FOSSA vs Fortify Static Code Analyzer comparison

The compared OpenText and FOSSA solutions aren't in the same category. OpenText is ranked #3 in SCAS , with an average rating of 8.2, and holds a 11.3% mindshare in the category. FOSSA is ranked #9 in SCA , with an average rating of 8.0, and holds a 3.6% mindshare. Additionally, 87% of OpenText users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 92% of FOSSA users who would recommend it.

Fortify Static Code Analyzer

Read 16 Fortify Static Code Analyzer reviews

1,829 Views
1,289 Comparison Views

87% willing to recommend

FOSSA

Read 15 FOSSA reviews

2,219 Views
1,482 Comparison Views

92% willing to recommend

Fortify Static Code Analyzer

FOSSA

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Executive Summary

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.

To learn more, read our detailed Static Code Analysis Report (Updated: January 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Static Code Analysis

January 2025

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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

Fortify Static Code Analyzer

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

7.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Static Code Analysis (3rd)

FOSSA

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.9

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Software Composition Analysis (SCA) (9th)

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 11.3%, up 9.8% compared to last year.
FOSSA, on the other hand, focuses on Software Composition Analysis (SCA), holds 3.6% mindshare, down 4.4% since last year.

Static Code Analysis

Software Composition Analysis (SCA)

Featured Reviews

Vishal Dhamke

Vice President Application Security North America at BNP Paribas

An expansive platform that comes with a comprehensive set of 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 say for instance Installation, License Activation, User Access and Permissions, Integration with Development Environment, Project Configuration, Custom Rules and Policies, etc. The initial setup is very easy, 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 along with other logistics in place along with a proper RBAC. 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.

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Hanumanth Ramsetty

Software Engineer at Tech Mahindra Limited

Proactively mitigate deployment vulnerabilities with seamless dependency tracking

Before using FOSSA, we could only identify issues after deployment in the Cloud Run. Now, with FOSSA, we identify dependency issues or vulnerabilities during the CI phase itself. This proactive approach has eliminated the need to search the internet for solutions, as FOSSA provides updated recommendations automatically. This has made the process more efficient and mitigated risks before deployment.

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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

"It's helped us free up staff time."

"Fortify Static Code Analyzer's most valuable features are its ability to provide best practices for fixing code and its examples and capabilities to address security problems in the code. It effectively identifies security vulnerabilities by analyzing the code and offering insights on improving it."

"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 write software, and therefore, the most valuable aspect for us is basically the code analysis part."

"The reference provided for each issue is extremely helpful."

"The most valuable features include its ability to detect vulnerabilities accurately and its integration with our CI/CD pipeline."

"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."

More Fortify Static Code Analyzer pros

"The scalability is excellent."

"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."

"I am impressed with the tool’s seamless integration and quick results."

"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."

"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."

"FOSSA is easy to use and set up, provides relatively accurate results, and doesn't require armies of people to get value from its use."

"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."

"FOSSA allows us to keep track of all dependencies to ensure they are up to date and not causing any vulnerabilities."

More FOSSA pros

Cons

"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."

"It comes with a hefty licensing fee."

"The generation of false positives should be reduced."

"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."

"Not all languages are supported in Fortify."

"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."

"Streamlining the upgrade process and enhancing compatibility would make it easier for us to keep our security tools up-to-date."

More Fortify Static Code Analyzer cons

"On the dashboard, there should be an option to increase the column width so that we can see the complete name of the GitHub repository. Currently, on the dashboard, we see the list of projects, but to see the complete name, you have to hover your mouse over an item, which is annoying."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

More FOSSA cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The setup costs and pricing for Fortify may vary depending on the organization's needs and requirements."

"The licensing is expensive and is in the 50K range."

"From our standpoint, we are significantly better off with Fortify due to the favorable pricing we secured five years ago."

"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."

"I rate the pricing of Fortify Static Code Analyzer as a seven out of ten since it is a bit expensive."

"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 price of Fortify Static Code Analyzer could be reduced."

"Although I am not responsible for the budget, Fortify SAST is expensive."

"The solution's cost is a five out of ten."

"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."

"The solution's pricing is good and reasonable because you can literally use a lot of it for free."

"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."

"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."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

30%

Computer Software Company

14%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Government

Manufacturing Company

28%

Computer Software Company

14%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Educational Organization

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...

