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Fortify Static Code Analyzer vs Mend.io comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary
 

Categories and Ranking

Fortify Static Code Analyzer
Ranking in Static Code Analysis
3rd
Average Rating
8.2
Number of Reviews
16
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Mend.io
Ranking in Static Code Analysis
4th
Average Rating
8.4
Number of Reviews
29
Ranking in other categories
Application Security Tools (17th), Software Composition Analysis (SCA) (7th), Software Supply Chain Security (1st)
 

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.
Jeffrey Harker - PeerSpot reviewer
May 12, 2022
Easy to use, great for finding vulnerabilities, and simple to set up
Finding vulnerabilities is pretty easy. Mend (formerly WhiteSource) does a great job of that and we had quite a few when we first put this in place. Governance up until that time had been manual and when we tried to do manual governance of a large codebase, our chances of success were pretty minimal. Mend (formerly WhiteSource) 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. We use Mend (formerly WhiteSource) Smart Fix. I’d say pretty much everything in Mend (formerly WhiteSource) is easy to use. We really don't have too much difficulty using the product at all. I've implemented other scanners and tools and had much more trouble with those products than we've ever had with Mend (formerly WhiteSource). That’s extremely important. It's hard to sell to some of these teams to put any level of overhead on top of their product development efforts and the fact that Mend (formerly WhiteSource) is as easy as it is to use is a critical aspect of adoption here. It scores very highly on that scale. Mend (formerly WhiteSource) Smart Fix helps our developers fix vulnerable transitive dependencies. It's all very helpful to our development community. First of all, we're able to find that there are issues. Second of all, we're able to figure out very quickly what needs to be done to remediate the issues. Mend (formerly WhiteSource) helped reduce our mean time to resolution since adopting it. A lot of it is process improvement and technical aspects that can tell us how to go about remediating the issues. We get that out of Mend (formerly WhiteSource). Making the developers aware that these issues are there and insisting they be corrected and making the effort to do that visibly is very valuable to us. Overall, Mend (formerly WhiteSource) helped dramatically reduce the number of open-source software vulnerabilities running in our production at any given point in time. I won't give metrics, however, it's fair to say that our state before and after Mend (formerly WhiteSource) is dramatically different and moved in a positive direction. Mend's ability to integrate our developer's existing workflows, including their IDE repository and CI is good. Azure DevOps is really important. That's what the pipelines are. That's a very important piece of the entire puzzle. If this was just an external scanner where periodically we'd go through and scan our repos and give them a report, we’d do that with pen testing products, for example, for security testing. The problem is, by the time they get those reports, they've already shipped the code to multiple environments and it's too late to stop the train. With these features being baked into the pipelines like this, they know immediately. As a result, we're able to quickly take action to remediate findings.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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."
"Automating the Jenkins plugins and the build title is a big plus."
"The integration Subset core integration, using Jenkins is one of the good features."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"The reference provided for each issue is extremely helpful."
"We use a lot of open sources with a variety of containers, and the different open sources come with different licenses. Some come with dual licenses, some are risky and some are not. All our three use cases are equally important to us and we found WhiteSource handles them decently."
"What is very nice is that the product is very easy to set up. When you want to implement Mend.io, it just takes a few minutes to create your organization, create your products, and scan them. It's really convenient to have Mend scanning your products in less than one hour."
"The license management of WhiteSource was at a good level. As compared to other tools that I have used, its functionality for the licenses for the code libraries was quite good. Its UI was also fine."
"The inventory management as well as the ability to identify security vulnerabilities has been the most valuable for our business."
"The most valuable features are the reporting, customizing libraries "In-house, White list, license selection", comparing the products/projects, and License & Copyright resolution."
"The most valuable feature is the unified JAR to scan for all langs (wss-scanner jar)."
"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."
"We set the solution up and enabled it and we had everything running pretty quickly."
 

Cons

"The product shows false positives for Python applications."
"The pricing is a bit high."
"Not all languages are supported in Fortify."
"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 contains many bugs and needs a thorough review."
"The generation of false positives should be reduced."
"The troubleshooting capabilities of this solution could be improved. This would reduce the number of cases that users have to submit."
"Their licensing is expensive."
"Streamlining the upgrade process and enhancing compatibility would make it easier for us to keep our security tools up-to-date."
"Some detected libraries do not specify a location of where in the source they were matched from, which is something that should be enhanced to enable quicker troubleshooting."
"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."
"WhiteSource Prioritize should be expanded to cover more than Java and JavaScript."
"At times, the latency of getting items out of the findings after they're remediated is higher than it should be."
"Mend supports most of the common package managers, but it doesn't support some that we use. I would appreciate it if they can quickly make these changes to add new package managers when necessary."
"It would be good if it can do dynamic code analysis. It is not necessarily in that space, but it can do more because we have too many tools. Their partner relationship support is a little bit confusing. They haven't really streamlined the support process when we buy through a reseller. They should improve their process."
"WhiteSource needs improvement in the scanning of the containers and images with distinguishing the layers."
"The UI can be slow once in a while, and we're not sure if it's because of the amount of data we have, or it is just a slow product, but it would be nice if it could be improved."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The licensing is expensive and is in the 50K range."
"I rate the pricing of Fortify Static Code Analyzer as a seven out of ten since it is a bit expensive."
"Although I am not responsible for the budget, Fortify SAST is expensive."
"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."
"The price of Fortify Static Code Analyzer could be reduced."
"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."
"From our standpoint, we are significantly better off with Fortify due to the favorable pricing we secured five years ago."
"The setup costs and pricing for Fortify may vary depending on the organization's needs and requirements."
"We always negotiate for the best price possible, and as far as I know, Mend has done an excellent job with their pricing. Our management is happy with the pricing, which has led to renewals."
"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."
"The version that we are using, WhiteSource Bolt, is a free integration with Azure DevOps."
"We are paying a lot of money to use WhiteSource. In our company, it is not easy to argue that it is worth the price. ​"
"This is an expensive solution."
"It is fairly priced."
"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."
"As we were using an SaaS-based service, the solution must be scalable, although my understanding is that this is based on the licensing model one is using."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
30%
Computer Software Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Government
6%
Financial Services Firm
18%
Computer Software Company
16%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Insurance Company
5%
 

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...
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...
 

Also Known As

Fortify Static Code Analysis SAST
WhiteSource, Mend SCA, Mend.io Supply Chain Defender, Mend SAST
 

Learn More

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
Microsoft, Autodesk, NCR, Target, IBM, vodafone, Siemens, GE digital, KPMG, LivePerson, Jack Henry and Associates
Find out what your peers are saying about Fortify Static Code Analyzer vs. Mend.io and other solutions. Updated: October 2024.
814,649 professionals have used our research since 2012.