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FOSSA vs Fortify Static Code Analyzer comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary
 

Categories and Ranking

Fortify Static Code Analyzer
Average Rating
8.2
Number of Reviews
16
Ranking in other categories
Static Code Analysis (3rd)
FOSSA
Average Rating
8.6
Number of Reviews
15
Ranking in other categories
Software Composition Analysis (SCA) (10th)
 

Mindshare comparison

While both are Security Software solutions, they serve different purposes. Fortify Static Code Analyzer is designed for Static Code Analysis and holds a mindshare of 23.2%, up 18.9% compared to last year.
FOSSA, on the other hand, focuses on Software Composition Analysis (SCA), holds 3.7% mindshare, down 4.5% since last year.
Static Code Analysis
Software Composition Analysis (SCA)
 

Featured Reviews

Vishal Dhamke - PeerSpot reviewer
Dec 29, 2023
An expansive platform with comprehensive security rules and patterns to identify vulnerabilities
Setting up Fortify Static Application Security Testing (SAST) involves several steps to ensure that the tool is correctly configured and integrated into your development workflow, for example: installation, license activation, user access and permissions, integration with the development environment, project configuration, custom rules and policies, etc. The initial setup is very easy. I have used the enterprise version and a standalone version. The enterprise version definitely takes an ample amount of time to deploy because it needs to have a server, other logistics, and a proper RBAC in place. The enterprise version would take an ample amount of time, but the standard version is just a few clicks. A team of four to five people is required for the maintenance, and frequent updates are required to keep all the signatures up to date. I would rate the setup a nine out of ten.
Hanumanth Ramsetty - PeerSpot reviewer
Oct 24, 2024
Proactively mitigate deployment vulnerabilities with seamless dependency tracking
In our current project, we are using FOSSA as part of our CI/CD pipeline. It is used to scan our projects to ensure that our dependencies are up to date and do not introduce vulnerabilities to our code Before using FOSSA, we could only identify issues after deployment in the Cloud Run. Now, with…

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"You can really see what's happening after you've developed something."
"We write software, and therefore, the most valuable aspect for us is basically the code analysis part."
"Fortify Static Code Analyzer tells us if there are any security leaks or not. If there are, then it's notifying us and does not allow us to pass the DevOps pipeline. If it is finds everything's perfect, as per our given guidelines, then it is allowing us to go ahead and start it, and we are able to deploy it."
"We've found the documentation to be very good."
"I like Fortify Software Security Center or Fortify SSC. This tool is installed on each developer's machine, but Fortify Software Security Center combines everything. We can meet there as security professionals and developers. The developers scan their code and publish the results there. We can then look at them from a security perspective and see whether they fixed the issues. We can agree on whether something is a false positive and make decisions."
"The most valuable features include its ability to detect vulnerabilities accurately and its integration with our CI/CD pipeline."
"The reference provided for each issue is extremely helpful."
"The Software Security Center, which is often overlooked, stands out as the most effective feature."
"The scalability is excellent."
"The most valuable feature is definitely the ease and speed of integrating into build pipelines, like a Jenkins pipeline or something along those lines. The ease of a new development team coming on board and integrating FOSSA with a new project, or even an existing project, can be done so quickly that it's invaluable and it's easy to ask the developers to use a tool like this. Those developers greatly value the very quick feedback they get on any licensing or security vulnerability issues."
"I found FOSSA's out-of-the-box policy engine to be accurate and that it was tuned appropriately to the settings that we were looking for. The policy engine is pretty straightforward... I find it to be very straightforward to make small modifications to, but it's very rare that we have to make modifications to it. It's easy to use. It's a four-category system that handles most cases pretty well."
"The most valuable feature is its ability to identify all of the components in a build, and then surface the licenses that are associated with it, allowing us to make a decision as to whether or not we allow a team to use the components. That eliminates the risk that comes with running consumer software that contains open source components."
"Being able to know the licenses of the libraries is most valuable because we sell products, and we need to provide to the customers the licenses that we are using."
"Policies and identification of open-source licensing issues are the most valuable features. It reduces the time needed to identify open-source software licensing issues."
"What I really need from FOSSA, and it does a really good job of this, is to flag me when there are particular open source licenses that cause me or our legal department concern. It points out where a particular issue is, where it comes from, and the chain that brought it in, which is the most important part to me."
"FOSSA provided us with contextualized, easily actionable intelligence that alerted us to compliance issues. I could tell FOSSA exactly what I cared about and they would tell me when something was out of policy. I don't want to hear from the compliance tool unless I have an issue that I need to deal with. That was what was great about FOSSA is that it was basically "Here's my policy and only send me an alert if there's something without a policy." I thought that it was really good at doing that."
 