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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.

See all answers

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...

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What do you like most about FOSSA?

I am impressed with the tool’s seamless integration and quick results.

See all answers

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...

See all answers

What needs improvement with FOSSA?

FOSSA does not show the exact line of code with vulnerabilities, which adds time to the process as we have to locate these manually. Some other tools like Check Point or SonarQube provide exact lin...

See all answers

Comparisons

Black Duck vs Fortify Static Code Analyzer

Compared 35% of the time

Snyk vs Fortify Static Code Analyzer

Compared 19% of the time

Veracode vs Fortify Static Code Analyzer

Compared 12% of the time

Sonatype Lifecycle vs Fortify Static Code Analyzer

Compared 9% of the time

CodeSonar vs Fortify Static Code Analyzer

Compared 1% of the time

More Fortify Static Code Analyzer Competitors

Black Duck vs FOSSA

Compared 43% of the time

Snyk vs FOSSA

Compared 18% of the time

Mend.io vs FOSSA

Compared 12% of the time

JFrog Xray vs FOSSA

Compared 7% of the time

Sonatype Lifecycle vs FOSSA

Compared 4% of the time

More FOSSA Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Fortify Static Code Analyzer

February 2025

Download Fortify Static Code Analyzer product report

Buyer's Guide

FOSSA

February 2025

Download FOSSA product report

Also Known As

Fortify Static Code Analysis SAST

No data available

Overview

Fortify Static Code Analyzer (SCA) utilizes numerous algorithms in addition to a dynamic intelligence base of secure coding protocols to investigate an application’s source code for any potential risk of malicious or dangerous threats. Additionally, the solution will prioritize the most critical concerns and give direction on how users can repair those concerns. This solution researches each and every potential route that workflow and data can travel to discover and repair all possible vulnerabilities. Fortify SCA allows users to create safe and secure software quickly. Users are able to discover potential security gaps more quickly with precise outcomes and repair them immediately.

Fortify Static Code Analyzer Benefits

CI/CD pipeline security: Fortify SCA integrates well with third-party tools such as ALM Octane, Atlassian Bamboo, Azure DevOps, Eclipse, Jenkins, and Jira. It offers real-time scan results, immediate recommendations, and collaborative auditing, and finds threats faster. It also discovers and prioritizes weaknesses to reduce risk.
Cost-effective: Improves coding actions by training users as they work to better understand the relationship of static application security testing (SAST). Fortify SCA is able to find more vulnerabilities than other solutions and delivers significantly fewer false positives.
Quick and reliable scanning: Fortify SCA will discover and eradicate weaknesses in byte, binary, or source code. SAST is able to stop the bulk of code issues at the start of development. The solution is able to discover 815 specific categories of risk, works through 27 programming languages and more than one million different APIs. Fortify SCA has a positive rate of 100% in the OWASP 1.2 benchmark.

Fortify Static Code Analyzer Features

Flexible deployment: Using Fortify On Demand, users can work in a complete SaaS environment. Fortify Hosted allows users to use on-premises and SaaS to work in a secure virtual space with complete control. Fortify-On-Prem gives users absolute control of the Fortify SCA solution.
Security assistant: Users have an interactive guide as they create code that provides risk analysis and anticipated outcomes. Security Assistant is an outstanding immediate feedback tool that gives instant results with significantly fewer false positives.
Audit assistant: This feature uses machine learning to reduce manual audit time while prioritizing the most important risks to users' networks. It provides automated audits in minutes. Any manual examinations are reduced, all issues are prioritized in accordance with organizational needs, and Fortify SCA consistently provides audit results to all projects.

Results from Real Users

“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 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.” - Arun D., Senior Architect at a healthcare company.

“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.” - Tom H., Director of Security at Merito

OpenText

Up to 90% of any piece of software is from open source, creating countless dependencies and areas of risk to manage. FOSSA is the most reliable automated policy engine for legal teams to maintain license compliance, security to fix vulnerabilities, and engineering to improve code quality across the entire software supply chain. As the only developer-native open source management platform, FOSSA fully integrates with your existing CI/CD pipeline to provide complete visibility and context earlier in the software development lifecycle. For the first time, teams can collaboratively shift left and audit, analyze, control, and remediate license issues and vulnerabilities right in their existing workflows.

FOSSA

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: January 2025.

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