We performed a comparison between FOSSA and Mend.io based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Software Composition Analysis (SCA) solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."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."
"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."
"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."
"I am impressed with the tool’s seamless integration and quick results."
"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."
"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."
"For us, the most valuable tool was open-source licensing analysis."
"Its ease of use and good results are the most valuable."
"We set the solution up and enabled it and we had everything running pretty quickly."
"The inventory management as well as the ability to identify security vulnerabilities has been the most valuable for our business."
"WhiteSource is unique in the scanning of open-source licenses. Additionally, the vulnerabilities aspect of the solution is a benefit. We don't use WhiteSource in the whole organization, but we use it for some projects. There we receive a sense of the vulnerabilities of the open-source components, which improves our security work. The reports are automated which is useful."
"The most valuable feature is the unified JAR to scan for all langs (wss-scanner jar)."
"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 vulnerability, we usually get a dedicated email from our R&D team saying that this particular vulnerability has been exploited in the world, and we should definitely check our project for this and take corrective actions."
"It gives us full visibility into what we're using, what needs to be updated, and what's vulnerable, which helps us make better decisions."
"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 more customized categories because our company is so big. This is doable for them. They are still in the stages of trying to figure this out since we are one of their biggest companies that they support."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"At times, the latency of getting items out of the findings after they're remediated is higher than it should be."
"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."
"It should support multiple SBOM formats to be able to integrate with old industry standards."
"The solution lacks the code snippet part."
"The dashboard UI and UX are problematic."
"On the reporting side, they could make some improvements. They are making the reports better and better, but sometimes it takes a lot of time to generate a report for our entire organization."
"Make the product available in a very stable way for other web browsers."
"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."
FOSSA is ranked 9th in Software Composition Analysis (SCA) with 12 reviews while Mend.io is ranked 4th in Software Composition Analysis (SCA) with 29 reviews. FOSSA is rated 8.6, while Mend.io is rated 8.4. 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". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Mend.io writes "Easy to use, great for finding vulnerabilities, and simple to set up". FOSSA is most compared with Black Duck, Snyk, Fortify Static Code Analyzer, JFrog Xray and Checkmarx Software Composition Analysis, whereas Mend.io is most compared with SonarQube, Black Duck, Veracode, Snyk and Fortify on Demand. See our FOSSA vs. Mend.io report.
See our list of best Software Composition Analysis (SCA) vendors.
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