Black Duck SCA vs FOSSA comparison

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Black Duck SCA

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 15, 2025

Black Duck SCA and FOSSA are competitors in the software composition analysis space. Black Duck SCA is recognized for its strong customer support, while FOSSA is known for its advanced features that justify its cost.

Features: Black Duck SCA provides comprehensive open-source security and license compliance management. It has strong integration capabilities, accurate dependency mapping, and automated vulnerability scanning. FOSSA excels in automation, allowing continuous monitoring throughout the development lifecycle with real-time alerts. Its advanced policy management and seamless integration make it stand out.

Room for Improvement: Black Duck SCA could improve on its initial setup cost and enhance its capabilities in identifying vulnerabilities. It may also benefit from expanding its knowledge base for better accuracy. FOSSA, on the other hand, could increase its adaptability to unique enterprise needs and expand its data beyond the standard vulnerability databases. Further refinement in providing intelligence rather than just data could also benefit users.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Black Duck SCA offers detailed onboarding and a responsive customer service team, facilitating smooth deployment. FOSSA provides quick deployment but may require further adjustments to meet specific enterprise requirements. However, it features an intuitive management interface.

Pricing and ROI: Black Duck SCA has a higher initial setup cost but offers a strong ROI with its comprehensive security features and effective customer service. FOSSA appears more cost-effective in terms of automation and scalability, resulting in substantial long-term ROI due to its feature-rich offerings and pricing strategy.

To learn more, read our detailed Black Duck SCA vs. FOSSA Report (Updated: September 2025).

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Black Duck SCA vs. FOSSA

September 2025

Helped 870,623 peers since 2012

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 SCA

Ranking in Software Composition Analysis (SCA)

2nd

Average Rating

7.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.4

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

FOSSA

Ranking in Software Composition Analysis (SCA)

8th

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.9

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Software Composition Analysis (SCA) category, the mindshare of Black Duck SCA is 15.7%, down from 21.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of FOSSA is 3.1%, down from 3.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Software Composition Analysis (SCA) Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Black Duck SCA	15.7%
FOSSA	3.1%
Other	81.2%

Software Composition Analysis (SCA)

Featured Reviews

Saravanan_Radhakrishnan

Senior Manager at Happiest Minds Technologies

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.

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Hanumanth Ramsetty

Software Engineer at Tech Mahindra Limited

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.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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 product enables other applications to be secure."

"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."

"It highlights what the developers have done, and it shows the impact from an intellectual property point of view."

"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."

"The most valuable feature is the vulnerability scanning, and that it's easy to use."

"The UI is the solution's most valuable feature since it allows for easy pipeline integration."

"Policy management is a valuable feature."

More Black Duck SCA pros

"The scalability is excellent."

"I am impressed with the tool’s seamless integration and quick results."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

More FOSSA pros

Cons

"It's still a bit inconsistent. For example, if I scan today, it might not show the same results tomorrow."

"The initial setup could be simplified. It was somewhat complex."

"I would like to see more integration with other solutions, such as IntelliJ IDEA."

"The solution must provide more open APIs."

"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."

"There are areas for improvement such as false positives and the scanning of containers."

"The solution's pricing model and documentation areas of concern where improvement is needed."

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

More Black Duck SCA cons

"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."

"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."

"If you have thousands of applications, organizing them all into teams or tags is challenging."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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 would like the FOSSA API to be broader. I would like not to have to interact with the GUI at all, to do the work that I want to do. I would like them to do API-first development, rather than a focus on the GUI."

More FOSSA cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price charged by Black Duck is exorbitant."

"Depending on the use case, the cost could range from $10,000 USD to $70,000 USD."

"The pricing is a little high."

"It is expensive."

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

"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."

"The price is low. It's not an expensive solution."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"The solution's pricing is good and reasonable because you can literally use a lot of it for free."

"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."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

18%

Manufacturing Company

15%

Computer Software Company

12%

Insurance Company

Manufacturing Company

21%

Computer Software Company

11%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Educational Organization

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	6
Large Enterprise	16

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	5
Midsize Enterprise	1
Large Enterprise	8

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...

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...

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Snyk vs FOSSA

Compared 18% of the time

Mend.io vs FOSSA

Compared 13% of the time

JFrog Xray vs FOSSA

Compared 9% of the time

Veracode vs FOSSA

Compared 6% of the time

Sonatype Lifecycle vs FOSSA

Compared 5% of the time

More FOSSA Competitors

Product Reports

Download Black Duck SCA product report

Black Duck SCA

October 2025

Download FOSSA product report

October 2025

Also Known As

Blackduck Hub, Black Duck Protex, Black Duck Security Checker

No data available

Overview

Black Duck is an essential tool for software composition analysis and license compliance. It identifies vulnerabilities effectively and supports security management in DevOps environments, offering integration, performance stability, and community support.

Organizations rely on Black Duck for seamless integration in CI/CD pipelines, thorough scanning of source and binary codes, and management of operational risks associated with open-source and commercial licenses. It plays a crucial role in security risk management and delivers a robust policy management framework. Users value its ease of use and reliable community support while benefiting from its comprehensive dependency visualization capabilities. Despite its strengths, there is room for enhancement in integration with other tools, UI friendliness, and reporting features.

What are Black Duck's key features?

Automated Component Analysis: Offers detailed insights into open-source components.
Vulnerability Scanning: Identifies and addresses potential security issues.
Knowledge Base: Extensive database for informed decision-making.
Policy Management: Comprehensive control over security policies.
Integration: Seamlessly fits into existing DevOps workflows.

What should users look for in ROI?

Security Assurance: Mitigates risks associated with open-source software.
Efficiency: Reduces time spent on manual auditing tasks.
License Compliance: Ensures compliance with open-source licenses.
Risk Management: Enhances operational risk management in software development.

Enterprise environments use Black Duck extensively for security, compliance, and risk management, ensuring software meets regulatory standards and mitigates vulnerabilities. Its implementation in specific industries aids in controlled and secure software development processes, underlining its role in maintaining rigorous security standards while delivering dependable performance.

Black Duck

Up to 90% of any piece of software is from open source, creating countless dependencies and areas of risk to manage. FOSSA is the most reliable automated policy engine for legal teams to maintain license compliance, security to fix vulnerabilities, and engineering to improve code quality across the entire software supply chain. As the only developer-native open source management platform, FOSSA fully integrates with your existing CI/CD pipeline to provide complete visibility and context earlier in the software development lifecycle. For the first time, teams can collaboratively shift left and audit, analyze, control, and remediate license issues and vulnerabilities right in their existing workflows.

Sample Customers

Samsung, Siemens, ScienceLogic, BryterCX, Dynatrace

AppDyanmic, Uber, Twitter, Zendesk, Confluent