Tidelift

Tidelift is a subscription service offered by Tidelift, Inc. that aims to assist organizations in proactively managing risk associated with open source software. According to the vendor, Tidelift provides insights and management tools for open source software, catering to small to large enterprises across various industries. The product is intended for use by software developers, IT managers, DevOps engineers, security professionals, and technology companies.

Key Features

Centralized, structured, and continuously curated database of insights: According to the vendor, Tidelift offers a centralized and structured database of insights on open source software. The database is continuously curated to ensure up-to-date and accurate information. It covers millions of open source packages from multiple ecosystems and repositories.

First-party maintainer-sourced data: Tidelift partners directly with maintainers of popular open source packages, allowing them to validate that they follow secure development practices. The vendor claims that this partnership provides unique first-party insights such as publishing privileges, authentication practices, and vulnerability handling recommendations.

Automated, structured, and centralized data: Tidelift aggregates data from multiple package manager ecosystems and repositories. The vendor states that the data is structured and presented in a centralized format. It provides insights on releases, licenses, source repository location, dependencies, and maintenance activity.

Tidelift human-researched data: According to the vendor, Tidelift's data science team analyzes and researches the upstream data. They claim that this approach provides contextualized insights on package maintenance, security policies, deprecation, vulnerability impact, and more. The goal is to help organizations make informed decisions about open source software.

Visibility: Tidelift ensures stakeholders have appropriate visibility of open source software usage. The vendor claims that it provides centralized dynamic software bills of materials (SBOMs) with release and license information. Additionally, it offers granular mapping of open source packages used across individual applications, including runtime or test usage, policy compliance, vulnerabilities, and dependency chains.

Management: Tidelift aims to help standardize open source software management practices and policies. According to the vendor, it offers built-in security standards to guide developers on allowed releases based on continuous evaluation. Furthermore, it includes licensing templates to ensure packages with approved licenses are used. Tidelift also supports maintenance standards to avoid using deprecated or outdated package versions.

Security: The vendor states that Tidelift provides guidance to developers on allowed releases based on security standards. They claim that it allows exceptions for specific use cases unaffected by vulnerabilities, ensuring that organizations can maintain a secure software ecosystem.

Licensing: Tidelift includes out-of-the-box licensing templates to guide developers in using packages with approved licenses. According to the vendor, this feature helps prevent legal risks associated with using packages with unexpected licenses, ensuring compliance and minimizing potential liabilities.

Maintenance: Tidelift aims to help organizations implement maintenance standards to avoid using deprecated or out-of-date package versions. The vendor claims that by promoting best practices in package maintenance, Tidelift enables organizations to keep their software up-to-date and secure.