We performed a comparison between Mend.io and Sonatype Lifecycle 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."Enables scanning/collecting third-party libraries and classifying license types. In this way we ensure our third-party software policy is followed."
"The most valuable features are the reporting, customizing libraries "In-house, White list, license selection", comparing the products/projects, and License & Copyright resolution."
"Attribution and license due diligence reports help us with aggregating the necessary data that we, in turn, have to provide to satisfy the various licenses copyright and component usage disclosures in our software."
"The inventory management as well as the ability to identify security vulnerabilities has been the most valuable for our business."
"The most valuable feature is the inventory, where it compiles a list of all of the third-party libraries that we have on our estate."
"We can take some measures to improve things, replace a library, or update a library which was too old or showed severe bugs."
"I am the organizational deployment administrator for this tool, and I, along with other users in our company, especially the security team, appreciate the solution for several reasons. The UI is excellent, and scanning for security threats fits well into our workflow."
"There are multiple different integrations there. We use Mend for CI/CD that goes through Azure as well. It works seamlessly. We never have any issues with it."
"It's helped us free up staff time."
"The reference provided for each issue is extremely helpful."
"The scanning capability is its most valuable feature, discovering vulnerable open source libraries."
"The key feature for Nexus Lifecycle is the proprietary data they have on vulnerabilities. The way that they combine all the different sources and also their own research into one concise article that clearly explains what the problem is. Most of the time, and even if you do notice that you have a problem, the public information available is pretty weak. So, if we want to assess if a problem applies to our product, it's really hard. We need to invest a lot of time digging into the problem. This work is basically done by Sonatype for us. The data that it delivers helps us with fixing or understanding the issue a lot quicker than without it."
"For us, it's seeing not only the licensing and security vulnerabilities but also seeing the age of the open-sources included within our software. That allows us to take proactive steps to make sure we're updating the software to versions that are regularly maintained and that don't have any vulnerabilities."
"Some of the more profound features include the REST APIs. We tend to make use of those a lot. They also have a plugin for our CI/CD; we use Jenkins to do continuous integration, and it makes our pipeline build a lot more streamlined. It integrates with Jenkins very well."
"Lifecycle lets developers see any vulnerabilities or AGPL license issues associated with code in the early stages of development. The nice thing is that it's built into the ID so that they can see all versions of a specific code."
"We really like the Nexus Firewall. There are increasing threats from npm, rogue components, and we've been able to leverage protection there. We also really like being able to know which of our apps has known vulnerabilities."
"It would be nice to have a better way to realize its full potential and translate it within the UI or during onboarding."
"We have ended our relationship with WhiteSource. We were using an agent that we built in the pipeline so that you can scan the projects during build time. But unfortunately, that agent didn't work at all. We have more than 500 projects, and it doubled or tripled the build time. For other projects, we had the failure of the builds without any known reason. It was not usable at all. We spent maybe one year working on the issues to try to make it work, but it didn't in the end. We should be able to integrate it with ID and Shift Left so that the developers are able to see the scan results without waiting for the build to fail."
"Make the product available in a very stable way for other web browsers."
"At times, the latency of getting items out of the findings after they're remediated is higher than it should be."
"It would be good if it can do dynamic code analysis. It is not necessarily in that space, but it can do more because we have too many tools. Their partner relationship support is a little bit confusing. They haven't really streamlined the support process when we buy through a reseller. They should improve their process."
"Needs better ACL and more role definitions. This product could be used by large organisations and it definitely needs a better role/action model."
"The solution lacks the code snippet part."
"WhiteSource needs improvement in the scanning of the containers and images with distinguishing the layers."
"The team managing Nexus Lifecycle reported that their internal libraries were not being identified, so they have asked Sonatype's technical team to include that in the upcoming version."
"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."
"The biggest thing that I have run into, which there are ways around, is being able to easily access the auditing data from a third-party tool; being able to pull all of that into one place in a cohesive manner where you can report off of that. We've had a little bit of a challenge with that. There are a number of things available to work with, to help with that in the tool, but we just haven't explored them yet."
"One thing that I would like to give feedback on is to scan the binary code. It's very difficult to find. It's under organization and policies where there are action buttons that are not very obvious. I think for people who are using it and are not integrated into it, it is not easy to find the button to load the binary and do the scan. This is if there is no existing, continuous integration process, which I believe most people have, but some users don't have this at the moment. This is the most important function of the Nexus IQ, so I expect it should be right on the dashboard where you can apply your binary and do a quick scan. Right now, it's hidden inside organization and policies. If you select the organization, then you can see in the top corner that there is a manual action which you can approve. There are multiple steps to reach that important function that we need. When we were initially looking at the dashboard, we looked for it and couldn't find it. So, we called our coworker who set up the server and they told us it's not on the dashboard."
"The user interface needs to be improved. It is slow for us. We use Nexus IQ mostly via APIs. We don't use the interface that much, but when we use it, certain areas are just unresponsive or very slow to load. So, performance-wise, the UI is not fast enough for us, but we don't use it that much anyway."
"Fortify Static Code Analyzer has a bit of a learning curve, and I don't find it particularly helpful in narrowing down the vulnerabilities we should prioritize."
"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."
"Sonatype Nexus Lifecycle can improve by having a feature to automatically detect vulnerabilities. Additionally, if it could automatically push the dependencies or create notifications it would be beneficial."
Mend.io is ranked 4th in Software Composition Analysis (SCA) with 29 reviews while Sonatype Lifecycle is ranked 5th in Software Composition Analysis (SCA) with 43 reviews. Mend.io is rated 8.4, while Sonatype Lifecycle is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Mend.io writes "Easy to use, great for finding vulnerabilities, and simple to set up". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Sonatype Lifecycle writes "Seamless to integrate and identify vulnerabilities and frees up staff time". Mend.io is most compared with SonarQube, Black Duck, Snyk, Veracode and GitHub Dependabot, whereas Sonatype Lifecycle is most compared with SonarQube, Black Duck, Fortify Static Code Analyzer, GitLab and Snyk. See our Mend.io vs. Sonatype Lifecycle report.
See our list of best Software Composition Analysis (SCA) vendors, best Application Security Tools vendors, and best Software Supply Chain Security vendors.
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