CAST Highlight vs Mend.io comparison

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CAST Highlight

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Nov 5, 2024

Mend.io and CAST Highlight are software solutions in the open-source component management and vulnerability detection category. Mend.io appears to have the upper hand with its comprehensive approach to dependency scanning and vulnerability tracking, making it appealing for holistic open-source governance. CAST Highlight stands out for organizations prioritizing security without full code transparency, offering unique insights without needing codebase access.

Features: Mend.io offers advanced open-source dependency scanning, Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) detection, and automated integration of vulnerability reports into workflows. It allows users to customize license selections for improved governance. CAST Highlight provides insights into software quality and cloud readiness without direct codebase access, facilitating automated portfolio analysis.

Room for Improvement: Mend.io could enhance notification features, expand language support, and improve integration with diverse environments. Role definitions could also be refined for better user experience. CAST Highlight might benefit from reducing its abstraction level for clearer issue descriptions, and a unified user experience across products would be advantageous.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Mend.io supports flexible deployment options, compatible with both public and private clouds, and receives high praise for responsive and technically adept customer service. CAST Highlight's deployment is predominantly on-premises, with commendable responsiveness, though facing some challenges in support intricacies.

Pricing and ROI: Mend.io is competitively priced, offering plans for varying team sizes with ROI observed in reduced manual effort and enhanced security. CAST Highlight, while perceived as expensive with pricing based on scans and enterprise features, provides unique insights that some users find justify the cost, though pricing adjustments could better align with customer needs.

To learn more, read our detailed CAST Highlight vs. Mend.io Report (Updated: March 2025).

CAST Highlight vs. Mend.io

March 2025

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Helped 847,862 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

CAST Highlight

Ranking in Software Composition Analysis (SCA)

16th

Average Rating

7.8

Reviews Sentiment

7.1

Number of Reviews

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

Ranking in other categories

Application Security Tools (18th), Static Code Analysis (4th), Software Supply Chain Security (2nd)

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Software Composition Analysis (SCA) category, the mindshare of CAST Highlight is 0.9%, up from 0.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Mend.io is 8.0%, down from 8.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Software Composition Analysis (SCA)

Featured Reviews

Jayanti Rode

Technical Associate Manager at Accenture

Identifies migration blockers and boosters while facing challenges with platform-specific roadblocks

The solution provides agnostic blockers for platforms as well as for containerization. Within that containerization, it offers generic blockers. However, my project might require it to provide Windows-specific blockers or Linux-specific blockers, as I often work with only one platform at a time. If I received categorization in containerization blockers, it would save time. Understanding only the OS-specific blockers means I would avoid resolving irrelevant issues, thus saving time. Initially, I receive a response from support, however, if there is involvement from R&D or other teams, it may take longer than expected. The support team is challenging when sharing source code. As this is a static code analysis tool, it sometimes requires source code for R&D. However, CAST clients may be restricted from sharing due to business logic and nondisclosure agreements. This creates a challenge, and I may have to share pseudo code or seek client approval, risking escalation.

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meetharoon

CEO at a computer software company with 10,001+ employees

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.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"In cloud migration, I use CAST highlight to identify blockers, which are the negative road patterns, and also the boosters, which are positive code patterns."

"CAST Highlight is easy to use and has a good dashboard."

"CAST Highlight provides a clear overview of the role portfolio and allows users to assess the overall quality of the environment. Users can see where improvements are needed and follow up on trends of the application."

"The way it tells you which codebase is more ready for the cloud and which codebase is less ready is very valuable. It works seamlessly with most languages."

"The most valuable features of the CAST Highlight are the interface and there are three notations that are very simple to understand and communicate with."

"The solution provides agnostic blockers for platforms as well as for containerization."

"The most valuable features of CAST Highlight are automation and speed."

"It offers good performance."

"The vulnerability analysis is the best aspect of the solution."

"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."

"With the fix suggestions feature, not only do you get the specific trace back to where the vulnerability is within your code, but you also get fix suggestions."

"We find licenses together with WhiteSource which are associated with a certain library, then we get a classification of the license. This is with respect to criticality and vulnerability, so we could take action and improve some things, or replace a third-party library which seems to be too risky for us to use on legal grounds."

"We set the solution up and enabled it and we had everything running pretty quickly."

"We can take some measures to improve things, replace a library, or update a library which was too old or showed severe bugs."

"For us, the most valuable tool was open-source licensing analysis."

