tool did not allow us to create custom reports. We had asked for some facility and some ability for us to create some custom reports. That would be awesome if they allow us to create custom reports the way we wanted. There is one small area which I don't know whether we should call a tool limitation or a wish list; if I use a library and I don't use all the capabilities of the library but only a portion of it and that portion is not vulnerable, but there is a component which is outdated, that is a problem, even though I don't use that component. Mend.io will discover there is a problem in the whole library; that is correct. That's a valid discovery, but in my case, for example, if I don't use that particular portion, then it actually is not making sense for me, but that's not a limitation of Mend.io; I think that's a general problem with any tool in the market because no tool in the market will actually know what portion of the code I'm actually using from that particular library if it is vulnerable or not.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"In cloud migration, I use CAST highlight to identify blockers, which are the negative road patterns, and also the boosters, which are positive code patterns."

"It offers good performance."

"The most valuable features of CAST Highlight are automation and speed."

"CAST Highlight is easy to use and has a good dashboard."

"The most valuable features of the CAST Highlight are the interface and there are three notations that are very simple to understand and communicate with."

"The way it tells you which codebase is more ready for the cloud and which codebase is less ready is very valuable. It works seamlessly with most languages."

"CAST Highlight provides a clear overview of the role portfolio and allows users to assess the overall quality of the environment. Users can see where improvements are needed and follow up on trends of the application."

"The solution provides agnostic blockers for platforms as well as for containerization."

"The most valuable feature is the inventory, where it compiles a list of all of the third-party libraries that we have on our estate."

"The solution boasts a broad range of features and covers much of what an ideal SCA tool should."

"The license management of WhiteSource was at a good level. As compared to other tools that I have used, its functionality for the licenses for the code libraries was quite good. Its UI was also fine."

"The dashboard view and the management view are most valuable."

"I am the organizational deployment administrator for this tool, and I, along with other users in our company, especially the security team, appreciate the solution for several reasons. The UI is excellent, and scanning for security threats fits well into our workflow."

"Mend has reduced our open-source software vulnerabilities and helped us remediate issues quickly. My company's policy is to ensure that vulnerabilities are fixed before it gets to production."

"We find licenses together with WhiteSource which are associated with a certain library, then we get a classification of the license. This is with respect to criticality and vulnerability, so we could take action and improve some things, or replace a third-party library which seems to be too risky for us to use on legal grounds."

"Attribution and license due diligence reports help us with aggregating the necessary data that we, in turn, have to provide to satisfy the various licenses copyright and component usage disclosures in our software."

More Mend.io pros

Cons

"There's a bit of a learning curve at the outset."

"There could be potential improvements or additional features added to CAST Highlight to make it better."

"If I received categorization in containerization blockers, it would save time."

"CAST Highlight could improve to allow us to comment and do a deep analysis by ourselves."

"The ease of configuration and customization could be improved in CAST Highlight."

"Its price should be better. It is a pretty costly tool. They have two products: CAST Highlight and CAST AIP. I would expect CAST Highlight to have the Help dashboard and the Engineering dashboard. These dashboards are currently a part of CAST AIP, and if these are made available in CAST Highlight, customers won't have to use two different products all the time."

"The reports that describe the issues of concern are rather abstract and the issues should be more clearly described to the user."

"I rated the solution an eight out of ten because WhiteSource hasn't built in a couple of features that we would have loved to use and they say they're on their roadmap. I'm hoping that they'll be able to build and deliver in 2022."

"It should support multiple SBOM formats to be able to integrate with old industry standards."

"They're working on a UI refresh. That's probably been one of the pain points for us as it feels like a really old application."

"We have ended our relationship with WhiteSource. We were using an agent that we built in the pipeline so that you can scan the projects during build time. But unfortunately, that agent didn't work at all. We have more than 500 projects, and it doubled or tripled the build time. For other projects, we had the failure of the builds without any known reason. It was not usable at all. We spent maybe one year working on the issues to try to make it work, but it didn't in the end. We should be able to integrate it with ID and Shift Left so that the developers are able to see the scan results without waiting for the build to fail."

