We performed a comparison between FOSSA and Snyk based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Software Composition Analysis (SCA) solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."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."
"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."
"The scalability is excellent."
"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."
"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."
"I found FOSSA's out-of-the-box policy engine to be accurate and that it was tuned appropriately to the settings that we were looking for. The policy engine is pretty straightforward... I find it to be very straightforward to make small modifications to, but it's very rare that we have to make modifications to it. It's easy to use. It's a four-category system that handles most cases pretty well."
"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."
"FOSSA provided us with contextualized, easily actionable intelligence that alerted us to compliance issues. I could tell FOSSA exactly what I cared about and they would tell me when something was out of policy. I don't want to hear from the compliance tool unless I have an issue that I need to deal with. That was what was great about FOSSA is that it was basically "Here's my policy and only send me an alert if there's something without a policy." I thought that it was really good at doing that."
"The solution's Open Source feature gives us notifications and suggestions regarding how to address vulnerabilities."
"We use Snyk to check vulnerabilities and rectify potential leaks in GitHub."
"The solution has great features and is quite stable."
"Snyk categorizes the level of vulnerability into high, medium, and low, which helps organizations prioritize which issues to tackle first."
"I find SCA to be valuable. It can read your libraries, your license and bring the best way to resolve your problem in the best scenario."
"The most valuable features are their GitLab and JIRA integrations. The GitLab integration lets us pull projects in pretty easily, so that it's pretty minimal for developers to get it set up. Using the JIRA integration, it's also pretty easy to get the information that is generated, as a result of that GitLab integration, back to our teams in a non-intrusive way and in a workflow that we are already using."
"It has an accurate database of vulnerabilities with a low amount of false positives."
"The most valuable features of Snyk are vulnerability scanning and automation. The automation the solution brings around vulnerability scanning is useful."
"The technical support has room for improvement."
"On the dashboard, there should be an option to increase the column width so that we can see the complete name of the GitHub repository. Currently, on the dashboard, we see the list of projects, but to see the complete name, you have to hover your mouse over an item, which is annoying."
"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."
"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."
"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 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."
"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."
"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."
"The feature for automatic fixing of security breaches could be improved."
"One area where Snyk could improve is in providing developers with the line where the error occurs."
"Snyk's API and UI features could work better in terms of speed."
"They were a couple of issues which happened because Snyk lacked some documentation on the integration side. Snyk is lacking a lot of documentation, and I would like to see them improve this. This is where we struggle a bit. For example, if something breaks, we can't figure out how to fix that issue. It may be a very simple thing, but because we don't have the proper documentation around an issue, it takes us a bit longer."
"The reporting mechanism of Snyk could improve. The reporting mechanism is available only on the higher level of license. Adjusting the policy of the current setup of recording this report is something that can improve. For instance, if you have a certain license, you receive a rating, and the rating of this license remains the same for any use case. No matter if you are using it internally or using it externally, you cannot make the adjustment to your use case. It will always alert as a risky license. The areas of licenses in the reporting and adjustments can be improve"
"There are some new features that we would like to see added, e.g., more visibility into library usage for the code. Something along the lines where it's doing the identification of where vulnerabilities are used, etc. This would cause them to stand out in the market as a much different platform."
"The product is very expensive."
"A feature we would like to see is the ability to archive and store historical data, without actually deleting it. It's a problem because it throws my numbers off. When I'm looking at the dashboard's current vulnerabilities, it's not accurate."
FOSSA is ranked 9th in Software Composition Analysis (SCA) with 12 reviews while Snyk is ranked 2nd in Software Composition Analysis (SCA) with 41 reviews. FOSSA is rated 8.6, while Snyk is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of FOSSA writes "Compatibility with a wide range of dev tools, web and "C-type", enables us to scan across our ecosystem, including legacy software". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Snyk writes "Performs software composition analysis (SCA) similar to other expensive tools". FOSSA is most compared with Black Duck, Mend.io, Fortify Static Code Analyzer, JFrog Xray and Checkmarx Software Composition Analysis, whereas Snyk is most compared with SonarQube, Black Duck, GitHub Advanced Security, Fortify Static Code Analyzer and Veracode. See our FOSSA vs. Snyk report.
See our list of best Software Composition Analysis (SCA) vendors.
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