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Black Duck vs Snyk comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 8, 2024

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
Snyk
Ranking in Software Composition Analysis (SCA)
3rd
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
44
Ranking in other categories
Application Security Tools (4th), Container Security (7th), Software Development Analytics (2nd), DevSecOps (1st)
 

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 Snyk is 17.6%, down from 18.0% 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
Affordable tool boosts code scanning efficiency but faces integration hurdles
The most important feature of Snyk is its cost-effectiveness compared to other solutions such as Check Point. It is easy to consolidate Snyk across multiple entities within a large organization. Additionally, our integration of Snyk into GitHub allows us to automatically scan codebases and identify issues, which has improved efficiency.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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 product enables other applications to be secure."
"The software composition analysis is most effective for security risk management."
"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 cloud option of the product is always available and a positive aspect of the solution."
"Black Duck is pretty extensive in terms of the scan reserves and the vulnerability exposures. From that perspective, I'm happy with it."
"The most valuable feature is the vulnerability scanning, and that it's easy to use."
"The stability is okay."
"The most valuable features include enriched information around the vulnerabilities for better triaging, in terms of the vulnerability layer origin and vulnerability tree."
"Snyk performs software composition analysis (SCA) similar to other expensive tools."
"What is valuable about Snyk is its simplicity."
"The code scans on the source code itself were valuable."
"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."
"Its reports are nice and provide information about the issue as well as resolution. They also provide a proper fix. If there's an issue, they provide information in detail about how to remediate that issue."
"The advantage of Snyk is that Snyk automatically creates a pull request for all the findings that match or are classified according to the policy that we create. So, once we review the PR within Snyk and we approve the PR, Snyk auto-fixes the issue, which is quite interesting and which isn't there in any other product out there. So, Snyk is a step ahead in this particular area."
"It is a stable solution. Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."
 

Cons

"There are areas for improvement such as false positives and the scanning of containers."
"I would like to see more integration with other solutions, such as IntelliJ IDEA."
"The solution's pricing model and documentation areas of concern where improvement is needed."
"The tool's documentation and support are areas of concern where improvements are required."
"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."
"The tool needs to improve its pricing. Its configuration is complex and can be improved."
"There are areas for improvement such as false positives and the scanning of containers."
"Basically the licensing costs are a little bit expensive."
"They need to improve the Snyk plugins and make it easier to make your optimizations based on your own needs or features."
"The documentation sometimes is not relevant. It does not cover the latest updates, scanning, and configurations. The documentation for some things is wrong and does not cover some configuration scannings for the multiple project settings."
"Snyk has several limitations, including issues with Gradle, NPM, and Xcode, and trouble with AutoPR."
"Generating reports and visibility through reports are definitely things they can do better."
"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."
"The feature for automatic fixing of security breaches could be improved."
"We would like to have upfront knowledge on how easy it should be to just pull in an upgraded dependency, e.g., even introduce full automation for dependencies supposed to have no impact on the business side of things. Therefore, we would like some output when you get the report with the dependencies. We want to get additional information on the expected impact of the business code that is using the dependency with the newer version. This probably won't be easy to add, but it would be helpful."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Depending on the use case, the cost could range from $10,000 USD to $70,000 USD."
"The price is low. It's not an expensive solution."
"The pricing is a little high."
"It is expensive."
"The price charged by Black Duck is exorbitant."
"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."
"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 quite high because the behavior of the software during the scan is similar to competing products."
"We are using the open-source version for the scans."
"It is pretty expensive. It is not a cheap product."
"The price is good. Snyk had a good price compared to the competition, who had higher pricing than them. Also, their licensing and billing are clear."
"The product's price is okay."
"The price of the solution is expensive compared to other solutions."
"The license model is based on the number of contributing developers. Snyk is expensive, for a startup company will most likely use the community edition, while larger companies will buy the licensed version. The price of Snyk is more than other SLA tools."
"Snyk is an expensive solution."
"For what Snyk offers, it has the best cost-benefit I have ever seen because you're buying the license per user."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
20%
Manufacturing Company
16%
Computer Software Company
14%
Healthcare Company
4%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Computer Software Company
15%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Insurance Company
6%
 

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 Snyk compare with SonarQube?
Snyk does a great job identifying and reducing vulnerabilities. This solution is fully automated and monitors 24/7 to find any issues reported on the internet. It will store dependencies that you a...
What do you like most about Snyk?
The most effective feature in securing project dependencies stems from its ability to highlight security vulnerabilities.
What needs improvement with Snyk?
Snyk has several limitations, including issues with Gradle, NPM, and Xcode, and trouble with AutoPR. It lacks the ability to select branches on its Web UI, forcing users to rely on CLI or CI/CD for...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

Blackduck Hub, Black Duck Protex, Black Duck Security Checker
No data available
 

Learn More

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Samsung, Siemens, ScienceLogic, BryterCX, Dynatrace
StartApp, Segment, Skyscanner, DigitalOcean, Comic Relief
Find out what your peers are saying about Black Duck vs. Snyk and other solutions. Updated: December 2024.
831,020 professionals have used our research since 2012.