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FOSSA vs Semgrep comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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)
19th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.9
Number of Reviews
15
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Semgrep
Ranking in Software Composition Analysis (SCA)
5th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
11
Ranking in other categories
Static Application Security Testing (SAST) (4th), Supply Chain Management Software (4th), Static Code Analysis (3rd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2026, in the Software Composition Analysis (SCA) category, the mindshare of FOSSA is 2.2%, down from 3.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Semgrep is 3.4%, up from 3.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Software Composition Analysis (SCA) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Semgrep3.4%
FOSSA2.2%
Other94.4%
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.
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Having it as a resource to very quickly triage incredibly high volumes of open-source coming into the company through agile development programs was invaluable."
"FOSSA is not cheap, but their offering is top-notch."
"It improves productivity, saving a lot of time for our software developers."
"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."
"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."
"FOSSA is well worth the investment; it is an opportunity to scale your operations, especially for a legal team to maintain pace with your technical teams in a cost-efficient way."
"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."
"Overall, it's a great product."
"Since implementing Semgrep, I have noticed significant outcomes, for example, I can resolve vulnerabilities that previously took four days in under a day, saving both time and money, thus enhancing our return on investment."
"Semgrep has positively impacted our organization by improving code quality and helping us eliminate vulnerabilities in our code."
"The most valuable feature is the ability to write our custom rules."
"Semgrep has positively impacted my organization by significantly reducing our security blind spots by catching critical vulnerabilities early in the development life cycle before they reach production."
"The best part of Semgrep is its ease of integration with CI/CD pipelines and how it is a developer-friendly tool."
"Semgrep is really simple to use, it's free, and it's very useful."
"Compared to other competitors in the market, the AI-backed capability is the biggest strength of Semgrep."
"The feature is easy to use, saves a lot of time, and is streamlined in nature."
 

Cons

"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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 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."
"I would like more customized categories because our company is so big."
"There should be more information on how to acquire the system, catering to beginners in application security, to make it more user-friendly."
"Regarding improvements for Semgrep, I have noticed that it occasionally provides false positive results, although it does not happen consistently."
"I give Semgrep a six out of 10 simply because there are other tools that are better than this out there."
"The features could be enhanced with better documentation and more user-friendly interfaces for beginners."
"Semgrep can be improved by making it more user-friendly."
"However, as a tool it is really complex to maintain and to use, and it has a huge price tag."
"I have consistently observed that their scan time is an issue; sometimes with their AI-based scanning, when you triage that scan, the scan never completes or finishes, which makes it difficult."
"Semgrep could be improved by offering more granular configuration options for custom rule tuning and reducing memory overhead during large scale repository scans."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution's pricing is good and reasonable because you can literally use a lot of it for free."
"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."
"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."
"The solution's cost is a five out of ten."
"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."
Information not available
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
20%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Comms Service Provider
7%
University
6%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Outsourcing Company
8%
 

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 Business4
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise7
 

Questions from the Community

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...
What advice do you have for others considering FOSSA?
For those seeking to ensure their application is updated with the latest features, FOSSA can be a beneficial add-on. However, it should not replace your existing primary security solutions such as ...
What needs improvement with Semgrep?
The features could be enhanced with better documentation and more user-friendly interfaces for beginners.Semgrep can be improved by further enhancing its reporting features to provide more detailed...
What is your primary use case for Semgrep?
A quick specific example of how I use Semgrep in my pipelines is a recent scenario where it helped me catch a critical vulnerability before it went into production, significantly improving our proc...
What advice do you have for others considering Semgrep?
I would rate Semgrep an eight out of ten overall. I chose a six or seven out of ten when considering specific aspects because while Semgrep is powerful, there are still areas that need improvement,...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

No data available
Semgrep Code, Semgrep Supply Chain, Semgrep AppSec Platform
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

AppDyanmic, Uber, Twitter, Zendesk, Confluent
Policygenius, Tide, Lyft, Thinkific, FloQast, Vanta, and Fareportal
Find out what your peers are saying about FOSSA vs. Semgrep and other solutions. Updated: September 2026.
920,769 professionals have used our research since 2012.