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FOSSA vs Mend.io comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Nov 5, 2024

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

FOSSA
Ranking in Software Composition Analysis (SCA)
10th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.9
Number of Reviews
15
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
33
Ranking in other categories
Application Security Tools (18th), Static Code Analysis (5th), Software Supply Chain Security (4th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2026, in the Software Composition Analysis (SCA) category, the mindshare of FOSSA is 3.0%, down from 3.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Mend.io is 5.4%, down from 7.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Software Composition Analysis (SCA) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Mend.io5.4%
FOSSA3.0%
Other91.6%
Software Composition Analysis (SCA)
 

Featured Reviews

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.
meetharoon - PeerSpot reviewer
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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."
"I am impressed with the tool’s seamless integration and quick results."
"The most valuable feature is definitely the ease and speed of integrating into build pipelines, like a Jenkins pipeline or something along those lines. The ease of a new development team coming on board and integrating FOSSA with a new project, or even an existing project, can be done so quickly that it's invaluable and it's easy to ask the developers to use a tool like this. Those developers greatly value the very quick feedback they get on any licensing or security vulnerability issues."
"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."
"The scalability is excellent."
"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 suggests solutions for dependency mismatches."
"FOSSA is easy to use and set up, provides relatively accurate results, and doesn't require armies of people to get value from its use."
"We can take some measures to improve things, replace a library, or update a library which was too old or showed severe bugs."
"The most valuable features are the reporting, customizing libraries "In-house, White list, license selection", comparing the products/projects, and License & Copyright resolution."
"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."
"With the fix suggestions feature, not only do you get the specific trace back to where the vulnerability is within your code, but you also get fix suggestions."
"The solution is scalable."
"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."
"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."
"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."
 

Cons

"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."
"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."
"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."
"I would like more customized categories because our company is so big. This is doable for them. They are still in the stages of trying to figure this out since we are one of their biggest companies that they support."
"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."
"FOSSA does not show the exact line of code with vulnerabilities, which adds time to the process as we have to locate these manually."
"I would like the FOSSA API to be broader. I would like not to have to interact with the GUI at all, to do the work that I want to do. I would like them to do API-first development, rather than a focus on the GUI."
"We specifically use this solution within our CICD pipelines in Azure DevOps, and we would like to have a gate so that if the score falls below a certain value then we can block the pipeline from running."
"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."
"The UI is not that friendly and you need to learn how to navigate easily."
"AI integration in code security tools like Mend.io is still in its early stages and relatively immature."
"Make the product available in a very stable way for other web browsers."
"Mend supports most of the common package managers, but it doesn't support some that we use. I would appreciate it if they can quickly make these changes to add new package managers when necessary."
"At times, the latency of getting items out of the findings after they're remediated is higher than it should be."
"The solution lacks the code snippet part."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution's cost is a five out of ten."
"The solution's pricing is good and reasonable because you can literally use a lot of it for free."
"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."
"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."
"When comparing the price of WhiteSource to the competition it is priced well. The cost for 50 users is approximately $18,000 annually."
"The solution involves a yearly licensing fee."
"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."
"WhiteSource is much more affordable than Veracode."
"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."
"We always negotiate for the best price possible, and as far as I know, Mend has done an excellent job with their pricing. Our management is happy with the pricing, which has led to renewals."
"The version that we are using, WhiteSource Bolt, is a free integration with Azure DevOps."
"Its pricing model is per developer. It depends on the number of developers in the company. The license is for a minimum of 20 developers. So, even if you are a small startup with less than 10 developers, you have to buy a license for 20 developers on a yearly subscription, which makes it quite expensive for startup customers. I provide consultation to startup accelerators. They're small at the beginning, and only once they grow to 20 developers, they can afford this tool. As a result, WhiteSource is missing this target audience. Their licensing is not flexible."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
20%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Educational Organization
7%
Computer Software Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Energy/Utilities Company
5%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise8
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business10
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise20
 

Questions from the Community

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...
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...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

No data available
WhiteSource, Mend SCA, Mend.io Supply Chain Defender, Mend SAST
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

AppDyanmic, Uber, Twitter, Zendesk, Confluent
Microsoft, Autodesk, NCR, Target, IBM, vodafone, Siemens, GE digital, KPMG, LivePerson, Jack Henry and Associates
Find out what your peers are saying about FOSSA vs. Mend.io and other solutions. Updated: March 2026.
884,873 professionals have used our research since 2012.