We performed a comparison between Black Duck and Snyk based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Snyk is the clear winner in this comparison. It is easy to deploy, secure, and powerful. In addition, it has excellent customer support and an impressive ROI.
"I like the fact that the product auto analyzes components."
"The solution is stable."
"The product enables other applications to be secure."
"Policy management is a valuable feature."
"The stability is okay."
"The cloud option of the product is always available and a positive aspect of the solution."
"The installation is very easy."
"The most valuable feature for me in Black Duck is its ability to scan binary files effectively."
"It is a stable solution. Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."
"We're loving some of the Kubernetes integration as well. That's really quite cool. It's still in the early days of our use of it, but it looks really exciting. In the Kubernetes world, it's very good at reporting on the areas around the configuration of your platform, rather than the things that you've pulled in. There's some good advice there that allows you to prioritize whether something is important or just worrying. That's very helpful."
"Snyk is a developer-friendly product."
"I think all the standard features are quite useful when it comes to software component scanning, but I also like the new features they're coming out with, such as container scanning, secrets scanning, and static analysis with SAST."
"The most valuable feature is that they add a lot of their own information to the vulnerabilities. They describe vulnerabilities and suggest their own mitigations or version upgrades. The information was the winning factor when we compared Snyk to others. This is what gave it more impact."
"I am impressed with the product's security vulnerability detection. My peers in security are praising the tool for its accuracy to detect security vulnerabilities. The product is very easy to onboard. It doesn't require a lot of preparation or prerequisites. It's a bit of a plug-and-play as long as you're using a package manager or for example, you are using a GitHub repository. And that is an advantage for this tool because developers don't want to add more tools to what they're currently using."
"Our overall security has improved. We are running fewer severities and vulnerabilities in our packages. We fixed a lot of the vulnerabilities that we didn't know were there."
"I find SCA to be valuable. It can read your libraries, your license and bring the best way to resolve your problem in the best scenario."
"It needs to be more user-friendly for developers and in general, to ensure compliance."
"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."
"It's still a bit inconsistent. For example, if I scan today, it might not show the same results tomorrow."
"The tool needs to improve its pricing. Its configuration is complex and can be improved."
"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."
"I would like to see more integration with other solutions, such as IntelliJ IDEA."
"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."
"We're not too sure about the extension of the firewall. It never shows up in the Hub."
"For the areas that they're new in, it's very early stages for them. For example, their expertise is in looking at third-party components and packages, which is their bread-and-butter and what they've been doing for ages, but for newer features such as static analysis I don't think they've got compatibility for all the languages and frameworks yet."
"Scalability has some issues because we have a lot of code and its use is mandatory. Therefore, it can be slow at times, especially because there are a lot of projects and reporting. Some UI improvements could help with this."
"DAST has shortcomings, and Snyk needs to improve and overcome such shortcomings."
"I think Snyk should add more of a vulnerability protection feature in the tool since it is an area where it lacks."
"We have to integrate with their database, which means we need to send our entire code to them to scan, and they send us the report. A company working in the financial domain usually won't like to share its code or any information outside its network with any third-party provider."
"There are some new features that we would like to see added, e.g., more visibility into library usage for the code. Something along the lines where it's doing the identification of where vulnerabilities are used, etc. This would cause them to stand out in the market as a much different platform."
"Compatibility with other products would be great."
"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."
Black Duck is ranked 1st in Software Composition Analysis (SCA) with 19 reviews while Snyk is ranked 2nd in Software Composition Analysis (SCA) with 41 reviews. Black Duck is rated 7.8, while Snyk is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of Black Duck writes "Enables applications to be secure, but it must provide more open APIs". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Snyk writes "Performs software composition analysis (SCA) similar to other expensive tools". Black Duck is most compared with Fortify Static Code Analyzer, JFrog Xray, Mend.io, FOSSA and Sonatype Lifecycle, whereas Snyk is most compared with SonarQube, GitHub Advanced Security, Fortify Static Code Analyzer, Veracode and Checkmarx One. See our Black Duck vs. Snyk report.
See our list of best Software Composition Analysis (SCA) vendors.
We monitor all Software Composition Analysis (SCA) reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
