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Black Duck vs Snyk comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 8, 2024
 

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
7.3
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 December 2024, in the Software Composition Analysis (SCA) category, the mindshare of Black Duck is 22.9%, down from 23.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Snyk is 17.9%, up from 17.9% 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.
Jayashree Acharyya - PeerSpot reviewer
Used for image scanning and identifying vulnerabilities, but its integration with other services could be improved
The solution has improved or streamlined our process a lot for securing container images. We wanted to make sure we are deploying the secure Docker images. Snyk allowed us to check whether it is following our standard of docker images or not. We use Azure DevOps as our platform, and Snyk's integration with Azure DevOps was okay. However, Snyk's integration with JFrog Artifactory didn't go well. We use JFrog Artifactory to store the artifacts we download. We wanted to integrate Snyk with JFrog Artifactory to scan the binary artifacts we downloaded, but that broke our JFrog Artifactory for some reason. Instead of using it there, we are calling it directly from the pipeline. Snyk's automation features significantly reduced remediation times a couple of times. Sometimes, our developers scan the code from the environment and find some Java vulnerabilities. We fixed those vulnerabilities in the lower environment itself. The solution does not require any maintenance. The accuracy of Snyk's vulnerability detection is pretty good compared to other tools. I rate the solution's vulnerability detection feature an eight out of ten. I would recommend Snyk to other users because it is easy to implement and integrate with Azure DevOps and GitHub. Overall, I rate the solution a seven out of ten.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It highlights what the developers have done, and it shows the impact from an intellectual property point of view."
"I like the fact that the product auto analyzes components."
"Black Duck is pretty extensive in terms of the scan reserves and the vulnerability exposures. From that perspective, I'm happy with it."
"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 very good at scanning and evaluating open source software."
"The installation is very easy."
"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 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 is easy for developers to use. The documentation is clear as well as the APIs are good and easily readable. It's a good solution overall."
"The solution has great features and is quite stable."
"The most important feature of Snyk is its cost-effectiveness compared to other solutions such as Check Point."
"The solution's vulnerability database, in terms of comprehensiveness and accuracy, is very high-level. As far as I know, it's the best among their competitors."
"A main feature of Snyk is that when you go with SCA, you do get properly done security composition, also from the licensing and open-source parameters perspective. A lot of companies often use open-source libraries or frameworks in their code, which is a big security concern. Snyk deals with all the things and provides you with a proper report about whether any open-source code or framework that you are using is vulnerable. In that way, Snyk is very good as compared to other tools."
"I find SCA to be valuable. It can read your libraries, your license and bring the best way to resolve your problem in the best scenario."
"The most valuable feature of Snyk is the SBOM."
"Our customers find container scans most valuable. They are always talking about it."
 

Cons

"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."
"There are areas for improvement such as false positives and the scanning of containers."
"The documentation is quite scattered."
"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 tool's documentation and support are areas of concern where improvements are required."
"I would like to see more integration with other solutions, such as IntelliJ IDEA."
"The tool needs to improve its pricing. Its configuration is complex and can be improved."
"The solution must provide more open APIs."
"Offering API access in the lower or free open-source tiers would be better. That would help our customers. If you don't have an enterprise plan, it becomes challenging to integrate with the rest of the systems. Our customers would like to have some open-source integrations in the next release."
"It would be great if they can include dynamic, interactive, and run-time scanning features. Checkmarx and Veracode provide dynamic, interactive, and run-time scanning, but Snyk doesn't do that. That's the reason there is more inclination towards Veracode, Checkmarx, or AppScan. These are a few tools available in the market that do all four types of scanning: static, dynamic, interactive, and run-time."
"Snyk has several limitations, including issues with Gradle, NPM, and Xcode, and trouble with AutoPR."
"We have seen cases where tools didn't find or recognize certain dependencies. These are known issues, to some extent, due to the complexity in the language or stack that you using. There are some certain circumstances where the tool isn't actually finding what it's supposed to be finding, then it could be misleading."
"The log export function could be easier when shipping logs to other platforms such as Splunk."
"The tool needs improvement in license compliance. I would like to see the integration of better policy management in the product's future release. When it comes to the organization that I work for, there are a lot of business units since we are a group of companies. Each of these companies has its specific requirements and its own appetite for risk. This should be able to reflect in flexible policies. We need to be able to configure policies that can be adjusted later or overridden by the business unit that is using the product."
"Snyk has several limitations, including issues with Gradle, NPM, and Xcode, and trouble with AutoPR."
"They were a couple of issues which happened because Snyk lacked some documentation on the integration side. Snyk is lacking a lot of documentation, and I would like to see them improve this. This is where we struggle a bit. For example, if something breaks, we can't figure out how to fix that issue. It may be a very simple thing, but because we don't have the proper documentation around an issue, it takes us a bit longer."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Depending on the use case, the cost could range from $10,000 USD to $70,000 USD."
"The price charged by Black Duck is exorbitant."
"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."
"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."
"The price is low. It's not an expensive solution."
"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."
"Snyk is a premium-priced product, so it's kind of expensive. The big con that I find frustrating is when a company charges extra for single sign-on (SSO) into their SaaS app. Snyk is one of the few that I'm willing to pay that add-on charge, but generally I disqualify products that charge an extra fee to do integrated authentication to our identity provider, like Okta or some other SSO. That is a big negative. We had to pay extra for that. That little annoyance aside, it is expensive. You get a lot out of it, but you're paying for that premium."
"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."
"Snyk is an expensive solution."
"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."
"The price of the solution is expensive compared to other solutions."
"The product's price is okay."
"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."
"We do have some missing licenses issues, especially with non-SPDX compliant one, but we expect this to be fixed soon"
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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
16%
Computer Software Company
15%
Manufacturing Company
9%
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?
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.
823,795 professionals have used our research since 2012.