We performed a comparison between SonarQube and Sonatype Nexus Lifecycle based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Based on the parameters we compared, SonarQube and Sonatype Nexus Lifecycle seem to have a similar rating among users regarding ease of deployment, pricing, service and support, and ROI. In terms of features, users of SonarQube felt more scanning features were needed, while users of Sonatype Nexus Lifecycle felt the software needed to be more code-driven.
"There is a free version."
"Using SonarQube benefits us because we are able to avoid the inclusion of malware in our applications."
"The software quality gate streamlines the product's quality."
"The customizable dashboard and ability to include results and coverage from unit test and other static analysis code tools."
"It is a very good tool for analysis and security vulnerability checking."
"The overall quality of the indicator is good."
"The tool helps us to monitor and manage violations. It manages the bugs and security violations."
"SonarQube is useful for controlling all of our Azure task tracking and scanning."
"The most important features of the Sonatype Nexus Lifecycle are the vulnerability reports."
"The most valuable feature is that I get a quick overview of the libraries that are included in the application, and the issues that are connected with them. I can quickly understand which problems there are from a security point of view or from a licensing point of view. It's quick and very exact."
"It scans and gives you a low false-positive count... The reason we picked Lifecycle over the other products is, while the other products were flagging stuff too, they were flagging things that were incorrect. Nexus has low false-positive results, which give us a high confidence factor."
"Its engine itself is most valuable in terms of the way it calculates and decides whether a security vulnerability exists or not. That's the most important thing. Its security is also pretty good, and its listing about the severities is also good."
"The way we can define policies and apply those policies selectively across the different applications is valuable. We can define a separate policy for public-facing applications and a separate policy for the internal applications. That is cool."
"The component piece, where you can analyze the component, is the most valuable. You can pull the component up and you can look at what versions are bad, what versions are clean, and what versions haven't been reported on yet. You can make decisions based off of that, in terms of where you want to go. I like that it puts all that information right there in a window for you."
"The most valuable features of the Sonatype Nexus Lifecycle are the evaluation of the unit test coverage, vulnerability scanning, duplicate code lines, code smells, and unnecessary loops."
"Automating the Jenkins plugins and the build title is a big plus."
"Currently requires multiple tools, lacking one overall tool."
"I would like to see improvements in defining the quality sets of rules and the quality to ensure code with low-performance does not end up in production."
"Ease of use/interface."
"There are sometimes security breaches in our code, which aren't be caught by SonarQube. In the security area, SonarCube has to improve. It needs to better compete with other products."
"Our developers have complained about the Quality Gates and the number of false positives that this product reports."
"We previously experienced issues with security but a segregated security violation has been implemented and the issues we experienced are being fixed."
"The BPM language is important and should be considered in SonarQube."
"There isn't a very good enterprise report."
"They're working on the high-quality data with Conan. For Conan applications, when it was first deployed to Nexus IQ, it would scan one file type for dependencies. We don't use that method in Conan, we use another file type, which is an acceptable method in Conan, and they didn't have support for that other file type. I think they didn't even know about it because they aren't super familiar with Conan yet. I informed them that there's this other file type that they could scan for dependencies, and that's what they added functionality for."
"One thing that it is lacking, one thing I don't like, is that when you label something or add a status to it, you do it as an overall function, but you can't go back and isolate a library that you want to call out individually and remove a status from it. It's still lacking some functionality-type things for controlling labels and statuses. I'd like to be able to apply it across all of my apps, but then turn it off for one, and I can't do that."
"One area of improvement, about which I have spoken to the Sonatype architect a while ago, is related to the installation. We still have an installation on Linux machines. The installation should move to EKS or Kubernetes so that we can do rollover updates, and we don't have to take the service down. My primary focus is to have at least triple line availability of my tools, which gives me a very small window to update my tools, including IQ. Not having them on Kubernetes means that every time we are performing an upgrade, there is downtime. It impacts the 0.1% allocated downtime that we are allowed to have, which becomes a challenge. So, if there is Kubernetes installation, it would be much easier. That's one thing that definitely needs to be improved."
"As far as the relationship of, and ease of finding the relationships between, libraries and applications across the whole enterprise goes, it still does that. They could make that a little smoother, although right now it's still pretty good."
"Their licensing is expensive."
"If there is something which is not in Maven Central, sometimes it is difficult to get the right information because it's not found."
"Overall it's good, but it would be good for our JavaScript front-end developers to have that IDE integration for their libraries. Right now, they don't, and I'm told by my Sonatype support rep that I need to submit an idea, from which they will submit a feature request. I was told it was already in the pipeline, so that was one strike against sales."
"In terms of features, the reports natively come in as PDF or JSON. They should start thinking of another way to filter their reports. The reporting tool used by most enterprises, like Splunk and Elasticsearch, do not work as well with JSON."
SonarQube is ranked 1st in Application Security Tools with 110 reviews while Sonatype Lifecycle is ranked 6th in Application Security Tools with 42 reviews. SonarQube is rated 8.0, while Sonatype Lifecycle is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of SonarQube writes "Easy to integrate and has a plug-in that supports both C and C++ languages". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Sonatype Lifecycle writes "Seamless to integrate and identify vulnerabilities and frees up staff time". SonarQube is most compared with Checkmarx One, SonarCloud, Coverity, Veracode and Fortify on Demand, whereas Sonatype Lifecycle is most compared with Black Duck, Fortify Static Code Analyzer, GitLab, Checkmarx One and Mend.io. See our SonarQube vs. Sonatype Lifecycle report.
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