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Black Duck vs FlexNet Code Insight comparison

 

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

Black Duck
Ranking in Software Composition Analysis (SCA)
1st
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
20
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
FlexNet Code Insight
Ranking in Software Composition Analysis (SCA)
22nd
Average Rating
4.0
Number of Reviews
1
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2025, in the Software Composition Analysis (SCA) category, the mindshare of Black Duck is 22.4%, down from 23.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of FlexNet Code Insight is 0.7%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Software Composition Analysis (SCA)
 

Featured Reviews

Saravanan_Radhakrishnan - PeerSpot reviewer
Enables applications to be secure, but it must provide more open APIs
The product enables other applications to be secure. We use it to onboard 400 to 500 applications into the DevOps platform, protect them, and have a secure environment. The tool integrates well with different technologies, application stacks, and databases. The APIs are available. We can read the blogs in the community for open-source compliance and security. The community feeds are important. Black Duck is a leader in Gartner. It is a reliable solution.
A decent web interface for reports, but the snippet style code matching requires too much effort
Due to the "snippet match" nature of the scans, we found that it was too much effort to properly validate and catalog each open source component with every new project/product. Incremental results were also difficult to achieve even after consulting with the vendor. We found there were too many false positives and the code-snippet validator had bugs and presented too many false positives. My experience with this tool has turned me away from "snippet"-focused composition analysis. We have switched to one that uses more complete code signatures that do not require validation and review of findings in most cases.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"We didn't have a central inventory to quickly identify issues or determine how many products were affected. Now under Black Duck, it's all consolidated. You search for a component and immediately see which products use it."
"The solution is stable."
"It highlights what the developers have done, and it shows the impact from an intellectual property point of view."
"The solution is very good at scanning and evaluating open source software."
"I like the fact that the product auto analyzes components."
"The most valuable feature for me in Black Duck is its ability to scan binary files effectively."
"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."
"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 had a web interface into the reporting tools that was decent, and open source components could be reported per project and/or aggregated similar to other software composition tools."
 

Cons

"I would like to see improvements in Black Duck's reporting capabilities."
"We're not too sure about the extension of the firewall. It never shows up in the Hub."
"The initial setup could be simplified. It was somewhat complex."
"Due to the fact that, with our software developer life cycle, we don't need to scan our source code every day or every week. For that reason, we find the cost is too high. We might only actually use it five to ten times a year, which makes it expensive."
"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."
"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."
"The scanner client is limited by the size of software it can handle."
"There are areas for improvement such as false positives and the scanning of containers."
"I found the user interface cumbersome and difficult to use."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price is low. It's not an expensive solution."
"The pricing is a little high."
"The price charged by Black Duck is exorbitant."
"The price is quite high because the behavior of the software during the scan is similar to competing products."
"I rate the product's price one on a scale of one to ten, where one is a high price, and ten is a low price."
"It is expensive."
"Depending on the use case, the cost could range from $10,000 USD to $70,000 USD."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
20%
Manufacturing Company
16%
Computer Software Company
14%
Healthcare Company
4%
Manufacturing Company
29%
Computer Software Company
19%
Real Estate/Law Firm
11%
Financial Services Firm
10%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

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 do you like most about Black Duck?
The cloud option of the product is always available and a positive aspect of the solution.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Black Duck?
The price charged by Black Duck is exorbitant. For the features provided by the product, I would not want to pay a high price. There are many other products in the market that offer better features...
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Comparisons

 

Also Known As

Blackduck Hub, Black Duck Protex, Black Duck Security Checker
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Learn More

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Overview

 

Sample Customers

Samsung, Siemens, ScienceLogic, BryterCX, Dynatrace
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Find out what your peers are saying about Black Duck, Veracode, Snyk and others in Software Composition Analysis (SCA). Updated: January 2025.
831,265 professionals have used our research since 2012.