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Black Duck vs Mend.io comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 12, 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

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
Mend.io
Ranking in Software Composition Analysis (SCA)
7th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
30
Ranking in other categories
Application Security Tools (18th), Static Code Analysis (4th), Software Supply Chain Security (5th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2025, in the Software Composition Analysis (SCA) category, the mindshare of Black Duck is 20.0%, down from 22.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Mend.io is 8.1%, down from 9.1% 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.
meetharoon - PeerSpot reviewer
Enables smooth management of vulnerabilities and promotes a shift towards a culture of security
We have witnessed Mend.io for its high stability, consistently living up to our expectations in terms of performance and reliability. Our developers have reported very few issues and almost minimal to zero downtime, which is a critical factor for our organization to rely on Mend SCA to secure our applications. We didn't experience any major issues in the stability of the product. This level of dependability is crucial for our hundreds of development teams that need to maintain continuous integration and deployment processes without interruptions. We realize the solution's architecture is designed to support a wide range of use cases, making it suitable for organizations of varying sizes and complexities. As a SaaS (Software as a Service) offering, Mend.io eliminates the need for physical server management, which further contributes to its stability. Users can access the platform without worrying about hardware failures or maintenance issues that can affect on-premises solutions. Moreover, Mend.io's integration capabilities with existing workflows—including IDEs, repositories, and CI/CD pipelines—enhance its stability by providing a seamless user experience. This integration allows teams to incorporate security scanning into their development processes without significant disruptions, which is often a challenge with less stable solutions. Feedback from our developers and architects highlights the tool's effectiveness in reducing open-source software vulnerabilities while maintaining a streamlined development lifecycle. Our organization have experienced improved code quality and faster incident response times as a result of using Mend.io. The platform's intuitive dashboard and management views are also praised by our developers for their usability, contributing to a positive user experience. In short, Mend.io stands out as a dependable and reliable solution in the realm of software composition analysis. Its high stability, combined with robust integration capabilities and user-friendly features, makes it an excellent choice for organizations seeking to enhance their security posture while minimizing operational disruptions.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The most valuable feature is the vulnerability scanning, and that it's easy to use."
"The most valuable feature for me in Black Duck is its ability to scan binary files effectively."
"The solution is stable."
"The solution is very good at scanning and evaluating open source software."
"The UI is the solution's most valuable feature since it allows for easy pipeline integration."
"It is able to drill down to the source level."
"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."
"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."
"Our dev team uses the fix suggestions feature to quickly find the best path for remediation."
"The most valuable feature is the inventory, where it compiles a list of all of the third-party libraries that we have on our estate."
"We use a lot of open sources with a variety of containers, and the different open sources come with different licenses. Some come with dual licenses, some are risky and some are not. All our three use cases are equally important to us and we found WhiteSource handles them decently."
"Enables scanning/collecting third-party libraries and classifying license types. In this way we ensure our third-party software policy is followed."
"WhiteSource helped reduce our mean time to resolution since the adoption of the product."
"The reporting capability gives us the option to generate an open-source license report in a single click, which gets all copyright and license information, including dependencies."
"Its ease of use and good results are the most valuable."
"For us, the most valuable tool was open-source licensing analysis."
 

Cons

"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."
"There are areas for improvement such as false positives and the scanning of containers."
"It's still a bit inconsistent. For example, if I scan today, it might not show the same results tomorrow."
"We're not too sure about the extension of the firewall. It never shows up in the Hub."
"The solution must provide more open APIs."
"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."
"The initial setup could be simplified. It was somewhat complex."
"I would like to see improvements in Black Duck's reporting capabilities."
"WhiteSource only produces a report, which is nice to look at. However, you have to check that report every week, to see if something was found that you don't want. It would be great if the build that's generating a report would fail if it finds a very important vulnerability, for instance."
"The dashboard UI and UX are problematic."
"At times, the latency of getting items out of the findings after they're remediated is higher than it should be."
"The initial setup could be simplified."
"The UI can be slow once in a while, and we're not sure if it's because of the amount of data we have, or it is just a slow product, but it would be nice if it could be improved."
"On the reporting side, they could make some improvements. They are making the reports better and better, but sometimes it takes a lot of time to generate a report for our entire organization."
"Make the product available in a very stable way for other web browsers."
"We specifically use this solution within our CICD pipelines in Azure DevOps, and we would like to have a gate so that if the score falls below a certain value then we can block the pipeline from running."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing is a little high."
"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."
"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."
"It is expensive."
"The price is quite high because the behavior of the software during the scan is similar to competing products."
"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."
"It is fairly priced."
"The solution involves a yearly licensing fee."
"We always negotiate for the best price possible, and as far as I know, Mend has done an excellent job with their pricing. Our management is happy with the pricing, which has led to renewals."
"When comparing the price of WhiteSource to the competition it is priced well. The cost for 50 users is approximately $18,000 annually."
"Mend is costly but not overly expensive. The license was quite expensive this year, but we managed to negotiate the price down to the same as last year. At the same time, it's a good value. We're getting what we're paying for and still not using all the features. We could probably get more out of the tool and make it more valuable. At the moment, we don't have the capacity to do that."
"As we were using an SaaS-based service, the solution must be scalable, although my understanding is that this is based on the licensing model one is using."
"Over the last two years, they have tried to add more and more features to their license packages, but the price is a little bit high, comparatively."
"This is an expensive solution."
report
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
21%
Manufacturing Company
17%
Computer Software Company
14%
Healthcare Company
4%
Financial Services Firm
17%
Computer Software Company
15%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Energy/Utilities Company
5%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

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...
How does WhiteSource compare with SonarQube?
Red Hat Ceph does well in simplifying storage integration by replacing the need for numerous storage solutions. This solution allows for multiple copies of replicated and coded pools to be kept, ea...
What do you like most about Mend.io?
The best feature is that the Mend R&D team does their due diligence for all the vulnerabilities. In case they observe any important or critical vulnerabilities, such as the Log4j-related vulner...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Mend.io?
Mend.io SCA offers a competitive pricing structure that is relatively affordable compared to similar solutions in the market. This makes it an attractive option for organizations looking to enhance...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

Blackduck Hub, Black Duck Protex, Black Duck Security Checker
WhiteSource, Mend SCA, Mend.io Supply Chain Defender, Mend SAST
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Samsung, Siemens, ScienceLogic, BryterCX, Dynatrace
Microsoft, Autodesk, NCR, Target, IBM, vodafone, Siemens, GE digital, KPMG, LivePerson, Jack Henry and Associates
Find out what your peers are saying about Black Duck vs. Mend.io and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.
841,004 professionals have used our research since 2012.