Apache Archiva vs. Sonatype Platform

Well suited for small organizations to medium-sized teams/organizations. Apache Archiva is well suited for:

• It acts as a central repository/proxy of the artifacts generated and used by the teams.
• It provides control on which open source repositories can be utilized by the team.
• Saves network bandwidth by reducing outbound traffic.

Apache Archiva is less appropriate for organizations where immediate support/bug resolutions are required.

Incentivized

For a medium to large size organization with the possibility to setup a central support team to support the governance, maintenance and implementation of the Sonatype Platform, the product suite from Sonatype is very well suited. Setting up detailed configurations requires quite some effort and deep understanding of the Sonatype Platform. Whenever needed the support teams from Sonatype are available for technical and functional support. As well the Innovate platform of Sonatype offers customers to interact on specific topics and set up customer reference calls.

• It's an open source project and therefore saves cost.
• It allows exchange of artifacts/libraries between different teams.
• It allows managing internal and external repositories with ease.

Incentivized

• Nexus firewall is a great feature enabled for all our proxy repositories which are used to download the third-party opensource packages.
• Nexus IQ is integrated with build stage to analyze the component against evaluation policy. This helps to figure out the application security standards.
• Nexus IQ is also having a feature to scan container images before it uploads to our private repository. This is great feature for container platforms.

• Muti-tenancy was hard to achieve.
• UI can be improved. Its seems bit dated.
• It is a bit tricky to setup.

Incentivized

• Recommendations for best Energy Consumption options based on existing BOM - e.g. replace component X with component Y to reduce CPU cycles.
• More specific recommendations regarding Open Source Licensing - not just saying "Copyleft" but the next level of analysis (it's difficult - but would save a lot of time)
• Provide specific component replacement options where no "next version" resolves a high severity vulnerability.

Incentivized

Sonatype supports more than 200 dev(s). It proves with the repository to store the artifacts. Allows for governance of open source software used by the different teams. It is used by security teams to scan for vulnerabilities in software(s) and in the deployed containers. It helps ensure code quality.

Incentivized

Monthly touchpoints with Sinisa has been very valuable.

Incentivized

• Apache Archiva is a great choice for organizations with a limited budget.
• Alternatives are expensive to acquire Archiva comes offers REST API(s) which allows the creation of customized UI.
• With Apache Archiva, it is easy to manage the remote proxy repositories.
• RBAC helps with managing user access to the repository.
• Configuration can be achieved using UI and stored in archiva.xml.
• Backup of configuration is quite simple.

Incentivized

Out of other products we evaluated before choosing Sonatype, the later looked far more user friendly, easy to understand and work with. This was key for us, as the tool needs to be used by many engineers that don't have security as their main focus. Having a tool that is easy to understand and work with, makes the process of evaluating open source dependencies much easier and appealing for developers.

Incentivized

• The impact of Apache Archiva on ROI has been positive. Since it is open source. It is free.
• It has allowed teams to store artifacts centrally, thus leading to a reduced need for multiple servers
• Security audits can be easily performed on the artifacts.

Incentivized

• Sonatype's centralized management of artifacts have made it very easy for developers to share code in an efficient manner.
• Sonatype's low false positive rate has made it easier to convince developers to remediate vulnerabilities
• Sonatype's archaic architecture has made it more expensive to manage than it could be.