Black Duck Software Composition Analysis (SCA) vs. Sonatype Platform

If you are using a lot of open-source libraries, which is most likely, this is a must-have to ensure no known vulnerabilities slip into production

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.

• Quick inventory scan: Black Duck helps us scan the code repositories in no time. And quickly list the components and I now really know what is in my code.
• Security and License risk management: Black Duck being rich in its knowledge base about the vulnerabilities and license issues of open source components, quickly compares the identified inventory to the Black Duck knowledge base and lists all the vulnerabilities and license issues in the code.
• Integration for automatic scanning: Black Duck is part of devops which provides us automatic scanning. Black Duck is not just for devops but also SecOps.

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.

• License model based on usage is costly.
• Documentation is extensive, but often confusing.
• Black Duck Hub could use some feature improvements for more robust governance capabilities

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

Support seems very responsive.

Incentivized

Monthly touchpoints with Sinisa has been very valuable.

Incentivized

Black Duck is an obvious choice, with its versatility, integration, best enterprise support and on top of the list the knowledge base Black Duck has. Vega or Grabber also scans the application and tells about vulnerabilities. But it can never be compared with the feature set of Black Duck. Black Duck can also generate reports.

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

• It is hard to measure ROI since Black Duck Hub saves us from costly legal battles that have thankfully never had to happen.

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.