"The overall support that we receive is pretty good. "

More Mend.io pros

Cons

"Its price should be better. It is a pretty costly tool. They have two products: CAST Highlight and CAST AIP. I would expect CAST Highlight to have the Help dashboard and the Engineering dashboard. These dashboards are currently a part of CAST AIP, and if these are made available in CAST Highlight, customers won't have to use two different products all the time."

"CAST Highlight could improve to allow us to comment and do a deep analysis by ourselves."

"There's a bit of a learning curve at the outset."

"There could be potential improvements or additional features added to CAST Highlight to make it better."

"If I received categorization in containerization blockers, it would save time."

"The ease of configuration and customization could be improved in CAST Highlight."

"The reports that describe the issues of concern are rather abstract and the issues should be more clearly described to the user."

"Mend lets you create custom policies. They're not too complicated to set up, but it would be helpful if they had some preconfigured policies to match what we have in Azure DevOps. That would save us a lot of time. It's tedious to configure the policies manually, and I lack the capacity to do it right now. Other products have preconfigured packs and templates, and Mend doesn't."

"I would like to have an additional compliance pack. Currently, it does not have anything for the CIS framework or the NIST framework. If we directly run a scan, and it is under the CIS framework, we can directly tell the auditor that this product is now CIS compliant."

"AI integration in code security tools like Mend.io is still in its early stages and relatively immature."

"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."

"The initial setup could be simplified."

"We have ended our relationship with WhiteSource. We were using an agent that we built in the pipeline so that you can scan the projects during build time. But unfortunately, that agent didn't work at all. We have more than 500 projects, and it doubled or tripled the build time. For other projects, we had the failure of the builds without any known reason. It was not usable at all. We spent maybe one year working on the issues to try to make it work, but it didn't in the end. We should be able to integrate it with ID and Shift Left so that the developers are able to see the scan results without waiting for the build to fail."

"If anything, I would spend more time making this more user-friendly, better documenting the CLI, and adding more examples to help expand the current documentation."

"I rated the solution an eight out of ten because WhiteSource hasn't built in a couple of features that we would have loved to use and they say they're on their roadmap. I'm hoping that they'll be able to build and deliver in 2022."

More Mend.io cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It is a pretty costly tool. A lot of customers are resistant to using it."

"CAST Highlight is an expensive solution."

"Basic support is included with the standard licensing feed but it can be upgraded for an additional cost."

"CAST Highlight is an expensive solution. However, CAST Highlight is less expensive than the CAST AIP, but it remains too expensive and the professional services from CAST are also too expensive. The high price is part of the problem with the CAST solutions."

"Pricing is competitive."

"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."

"The solution involves a yearly licensing fee."

"Pricing and licensing are comparable to other tools. When we started, it was less than our existing solution. I can't go into specifics, but it isn't cheap."

"WhiteSource is much more affordable than Veracode."

"Its pricing model is per developer. It depends on the number of developers in the company. The license is for a minimum of 20 developers. So, even if you are a small startup with less than 10 developers, you have to buy a license for 20 developers on a yearly subscription, which makes it quite expensive for startup customers. I provide consultation to startup accelerators. They're small at the beginning, and only once they grow to 20 developers, they can afford this tool. As a result, WhiteSource is missing this target audience. Their licensing is not flexible."

"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."

More Mend.io pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

23%

Computer Software Company

17%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Financial Services Firm

17%

Computer Software Company

15%

Manufacturing Company

12%

Energy/Utilities Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about CAST Highlight?

The most valuable features of CAST Highlight are automation and speed.

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for CAST Highlight?

The pricing of CAST Highlight was not considered expensive or cheap, and no specific comment was made about the setup cost.

What needs improvement with CAST Highlight?

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...

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 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...

SonarQube Server (formerly SonarQube) vs CAST Highlight

Comparisons

Compared 63% of the time

Black Duck vs CAST Highlight

Compared 7% of the time

Checkmarx One vs CAST Highlight

Compared 5% of the time

GitLab vs CAST Highlight

Compared 5% of the time

Snyk vs CAST Highlight

Compared 3% of the time

More CAST Highlight Competitors

SonarQube Server (formerly SonarQube) vs Mend.io

Compared 25% of the time

Black Duck vs Mend.io

Compared 13% of the time

Snyk vs Mend.io

Compared 9% of the time

Veracode vs Mend.io

Compared 7% of the time

GitHub Dependabot vs Mend.io

Compared 7% of the time

More Mend.io Competitors

Product Reports

Download CAST Highlight product report

CAST Highlight

April 2025

Download Mend.io product report

March 2025

Also Known As

No data available

WhiteSource, Mend SCA, Mend.io Supply Chain Defender, Mend SAST

Overview

CAST Highlight is a SaaS software intelligence product for performing rapid application portfolio analysis. It automatically analyzes source code of hundreds of applications in a week for Cloud Readiness, Software Composition Analysis (Open Source risks), Resiliency, and Technical Debt. Objective software insights from automated source code analysis combined with built-in qualitative surveys for business context enable more informed decision-making about application portfolios.

