Black Duck Reviews

I recommend Black Duck for teams that need to identify their software components. It provides visibility for software components, their security risks, operational risks, and license compliance.

The automated code scanning feature and Black Duck's integration with our development tools have enhanced our software compliance process and overall audit readiness.

The software composition analysis is most effective for security risk management. It provides insights into legal issues, security risks, operational risks, and license risks.

There are areas for improvement such as false positives and the scanning of containers. The ability to export the mitigations that are provided is needed, along with improvements in reporting capabilities.

I have been working with Black Duck for seven years.

Their technical support is good. That said, there are some pain points with the response time and first-level support quality.

Neutral

I have not worked with anything similar before Black Duck.

There are many new tools based on specific technologies that could serve as alternatives.

I recommend Black Duck for those using native languages like C and C++. However, for new technologies, there are better tools available.

I'd rate the solution six out of ten.

We use the solution to detect non-compliance in third-party applications.

I really like the fact that we can define policies at a group level. Based on the foundation we create on the baseline, we can apply specific policies for specific teams. We can apply the same policy to the entire organization and tailor the policies for different teams. Policy management is a valuable feature.

I also enjoy using the license management feature in which we can add or review the terms of the licenses. The component management feature is also good. Black Duck is quite powerful. It has been in the industry for quite a lot of time, for around 30 years.

The documentation is quite scattered. It's really difficult to identify the documentation we need for a specific need. When I was working for an organization, I had to create my own documentation to establish the service for the group. The solution must make it easy for the users to understand what to do when they are getting started.

I have been familiar with the solution for a year, including the demo period.

The solution was pretty stable. We had some issues here and there.

The product is pretty scalable. It depends on the licensing model. We had negotiated a license model that was fit for our needs. Then, we added more applications as we grew. The tool provides both the on-premise and the cloud solution. We chose the cloud solution. We wanted the tool for internal use within our organization. We had more than 250 business units.

We have had a chance to benefit from expert hours with proper engineers who were able to respond to some questions. Some of them were more competent than the others. I'm satisfied with support on average.

Neutral

The initial setup is moderately hard because the documentation is not available. If someone is gathering the documentation and creating custom documentation for the organization, explaining how to connect to the CI/CD pipeline and create an account and everything in between, then it's not difficult. The initial investment in developing the documentation is quite tedious.

We provide an initial onboarding period of two weeks to the deployment team. The team can deploy the solution at its own pace, provided it follows the documentation. The team also has early life support throughout these two to three weeks, in which the team members also get trained and understand how to make the best of the tool’s features.

The deployment time depends on the organization’s application architecture, where they keep their projects, and how they are organized. These variables can extend or decrease the timeline for implementation. We need one or two technical resources to deploy the product.

We paid for the license on a yearly basis.

I have evaluated several other solutions, including FOSSA, but we didn't go forward with them. We chose Black Duck because it has a very strong knowledge base with a lot of customization around license management, component management, and policy management.

Organizations that enter a contract with Synopsys must be very careful about the expert hours. We would need support even if we do not have a premium contract. The expert hours are quite pricey. Whoever enters a contract with Synopsys should secure some expert hours because they will need it at least initially when they establish the system.

It wasn't that easy for us to onboard. It was a very steep learning curve. I was expecting more support from the vendor during the onboarding. I expected they would drive the onboarding since it was my first time using the solution. Instead, we had to discover a lot on our own as a customer. They provided some onboarding materials and training, but we were not hand-held through the process.

Overall, I rate the tool a nine out of ten.

We use Black Duck mainly for the DevSecOps pipeline. For the microservices-based application, we have to deploy Black Duck into the Kubernetes environment. 

I have worked for multiple clients across the world, such as the US and Europe in the banking, retail, and energy sectors.

The most valuable feature of Black Duck is the seamless integration to scan our Docker binary files, it provides us all open vulnerabilities, and it ensures a reference point from where it finds the vulnerability is up to date. For example, if there is any new vulnerability found, they are immediately available in the Black Duck. There is no delay in finding the vulnerabilities, they are called out in our code immediately.