"The UI can be slow once in a while, and we're not sure if it's because of the amount of data we have, or it is just a slow product, but it would be nice if it could be improved."

"Needs better ACL and more role definitions. This product could be used by large organisations and it definitely needs a better role/action model."

"It would be nice to have a better way to realize its full potential and translate it within the UI or during onboarding."

"I would like to have an additional compliance pack. Currently, it does not have anything for the CIS framework or the NIST framework. If we directly run a scan, and it is under the CIS framework, we can directly tell the auditor that this product is now CIS compliant."

More Mend.io cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"CAST Highlight is an expensive solution. However, CAST Highlight is less expensive than the CAST AIP, but it remains too expensive and the professional services from CAST are also too expensive. The high price is part of the problem with the CAST solutions."

"Basic support is included with the standard licensing feed but it can be upgraded for an additional cost."

"CAST Highlight is an expensive solution."

"It is a pretty costly tool. A lot of customers are resistant to using it."

"We are paying a lot of money to use WhiteSource. In our company, it is not easy to argue that it is worth the price. "

"Over the last two years, they have tried to add more and more features to their license packages, but the price is a little bit high, comparatively."

"Pricing and licensing are comparable to other tools. When we started, it was less than our existing solution. I can't go into specifics, but it isn't cheap."

"As we were using an SaaS-based service, the solution must be scalable, although my understanding is that this is based on the licensing model one is using."

"When comparing the price of WhiteSource to the competition it is priced well. The cost for 50 users is approximately $18,000 annually."

"Mend is costly but not overly expensive. The license was quite expensive this year, but we managed to negotiate the price down to the same as last year. At the same time, it's a good value. We're getting what we're paying for and still not using all the features. We could probably get more out of the tool and make it more valuable. At the moment, we don't have the capacity to do that."

"It is fairly priced."

"The version that we are using, WhiteSource Bolt, is a free integration with Azure DevOps."

More Mend.io pricing and cost advice

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Software Composition Analysis (SCA) solutions are best for your needs.

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

23%

Computer Software Company

11%

Government

Insurance Company

Financial Services Firm

14%

Computer Software Company

14%

Manufacturing Company

13%

Insurance Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	2
Midsize Enterprise	1
Large Enterprise	4

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	10
Midsize Enterprise	3
Large Enterprise	20

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for CAST Highlight?

The pricing of CAST Highlight was not considered expensive or cheap, and no specific comment was made about the setup cost.

What needs improvement with CAST Highlight?

What is your primary use case for CAST Highlight?

For CAST, I use it in cloud migration roadmap and in open source safety issues. These are my two main use cases.

How does WhiteSource compare with SonarQube?

Red Hat Ceph does well in simplifying storage integration by replacing the need for numerous storage solutions. This solution allows for multiple copies of replicated and coded pools to be kept, ea...

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 is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Mend.io?

Mend.io SCA offers a competitive pricing structure that is relatively affordable compared to similar solutions in the market. This makes it an attractive option for organizations looking to enhance...

SonarQube vs CAST Highlight

Comparisons

Compared 28% of the time

Black Duck SCA vs CAST Highlight

Compared 12% of the time

Checkmarx One vs CAST Highlight

Compared 11% of the time

Veracode vs CAST Highlight

Compared 9% of the time

Checkmarx Software Composition Analysis vs CAST Highlight

Compared 5% of the time

More CAST Highlight Competitors

SonarQube vs Mend.io

Compared 16% of the time

Black Duck SCA vs Mend.io

Compared 8% of the time

JFrog Xray vs Mend.io

Compared 7% of the time

GitHub Dependabot vs Mend.io

Compared 6% of the time

Snyk vs Mend.io

Compared 6% of the time

More Mend.io Competitors

Product Reports

Download CAST Highlight product report

CAST Highlight

January 2026

Download Mend.io product report

January 2026

Also Known As

No data available

WhiteSource, Mend SCA, Mend.io Supply Chain Defender, Mend SAST

Overview

CAST Highlight is a SaaS software intelligence product for performing rapid application portfolio analysis. It automatically analyzes source code of hundreds of applications in a week for Cloud Readiness, Software Composition Analysis (Open Source risks), Resiliency, and Technical Debt. Objective software insights from automated source code analysis combined with built-in qualitative surveys for business context enable more informed decision-making about application portfolios.

