We performed a comparison between Fortify Static Code Analyzer and FOSSA based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Veracode, Checkmarx, OpenText and others in Static Code Analysis."Its flexibility is most valuable. It is such a flexible tool. It can be implemented in a number of ways. It can do anything you want it to do. It can be fully automated within a DevOps pipeline. It can also be used in an ad hoc, special test case scenario and anywhere in between."
"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."
"You can really see what's happening after you've developed something."
"The Software Security Center, which is often overlooked, stands out as the most effective feature."
"It's helped us free up staff time."
"The reference provided for each issue is extremely helpful."
"The integration Subset core integration, using Jenkins is one of the good features."
"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."
"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."
"The scalability is excellent."
"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."
"One of the things that I really like about FOSSA is that it allows you to go very granular. For example, if there's a package that's been flagged because it's subject to a license that may be conflicts with or raises a concern with one of the policies that I've set, then FOSSA enables you to go really granular into that package to see which aspects of the package are subject to which licenses. We can ultimately determine with our engineering teams if we really need this part of the package or not. If it's raising this flag, we can make really actionable decisions at a very micro level to enable the build to keep pushing forward."
"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."
"Their CLI tool is very efficient. It does not send your source code over to their servers. It just does fingerprinting. It is also very easy to integrate into software development practices."
"The support team has just been amazing, and it helps us to have a great support team from FOSSA. They are there to triage and answer all our questions which come up by using their product."
"The troubleshooting capabilities of this solution could be improved. This would reduce the number of cases that users have to submit."
"It comes with a hefty licensing fee."
"The product shows false positives for Python applications."
"The generation of false positives should be reduced."
"Fortify Static Code Analyzer has a bit of a learning curve, and I don't find it particularly helpful in narrowing down the vulnerabilities we should prioritize."
"Fortify's software security center needs a design refresh."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"The solution provides contextualized, actionable, intelligence that alerts us to compliance issues, but there is still a little bit of work to be done on it. One of the issues that I have raised with FOSSA is that when it identifies an issue that is an error, why is it in error? What detail can they give to me? They've improved, but that still needs some work. They could provide more information that helps me to identify the dependencies and then figure out where they originated from."
"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."
"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."
"I wish there was a way that you could have a more global rollout of it, instead of having to do it in each repository individually. It's possible, that's something that is offered now, or maybe if you were using the CI Jenkins, you'd be able to do that. But with Travis, there wasn't an easy way to do that. At least not that I could find. That was probably the biggest issue."
"I would like the FOSSA API to be broader. I would like not to have to interact with the GUI at all, to do the work that I want to do. I would like them to do API-first development, rather than a focus on the GUI."
"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."
"I want the product to include binary scanning which is missing at the moment. Binary scanning includes code and component matching through dependency management. It also includes the actual scanning and reverse engineering of the boundaries and finding out what is inside."
Fortify Static Code Analyzer is ranked 3rd in Static Code Analysis with 14 reviews while FOSSA is ranked 9th in Software Composition Analysis (SCA) with 12 reviews. Fortify Static Code Analyzer is rated 8.4, while FOSSA is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Fortify Static Code Analyzer writes "Seamless to integrate and identify vulnerabilities and frees up staff time". On the other hand, the top reviewer of FOSSA writes "Compatibility with a wide range of dev tools, web and "C-type", enables us to scan across our ecosystem, including legacy software". Fortify Static Code Analyzer is most compared with Black Duck, Snyk, Veracode, Sonatype Lifecycle and CodeSonar, whereas FOSSA is most compared with Black Duck, Snyk, Mend.io, JFrog Xray and Checkmarx Software Composition Analysis.
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