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.

I have been using Black Duck for a few years.

The stability of Black Duck is very good.

Black Duck is scalable.

The technical support from Black Duck is very good.

Black Duck is easy to install. The full implementation took a couple of hours.

I do the implementation of the solution.

We have seen a very high return on investment using Black Duck.

I rate Black Duck a nine out of ten.

We use Black Duck Hub to discover commercial and open-source licenses and the licensed software used by a company. Whenever a company enters the M&A process, a preliminary step called due diligence is done. A part of it is the technical discovery that includes finding out what software the company is using and whether the software is linked with any open-source software or commercial product for which you have to pay a license.

Our main use case is to discover the license and find out if there is an obligation for the paid license. We also check the exposure of the software to open-source libraries. Open source is great, and it is a preferred solution for many companies. Around 90% of the software is now open source, but it is also exposed to vulnerabilities. So, through the dependencies that we were discovering, we were also working on the security exposure of the software product. For this purpose, we use Black Duck Hub.

The knowledge base and the management system are the most valuable features of Black Duck Hub. It has a very helpful management environment. They offer an editor where we can check the discovered license, which is retrieved from their knowledge base. They have a huge knowledge base build over the years. It gives you some possibilities, such as this license with possibility A could cause a vulnerability issue or a potential breach. 

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 have been using this solution for two and a half years. I was serving as vice president of engineering and integration in a company in Austin, Texas. I was assigned to acquisitions of companies, more specifically to the technical due diligence that takes place during acquisition. So, we used Black Duck Hub very extensively. We had the biggest ever contract with Synopsys for almost $1 million per year, and we used Black Duck Hub to scan the license for each acquired company. We had a very aggressive acquisition plan of almost one acquisition every 15 days. So, I have accumulated quite a big experience with the Black Duck Hub tool.

It is stable.

From the company side, it's super scalable, but from the client's side, it's not that scalable. The issue with scalability is that if you have reserved 100 megabytes on Black Duck Hub, and eventually, you like to use 200 or 300 megabytes, the pricing policy requires extending your product permanently. This is really painful because you just need instant access to the higher, bigger space, but you don't want to buy it permanently. They should give the possibility to extend instantly by 50% or 80% more for a week or two weeks. This is quite common, and I have seen many cloud providers that let you pay instantly for a limited time, and you have the possibility to use a little bit more.

I have a team of six users who use Black Duck for the discovery, but the results are forwarded to many more things.

In some cases, we have faced delays. We had reported issues, and we got the reply in 15 days or 20 days. Being a big organization, their support is rather slow. They prioritize these issues based on some logic unknown to me. If we have a big problem, we should get priority.

The initial setup is super simple for the user because it is set up on the cloud. You just get an account and upload the code. You don't have to install it. There is no deployment. You just access the service from the cloud.

Black Duck is more suitable if you require a lot of licensing compliance. For smaller organizations, WhiteSource is better because its pricing policies are not really suitable for huge organizations.

I'm also currently testing WhiteSource, Black Duck Hub, FOSSA, Snyk, and a few more solutions. My assignment is to provide an evaluation for a blockchain platform.

I would advise others to be careful with the provisioning of the space that you need. Black Duck has been the key player in the market for many years. It is totally in conjunction with Coverity and forms a suite of security and quality. It is frequently used in M&A or mergers and acquisition cases. It is the top product in the market.

I would rate Black Duck a nine out of ten. 

It is able to drill down to the source level.

We expect a lot more features. They have to improve it a lot in terms of the way they do the analysis. At the analysis level, more depth is required.

They are giving a lot of APIs and Python scripts for certain functionalities, but instead of using APIs and Python scripts, they should provide these functionalities through the UI. Users should be able to customize and add more fields through the UI. Users should be able to add more fields and generate reports. Currently, they are not giving flexibility in the UI. They're providing a script that simply generates an Excel file or CSV file. There is no flexibility.

We have been using this solution for a year. We are using its latest version.

It is stable.

Because it is on the cloud, it is scalable. We have quite a significant number of users. Our users might be in the hundreds.

