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FOSSA vs Snyk comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 11, 2026

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

FOSSA
Ranking in Software Composition Analysis (SCA)
9th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.9
Number of Reviews
15
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Snyk
Ranking in Software Composition Analysis (SCA)
2nd
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
50
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (17th), Application Security Tools (7th), Static Application Security Testing (SAST) (9th), GRC (4th), Cloud Management (12th), Vulnerability Management (15th), Container Security (6th), Software Development Analytics (2nd), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (13th), DevSecOps (3rd), Application Security Posture Management (ASPM) (2nd), AI Security (11th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2026, in the Software Composition Analysis (SCA) category, the mindshare of FOSSA is 3.1%, down from 3.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Snyk is 10.5%, down from 16.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Software Composition Analysis (SCA) Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Snyk10.5%
FOSSA3.1%
Other86.4%
Software Composition Analysis (SCA)
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer2588340 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Software Engineer at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees
Dependency management enhanced with update suggestions but lacks precise vulnerability tracking
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 line numbers for bugs. Also, the process in FOSSA can be quite contradicting and not very straightforward for new users.
Abhishek-Goyal - PeerSpot reviewer
Software Engineer at a computer software company with 11-50 employees
Improves security posture by actively reducing critical vulnerabilities and guiding remediation
Snyk's main features include open-source vulnerability scanning, code security, container security, infrastructure as code security, risk-based prioritization, development-first integration, continuous monitoring and alerting, automation, and remediation. The best features I appreciate are the vulnerability checking, vulnerability scanning, and code security capabilities, as Snyk scans all open-source dependencies for known vulnerabilities and helps with license compliance for open-source components. Snyk integrates into IDEs, allowing issues to be caught as they appear in the code dynamically and prioritizes risk while providing remediation advice. Snyk provides actionable remediation advice on where vulnerabilities can exist and where code security is compromised, automatically scanning everything and providing timely alerts. Snyk has positively impacted my organization by improving the security posture across all software repositories, resulting in fewer critical vulnerabilities, more confidence in overall product security, and faster security compliance for project clients. Snyk has helped reduce vulnerabilities significantly. Initially, the repository had 17 to 31 critical and high vulnerabilities, but Snyk has helped manage them down to just five vulnerabilities, which are now lower and not high or critical.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"FOSSA suggests solutions for dependency mismatches."
"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."
"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."
"We're loving some of the Kubernetes integration as well. That's really quite cool. It's still in the early days of our use of it, but it looks really exciting. In the Kubernetes world, it's very good at reporting on the areas around the configuration of your platform, rather than the things that you've pulled in. There's some good advice there that allows you to prioritize whether something is important or just worrying. That's very helpful."
"Snyk provides a lot of information on vulnerabilities, the packages being used, and their dependencies, giving good insight into the security of those packages."
"Snyk performs software composition analysis (SCA) similar to other expensive tools."
"Snyk allows for scaling across large organizations, accommodating tens of thousands of applications and over 60,000 repositories, making it suitable for wide-scale deployment."
"The most valuable feature of Snyk is the SBOM."
"It has improved our vulnerability rating and reduced our vulnerabilities through the tool during the time that we've had it. It's definitely made us more aware, as we have removed scoping for existing vulnerabilities and platforms since we rolled it out up until now."
"What is valuable about Snyk is its simplicity."
"Static code analysis is one of the best features of the solution."
 

Cons

"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."
"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 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."
"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."
"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 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."
"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."
"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."
"It would be helpful if we get a recommendation while doing the scan about the necessary things we need to implement after identifying the vulnerabilities."
"It lists projects. So, if you have a number of microservices in an enterprise, then you could have pages of findings. Developers will then spend zero time going through the pages of reports to figure out, "Is there something I need to fix?" While it may make sense to list all the projects and issues in these very long lists for completeness, Snyk could do a better job of bubbling up and grouping items, e.g., a higher level dashboard that draws attention to things that are new, the highest priority things, or things trending in the wrong direction. That would make it a lot easier. They don't quite have that yet in container security."
"The way Snyk notifies if we have an issue, there are a few options: High vulnerability or medium vulnerability. The problem with that is high vulnerabilities are too broad, because there are too many. If you enable notifications, you get a lot of notifications, When you get many notifications, they become irrelevant because they're not specific. I would prefer to have control over the notifications and somehow decide if I want to get only exploitable vulnerabilities or get a specific score for a vulnerability. Right now, we receive too many high vulnerabilities. If we enable notifications, then we just get a lot of spam message. Therefore, we would like some type of filtering system to be built-in for the system to be more precise."
"I would like to give further ability to grouping code repositories, in such a way that you could group them by the teams that own them, then produce alerting to those teams. The way that we are seeing it right now, the alerting only goes to a couple of places. I wish we could configure the code to go to different places."
"The product is very expensive."
"Although Snyk is strong, sometimes it flags vulnerabilities that are not reachable, not exploitable, and not relevant to a project."
"Snyk's API and UI features could work better in terms of speed."
"We have seen cases where tools didn't find or recognize certain dependencies. These are known issues, to some extent, due to the complexity in the language or stack that you using. There are some certain circumstances where the tool isn't actually finding what it's supposed to be finding, then it could be misleading."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"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."
"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."
"The solution's cost is a five out of ten."
"Their licensing model is fairly robust and scalable for our needs. I believe we have reached a reasonable agreement on the licensing to enable hundreds of developers to participate in this product offering. The solution is very tailored towards developers and its licensing model works well for us."
"It's inexpensive and easy to license. It comes in standard package sizing, which is straightforward. This information is publicly found on their website."
"I would rate the pricing of Snyk at two. I'm currently using the free version, which the company offers before buying the full version. So, the price is affordable, especially for an enterprise."
"Pricing-wise, it is not expensive as compared to other tools. If you have a couple of licenses, you can scan a certain number of projects. It just needs to be attached to them."
"It is pretty expensive. It is not a cheap product."
"We are using the open-source version for the scans."
"We do have some missing licenses issues, especially with non-SPDX compliant one, but we expect this to be fixed soon"
"The solution is less expensive than Black Duck."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
21%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Computer Software Company
7%
Educational Organization
7%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Comms Service Provider
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise8
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business21
Midsize Enterprise9
Large Enterprise21
 

Questions from the Community

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?
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...
What is your primary use case for FOSSA?
I have worked with FOSSA primarily to manage the dependencies in our projects. For example, if I take a Spring Boot application, FOSSA helps in identifying mismatches or unsupported dependencies th...
How does Snyk compare with SonarQube?
Snyk does a great job identifying and reducing vulnerabilities. This solution is fully automated and monitors 24/7 to find any issues reported on the internet. It will store dependencies that you a...
What do you like most about Snyk?
The most effective feature in securing project dependencies stems from its ability to highlight security vulnerabilities.
What needs improvement with Snyk?
There are a lot of false positives that need to be identified and separated. The inclusion of AI to remove false positives would be beneficial. So far, I've not seen any AI features to enhance vuln...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

No data available
Fugue, Snyk AppRisk
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

AppDyanmic, Uber, Twitter, Zendesk, Confluent
StartApp, Segment, Skyscanner, DigitalOcean, Comic Relief
Find out what your peers are saying about FOSSA vs. Snyk and other solutions. Updated: February 2026.
882,606 professionals have used our research since 2012.