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Black Duck vs Snyk comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 9, 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
21
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Snyk
Ranking in Software Composition Analysis (SCA)
3rd
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
45
Ranking in other categories
Application Security Tools (4th), Container Security (8th), Software Development Analytics (2nd), DevSecOps (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Software Composition Analysis (SCA) category, the mindshare of Black Duck is 19.7%, down from 22.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Snyk is 15.4%, down from 17.6% 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 most valuable feature of Black Duck is the composition analysis feature, which is effective for security risk management."
"The software composition analysis is most effective for security risk management."
"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."
"I like the fact that the product auto analyzes components."
"The solution works well on Mac products."
"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 solution is stable."
"What is valuable about Snyk is its simplicity."
"Our customers find container scans most valuable. They are always talking about it."
"The solution's Open Source feature gives us notifications and suggestions regarding how to address vulnerabilities."
"The most effective feature in securing project dependencies stems from its ability to highlight security vulnerabilities."
"Static code analysis is one of the best features of the solution."
"The CLI feature is quite useful because it gives us a lot of flexibility in what we want to do. If you use the UI, all the information is there and you can see what Snyk is showing you, but there is nothing else that you can change. However, when you use the CLI, then you can use commands and can get the output or response back from Snyk. You can also take advantage of that output in a different way. For the same reason, we have been using the CLI for the hard gate in the pipeline: Obtain a particular CDSS score for vulnerability. Based on that information, we can then decide if we want to block or allow the build. We have more flexibility if we use the CLI."
"Snyk allows for scaling across large organizations, accommodating tens of thousands of applications and over 60,000 repositories, making it suitable for wide-scale deployment."
"The product's most valuable features are an open-source platform, remote functionality, and good pricing."
 

Cons

"It can be cumbersome to use or invalidate open source software because there is a hold time to check requirements or common regulations to ensure compliance."
"The initial setup could be simplified. It was somewhat complex."
"The product's pricing is higher compared to other competitor products."
"The tool's documentation and support are areas of concern where improvements are 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."
"There are areas for improvement such as false positives and the scanning of containers."
"I would like to see improvements in Black Duck's reporting capabilities."
"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."
"The product is very expensive."
"The way Snyk notifies if we have an issue, there are a few options: High vulnerability or medium vulnerability. The problem with that is high vulnerabilities are too broad, because there are too many. If you enable notifications, you get a lot of notifications, When you get many notifications, they become irrelevant because they're not specific. I would prefer to have control over the notifications and somehow decide if I want to get only exploitable vulnerabilities or get a specific score for a vulnerability. Right now, we receive too many high vulnerabilities. If we enable notifications, then we just get a lot of spam message. Therefore, we would like some type of filtering system to be built-in for the system to be more precise."
"For the areas that they're new in, it's very early stages for them. For example, their expertise is in looking at third-party components and packages, which is their bread-and-butter and what they've been doing for ages, but for newer features such as static analysis I don't think they've got compatibility for all the languages and frameworks yet."
"I use Snyk alongside Sonar, and Snyk tends to generate a lot of false positives. Improving the overall report quality and reducing false positives would be beneficial. I don't need additional features; just improving the existing ones would be enough."
"The tool should provide more flexibility and guidance to help us fix the top vulnerabilities before we go into production."
"DAST has shortcomings, and Snyk needs to improve and overcome such shortcomings."
"All such tools should definitely improve the signatures in their database. Snyk is pretty new to the industry. They have a pretty good knowledge base, but Veracode is on top because Veracode has been in this business for a pretty long time. They do have a pretty large database of all the findings, and the way that the correlation engine works is superb. Snyk is also pretty good, but it is not as good as Veracode in terms of maintaining a large space of all the historical data of vulnerabilities."
"The tool's initial use is complex."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Depending on the use case, the cost could range from $10,000 USD to $70,000 USD."
"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 charged by Black Duck is exorbitant."
"The price is low. It's not an expensive solution."
"It is expensive."
"The pricing is a little high."
"The price is quite high because the behavior of the software during the scan is similar to competing products."
"It's inexpensive and easy to license. It comes in standard package sizing, which is straightforward. This information is publicly found on their website."
"For what Snyk offers, it has the best cost-benefit I have ever seen because you're buying the license per user."
"It is pretty expensive. It is not a cheap product."
"The product has good pricing."
"You can get a good deal with Snyk for pricing. It's a little expensive, but it is worth it."
"Cost-wise, it's similar to Veracode, but I don't know the exact cost."
"Presently, my company uses an open-source version of the solution. The solution's pricing can be considered quite reasonable owing to the features they offer."
"It's good value. That's the primary thing. It's not cheap-cheap, but it's good value."
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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
10%
Insurance Company
7%
 

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?
There are a lot of false positives that need to be identified and separated. The inclusion of AI to remove false positives would be beneficial. So far, I've not seen any AI features to enhance vuln...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

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

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: March 2025.
847,772 professionals have used our research since 2012.