CAST is the software intelligence category leader. CAST technology can see inside custom applications with MRI-like precision, automatically generating intelligence about their inner workings - composition, architecture, transaction flows, cloud readiness, structural flaws, legal and security risks. It’s becoming essential for faster modernization for cloud, raising the speed and efficiency of Software Engineering, better open source risk control, and accurate technical due diligence. CAST operates globally with offices in North America, Europe, India, China. Visit www.castsoftware.com.

CAST

Mend.io is a software composition analysis tool that secures what developers create. The solution provides an automated reduction of the software attack surface, reduces developer burdens, and accelerates app delivery. Mend.io provides open-source analysis with its in-house and other multiple sources of software vulnerabilities. In addition, the solution offers license and policy violation alerts, has great pipeline integration, and, since it is a SaaS (software as a service), it doesn’t require you to physically maintain servers or data centers for any implementation. Not only does Mend.io reduce enterprise application security risk, it also helps developers meet deadlines faster.

Mend.io Features

Mend.io has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:

Vulnerability analysis
Automated remediation
Seamless integration
Business prioritization
Limitless scalability
Intuitive interface
Language support
Integration
Continuous monitoring
Remediation suggestions
Customization

Mend.io Benefits

There are many benefits to implementing Mend.io. Some of the biggest advantages the solution offers include:

Easy to use: The Mend.io platform is very user-friendly and easy to set up.

Third-party libraries: The solution eases the process of keeping track of all the used third-party dependencies within a product. It not only scans for the pure occurrence (also transitively) but also takes care of licenses and vulnerabilities.

Static code analysis: With Mend.io’s static code analysis, you can quickly identify security weaknesses in custom code across desktop, web, and mobile applications.

Broad support: Mend.io provides 27 different programming languages and various programming frameworks.

Easy integration: Mend.io makes integration very easy with existing DevOps environments and CI/CD pipelines so developers don’t need to manually configure or trigger the scan.

Ultra-fast scanning engine: The solution’s scanning engine generates results up to ten times faster than legacy SAST solutions.

Unified developer experience: Mend.io has a unified developer experience inside the code repository that shows side-by-side security alerts and remediation suggestions for custom code and open-source code.

Reviews from Real Users

Below are some reviews and helpful feedback written by PeerSpot users currently using the Mend.io solution.

Jeffrey H., System Manager of Cloud Engineering at Common Spirit, says, “Finding vulnerabilities is pretty easy. Mend.io (formerly WhiteSource) does a great job of that and we had quite a few when we first put this in place. Mend.io does a very good job of finding the open-source, checking the versions, and making sure they're secure. They notify us of critical high, medium, and low impacts, and if anything is wrong. We find the product very easy to use and we use it as a core part of our strategy for scanning product code moving toward release.”

PeerSpot reviewer Ben D., Head of Software Engineering at a legal firm, mentions, “The way WhiteSource scans the code is great. It’s easy to identify and remediate open source vulnerabilities using this solution. WhiteSource helped reduce our mean time to resolution since we adopted the product. In terms of integration, it's pretty easy.”

An IT Service Manager at a wholesaler/distributor comments, “Mend.io provides threat detection and an excellent UI in a highly stable solution, with outstanding technical support.”

Another reviewer, Kevin D., Intramural OfficialIntramural at Northeastern University, states, "The vulnerability analysis is the best aspect of the solution."

Sample Customers

Wells Fargo, Bank of NY Mellon, Northern Trust, Microsoft, Amazon, IBM, BMW, AT&T, US Army, US Air Force, US Navy, John Hancock, Marsh & McLennan, Ernst & Young, PwC, Volkswagen, Boston Consulting Group, London Stock Exchange, Telefonica, Saur France, Total Energies France, SNCF

Microsoft, Autodesk, NCR, Target, IBM, vodafone, Siemens, GE digital, KPMG, LivePerson, Jack Henry and Associates