CAST is the software intelligence category leader. CAST technology can see inside custom applications with MRI-like precision, automatically generating intelligence about their inner workings - composition, architecture, transaction flows, cloud readiness, structural flaws, legal and security risks. It’s becoming essential for faster modernization for cloud, raising the speed and efficiency of Software Engineering, better open source risk control, and accurate technical due diligence. CAST operates globally with offices in North America, Europe, India, China. Visit www.castsoftware.com.

CAST

Mend.io is a software composition analysis tool that secures what developers create. The solution provides an automated reduction of the software attack surface, reduces developer burdens, and accelerates app delivery. Mend.io provides open-source analysis with its in-house and other multiple sources of software vulnerabilities. In addition, the solution offers license and policy violation alerts, has great pipeline integration, and, since it is a SaaS (software as a service), it doesn’t require you to physically maintain servers or data centers for any implementation. Not only does Mend.io reduce enterprise application security risk, it also helps developers meet deadlines faster.

Mend.io Features

Mend.io has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:

Vulnerability analysis
Automated remediation
Seamless integration
Business prioritization
Limitless scalability
Intuitive interface
Language support
Integration
Continuous monitoring
Remediation suggestions
Customization

Mend.io Benefits

There are many benefits to implementing Mend.io. Some of the biggest advantages the solution offers include:

Easy to use: The Mend.io platform is very user-friendly and easy to set up.

Third-party libraries: The solution eases the process of keeping track of all the used third-party dependencies within a product. It not only scans for the pure occurrence (also transitively) but also takes care of licenses and vulnerabilities.

Static code analysis: With Mend.io’s static code analysis, you can quickly identify security weaknesses in custom code across desktop, web, and mobile applications.

Broad support: Mend.io provides 27 different programming languages and various programming frameworks.

Easy integration: Mend.io makes integration very easy with existing DevOps environments and CI/CD pipelines so developers don’t need to manually configure or trigger the scan.

Ultra-fast scanning engine: The solution’s scanning engine generates results up to ten times faster than legacy SAST solutions.

Unified developer experience: Mend.io has a unified developer experience inside the code repository that shows side-by-side security alerts and remediation suggestions for custom code and open-source code.

Reviews from Real Users

Below are some reviews and helpful feedback written by PeerSpot users currently using the Mend.io solution.

Jeffrey H., System Manager of Cloud Engineering at Common Spirit, says, “Finding vulnerabilities is pretty easy. Mend.io (formerly WhiteSource) does a great job of that and we had quite a few when we first put this in place. Mend.io does a very good job of finding the open-source, checking the versions, and making sure they're secure. They notify us of critical high, medium, and low impacts, and if anything is wrong. We find the product very easy to use and we use it as a core part of our strategy for scanning product code moving toward release.”

PeerSpot reviewer Ben D., Head of Software Engineering at a legal firm, mentions, “The way WhiteSource scans the code is great. It’s easy to identify and remediate open source vulnerabilities using this solution. WhiteSource helped reduce our mean time to resolution since we adopted the product. In terms of integration, it's pretty easy.”

An IT Service Manager at a wholesaler/distributor comments, “Mend.io provides threat detection and an excellent UI in a highly stable solution, with outstanding technical support.”

Another reviewer, Kevin D., Intramural OfficialIntramural at Northeastern University, states, "The vulnerability analysis is the best aspect of the solution."

Sample Customers

Wells Fargo, Bank of NY Mellon, Northern Trust, Microsoft, Amazon, IBM, BMW, AT&T, US Army, US Air Force, US Navy, John Hancock, Marsh & McLennan, Ernst & Young, PwC, Volkswagen, Boston Consulting Group, London Stock Exchange, Telefonica, Saur France, Total Energies France, SNCF

Microsoft, Autodesk, NCR, Target, IBM, vodafone, Siemens, GE digital, KPMG, LivePerson, Jack Henry and Associates