Their support is not so strong. It is fine. It is not bad. If we go a little bit deeper on the technical side, they might not know about it.

We didn't do the setup. They did the setup. My guess is that it is not so easy because it's done in the docker environment. For its maintenance, we need two people.

It is expensive.

I would rate it a seven out of ten.

I am not working with Black Duck. I manage a team that works with Black Duck.

We are happy with this solution.

We have not yet explored all of the functionalities of Black Duck.

Black Duck is pretty extensive in terms of the scan reserves and the vulnerability exposures. From that perspective, I'm happy with it.

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. I feel that it is just a matter of time and it should be fine.

We have been working with Black Duck for a little more than one year.

It is a very small group of people who are using this solution in our organization.

My team is the open-source program office and we have three people who are using Black Duck and the other teams would be in the range of fewer than 20 people.

We contacted technical support as we were not able to fix this issue ourselves. We are not the primary contact who has procured the product, they are based out of Paris. We are using the license but we have to go through them to contact Black Duck to get their help.

I am not able to share an opinion on the support because we raised the issue only a few weeks back, and this being the summer vacation period, a lot of people were unavailable. I don't know whether that delay is being caused by our counterparts in Paris or if it is really caused by Black Duck.

We have been using other tools, but our IT division acquired Black Duck and we wanted to use it across the organization.

As far as security is concerned, it has always been a priority in our organization. We had different tools that we were using for security, but when it comes to operational risk and compliance and licensing, we didn't have any specific approach before Black Duck.

We are not the primary team to procure this solution. My counterparts in Paris are the only ones who are aware of the pricing.

We are only using a few of the licenses because they had acquired several licenses, but I'm not involved in the pricing and the contract negotiations.

I would rate Black Duck an eight out of ten.

We use Black Duck to examine our source code for compliance issues.

The older version that we are using is very primitive. You have to do every step, right from setting up an application to the user. The code has to sit in a particular folder and all of the open-source dependencies have to be there. With everything in one folder, it starts to scan. As we are using Code Center, we need to ensure that all of the components are there. However, there are thousands of components and for each submission, the components have to be there. There are no bulk submissions or bulk transfers. Essentially, you need to write your own scripts with the APIs to do it more efficiently.

It needs to be more user-friendly for developers and in general, to ensure compliance. The scanning should be quick and easy to use, rather than complex.

The pricing for this solution should definitely be lower.

We have been using Black Duck for between five and six years.

The stability is okay. We need to keep cleaning up and archiving, which is the standard care by an administrator.

The number of people we have using Black Duck at any time is on a project-by-project basis. We probably have around 500 users, although they do not use it on a continuous basis. The usage is based on the number of requests. For some projects, it will be used just one time, and that's it. 

We have just started to contact technical support, so it is too early to evaluate them.

We did not use another similar solution prior to Black Duck.

The initial setup is complex. It is installed and configured on a Linux-based system, and the on-premises database needs to be updated.

Upgrading our version of Black Duck to the most recent is a tedious process. It is very step-by-step and very manual.

The price is quite high because the behavior of the software during the scan is similar to competing products. 

We are currently evaluating whether we should continue to work with Black Duck, upgrading to the most recent version, or change to another solution. We are looking at several tools that also include WhiteSource and Checkmarx Composition Software Analysis. Ideally, we want to find a solution that suits our everyday needs.

One thing that we have found is that the price of Black Duck is quite high, compared to other products.

As we are using an older version, and have not yet completed a PoC with the most recent one, I am not sure whether there are newer features that we need or will use. Things that we would like to see may have already been implemented.

I would rate this solution a six out of ten.

We use the solution to scan Java code. 

We accidentally use third-party library APIs, which may not be secure. Our technical team may not have the end time or expertise to figure it out. Black Duck helps us with that and saves us time. 

The tool needs to improve its pricing. Its configuration is complex and can be improved. 

I have been using the tool for five years. 

Black Duck is stable. 

I rate the tool's deployment a seven out of ten. 

I rate the product an eight out of ten.