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FOSSA vs Snyk comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 7, 2025

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)
8th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.9
Number of Reviews
15
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Snyk
Ranking in Software Composition Analysis (SCA)
1st
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
49
Ranking in other categories
Application Security Tools (8th), Static Application Security Testing (SAST) (8th), Cloud Management (14th), Container Security (6th), Software Development Analytics (2nd), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (16th), DevSecOps (2nd), Application Security Posture Management (ASPM) (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Software Composition Analysis (SCA) category, the mindshare of FOSSA is 3.1%, down from 3.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Snyk is 12.5%, down from 17.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Software Composition Analysis (SCA) Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Snyk12.5%
FOSSA3.1%
Other84.4%
Software Composition Analysis (SCA)
 

Featured Reviews

Hanumanth Ramsetty - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
meetharoon - PeerSpot reviewer
Affordable tool boosts code scanning efficiency but faces integration hurdles
The most important feature of Snyk is its cost-effectiveness compared to other solutions such as Check Point. It is easy to consolidate Snyk across multiple entities within a large organization. Additionally, our integration of Snyk into GitHub allows us to automatically scan codebases and identify issues, which has improved efficiency.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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."
"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."
"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 allows us to keep track of all dependencies to ensure they are up to date and not causing any vulnerabilities."
"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."
"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."
"The most effective feature in securing project dependencies stems from its ability to highlight security vulnerabilities."
"The customization is excellent."
"It has an accurate database of vulnerabilities with a low amount of false positives."
"The product's most valuable features are an open-source platform, remote functionality, and good pricing."
"Snyk helps me pinpoint security errors in my code."
"It has a nice dashboard where I can see all the vulnerabilities and risks that they provided. I can also see the category of any risk, such as medium, high, and low. They provide the input priority-wise. The team can target the highest one first, and then they can go to medium and low ones."
"We use Snyk to check vulnerabilities and rectify potential leaks in GitHub."
"The most valuable features include enriched information around the vulnerabilities for better triaging, in terms of the vulnerability layer origin and vulnerability tree."
 

Cons

"The solution provides contextualized, actionable, intelligence that alerts us to compliance issues, but there is still a little bit of work to be done on it. One of the issues that I have raised with FOSSA is that when it identifies an issue that is an error, why is it in error? What detail can they give to me? They've improved, but that still needs some work. They could provide more information that helps me to identify the dependencies and then figure out where they originated from."
"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."
"While running a FOSSA scan, it takes time for the results to reflect in the FOSSA UI portal."
"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."
"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."
"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 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."
"If you have thousands of applications, organizing them all into teams or tags is challenging."
"It lists projects. So, if you have a number of microservices in an enterprise, then you could have pages of findings. Developers will then spend zero time going through the pages of reports to figure out, "Is there something I need to fix?" While it may make sense to list all the projects and issues in these very long lists for completeness, Snyk could do a better job of bubbling up and grouping items, e.g., a higher level dashboard that draws attention to things that are new, the highest priority things, or things trending in the wrong direction. That would make it a lot easier. They don't quite have that yet in container security."
"The solution could improve the reports. They have been working on improving the reports but more work could be done."
"I would like to give further ability to grouping code repositories, in such a way that you could group them by the teams that own them, then produce alerting to those teams. The way that we are seeing it right now, the alerting only goes to a couple of places. I wish we could configure the code to go to different places."
"Compatibility with other products would be great."
"The general input I have is that there is an opportunity for them to better align with other similar tools and better align with similar capabilities that cloud suppliers deliver natively."
"The way Snyk notifies if we have an issue, there are a few options: High vulnerability or medium vulnerability. The problem with that is high vulnerabilities are too broad, because there are too many. If you enable notifications, you get a lot of notifications, When you get many notifications, they become irrelevant because they're not specific. I would prefer to have control over the notifications and somehow decide if I want to get only exploitable vulnerabilities or get a specific score for a vulnerability. Right now, we receive too many high vulnerabilities. If we enable notifications, then we just get a lot of spam message. Therefore, we would like some type of filtering system to be built-in for the system to be more precise."
"I think Snyk should add more of a vulnerability protection feature in the tool since it is an area where it lacks."
"They were a couple of issues which happened because Snyk lacked some documentation on the integration side. Snyk is lacking a lot of documentation, and I would like to see them improve this. This is where we struggle a bit. For example, if something breaks, we can't figure out how to fix that issue. It may be a very simple thing, but because we don't have the proper documentation around an issue, it takes us a bit longer."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution's pricing is good and reasonable because you can literally use a lot of it for free."
"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."
"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."
"Their licensing model is fairly robust and scalable for our needs. I believe we have reached a reasonable agreement on the licensing to enable hundreds of developers to participate in this product offering. The solution is very tailored towards developers and its licensing model works well for us."
"For what Snyk offers, it has the best cost-benefit I have ever seen because you're buying the license per user."
"The price is good. Snyk had a good price compared to the competition, who had higher pricing than them. Also, their licensing and billing are clear."
"The solution is less expensive than Black Duck."
"Pricing-wise, it is not expensive as compared to other tools. If you have a couple of licenses, you can scan a certain number of projects. It just needs to be attached to them."
"I didn't think the price was that great, but it wasn't that bad, either. I'd rate their pricing as average in the market."
"It's good value. That's the primary thing. It's not cheap-cheap, but it's good value."
"I would rate the pricing of Snyk at two. I'm currently using the free version, which the company offers before buying the full version. So, the price is affordable, especially for an enterprise."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
22%
Computer Software Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Educational Organization
8%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Insurance Company
7%
 

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 Business20
Midsize Enterprise9
Large Enterprise21
 

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 Snyk compare with SonarQube?
Snyk does a great job identifying and reducing vulnerabilities. This solution is fully automated and monitors 24/7 to find any issues reported on the internet. It will store dependencies that you a...
What do you like most about Snyk?
The most effective feature in securing project dependencies stems from its ability to highlight security vulnerabilities.
What needs improvement with Snyk?
There are a lot of false positives that need to be identified and separated. The inclusion of AI to remove false positives would be beneficial. So far, I've not seen any AI features to enhance vuln...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

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Overview

 

Sample Customers

AppDyanmic, Uber, Twitter, Zendesk, Confluent
StartApp, Segment, Skyscanner, DigitalOcean, Comic Relief
Find out what your peers are saying about FOSSA vs. Snyk and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.
868,759 professionals have used our research since 2012.