Cons

"The pricing is a bit high."
"The price can be improved."
"The generation of false positives should be reduced."
"Fortify Static Code Analyzer is a good solution, but sometimes we receive false positives. If they could reduce the number of false positives it would be good."
"Streamlining the upgrade process and enhancing compatibility would make it easier for us to keep our security tools up-to-date."
"It can be tricky if you want to exclude some files from scanning. For instance, if you do not want to scan and push testing files to Fortify Software Security Center, that is tricky with some IDEs, such as IntelliJ. We found that there is an Exclude feature that is not working. We reported that to them for future fixing. It needs some work on the plugins to make them consistent across IDEs and make them easier."
"Their licensing is expensive."
"I know the areas that they are trying to improve on. They've been getting feedback for several years. There are two main points. The first thing is keeping current with static code languages. I know it is difficult because code languages pop up all the time or there are new variants, but it is something that Fortify needs to put a better focus on. They need to keep current with their language support. The second thing is a philosophical issue, and I don't know if they'll ever change it. They've done a decent job of putting tools in place to mitigate things, but static code analysis is inherently noisy. If you just take a tool out of the box and run a scan, you're going to get a lot of results back, and not all of those results are interesting or important, which is different for every organization. Currently, we get four to five errors on the side of tagging, and it notifies you of every tiny inconsistency. If the tool sees something that it doesn't know, it flags, which becomes work that has to be done afterward. Clients don't typically like it. There has got to be a way of prioritizing. There are a ton of filter options within Fortify, but the problem is that you've got to go through the crazy noisy scan once before you know which filters you need to put in place to get to the interesting stuff. I keep hearing from their product team that they're working on a way to do container or docker scanning. That's a huge market mover. A lot of people are interested in that right now, and it is relevant. That is definitely something that I'd love to see in the next version or two."
"For open-source management, FOSSA's out-of-the-box policy engine is easy to use, but the list of licenses is not as complete as we would like it to be. They should add more open-source licenses to the selection."
"On the legal and policy sides, there is some room for improvement. I know that our legal team has raised complaints about having to approve the same dependency multiple times, as opposed to having them it across the entire organization."
"We have seen some inaccuracies or incompleteness with the distribution acknowledgments for an application, so there's certainly some room for improvement there. Another big feature that's missing that should be introduced is snippet matching, meaning, not just matching an entire component, but matching a snippet of code that had been for another project and put in different files that one of our developers may have created."
"One thing that can sometimes be difficult with FOSSA is understanding all that it can do. One of the ways that I've been able to unlock some of those more advanced features is through conversations with the absolutely awesome customer success team at FOSSA, but it has been a little bit difficult to find some of that information separately on my own through FAQs and other information channels that FOSSA has. The improvement is less about the product itself and more about empowering FOSSA customers to know and understand how to unlock its full potential."
"The technical support has room for improvement."
"If you have thousands of applications, organizing them all into teams or tags is challenging."
"FOSSA does not show the exact line of code with vulnerabilities, which adds time to the process as we have to locate these manually."
"Security scanning is an area for improvement. At this point, our experience is that we're only scanning for license information in components, and we're not scanning for security vulnerability information. We don't have access to that data. We use other tools for that. It would be an improvement for us to use one tool instead of two, so that we just have to go through one process instead of two."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price of Fortify Static Code Analyzer could be reduced."
"The licensing is expensive and is in the 50K range."
"Although I am not responsible for the budget, Fortify SAST is expensive."
"I rate the pricing of Fortify Static Code Analyzer as a seven out of ten since it is a bit expensive."
"The setup costs and pricing for Fortify may vary depending on the organization's needs and requirements."
"There is a licensing fee, and if you bring them to the company and you want them to do the installation and the implementation in the beginning, there is a separate cost. Similarly, if you want consultation or training, there is a separate cost. I see it as suitable only for enterprises. I do not see it suitable for a small business or individual use."
"From our standpoint, we are significantly better off with Fortify due to the favorable pricing we secured five years ago."
"It has a couple of license models. The one that we use most frequently is called their flexible deployment. We use this one because it is flexible and based on the number of code-contributing developers in the organization. It includes almost everything in the Fortify suite for one developer price. It gives access to not just the secure code analyzer (SCA) but also to FSC, the secure code. It gives us accessibility to scan central, which is the decentralized scanning farm. It also gives us access to the software security center, which is the vulnerability management platform."
"The solution's cost is a five out of ten."
"FOSSA is not cheap, but their offering is top-notch. It is very much a "you get what you pay for" scenario. Regardless of the price, I highly recommend FOSSA."
"FOSSA is a fairly priced product. It is not either cheaper or expensive. The pricing lies somewhere in the middle. The solution is worth the money that we are spending to use it."
"Its price is reasonable as compared to the market. It is competitively priced in comparison to other similar solutions on the market. It is also quite affordable in terms of the value that it delivers as compared to its alternative of hiring a team."
"The solution's pricing is good and reasonable because you can literally use a lot of it for free."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
30%
Computer Software Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Government
6%
Manufacturing Company
28%
Computer Software Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Healthcare Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Fortify Static Code Analyzer?
Integrating the Fortify Static Code Analyzer into our software development lifecycle was straightforward. It highlights important information beyond just syntax errors. It identifies issues like pa...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Fortify Static Code Analyzer?
I rate the pricing of Fortify Static Code Analyzer as a seven out of ten since it is a bit expensive.
What needs improvement with Fortify Static Code Analyzer?
False positives need improvement in the future. Fortify's vulnerability remediation guidance helps improve code security, but I think they need to improve the focus of the solution, as it still Con...
What do you like most about FOSSA?
I am impressed with the tool’s seamless integration and quick results.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for FOSSA?
The solution's pricing is good and reasonable because you can literally use a lot of it for free. You have to pay for the features you need, which I think is fair. If you want to get value for free...
What needs improvement with FOSSA?
If you have thousands of applications, organizing them all into teams or tags is challenging. There is a point where you start using FOSSA at a very large scale, and the user interface needs to adj...
 

Also Known As

Fortify Static Code Analysis SAST
No data available
 

Learn More

Video not available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
AppDyanmic, Uber, Twitter, Zendesk, Confluent
Find out what your peers are saying about Veracode, Checkmarx, OpenText and others in Static Code Analysis. Updated: November 2024.
814,649 professionals have used our research since 2012.