Black Duck vs Finite State: What’s the Best Software Composition Analysis (SCA) Tool?

Ten years ago, Black Duck was the go-to SCA solution—but in today’s rapidly changing cybersecurity environment, older doesn’t mean better, and it’s essential to understand how industry leaders stack up against more recent innovations.

Choosing a software composition analysis tool is an important decision that will affect your cybersecurity for years to come. However, with ever-changing regulatory demands and the growing complexity of cyber threats, evaluating your options and understanding what sets the best solutions apart can be challenging. 

Black Duck vs. Finite State: a side-by-side comparison

We’ve measured both tools’ competencies in the five most critical areas for SCA tools to perform. This guide is based on our extensive industry experience, conversations with cybersecurity professionals, and our own research. 

The five core areas are: 

1. Developer guidance
2. Comprehensive SBOM support
3. Low false positives output
4. Integration to the DevOps processes
5. Total cost of ownership

We’ll unpack these individual competencies in a moment, but here’s how Finite State and Black Duck stack up against each other at a glance on a scale of 1–5.

These scores are based on each tool’s capabilities as of January 2023.

At this point, you should be asking, “Isn’t it a bit suspect for Finite State to give themselves a perfect score?” 

Fair point, but there are a few good reasons for this: 

1. This scoring system focuses on the five areas that are vital to choosing a strong SCA solution. We arrived at these factors after countless conversations with IT security and development teams over the years: these are the ones that come up repeatedly. 
2. We could score all of these solutions across many more factors—like the size of the company’s internal research team, the number of integrations available, etc. However, getting reliable numbers for these factors is difficult to do, and even if we did get accurate numbers, they could change next week.
3. Finite State was specifically built to master these five areas. When companies switch from another solution to Finite State, it’s because of one (or several) of these factors.  

Let’s look at how these two stack up against each other in detail.

Black Duck vs. Finite State on developer guidance

Developers play a crucial role in securing your software supply chain, but most SCA solutions don’t make their jobs any easier. While the tools can identify vulnerabilities, only a few offer actionable guidance on how to patch them, meaning most developers have to spend more time on research.

An ideal SCA solution should offer advanced developer guidance, precise compatibility checks, and robust suppression management, empowering your developers to quickly identify the best upgrade path and implement it with confidence.

We graded Black Duck and Finite State’s developer guidance capabilities on the following five-point scale:

The Takeaway -

Black Duck falls short: While Black Duck will direct your dev team to current versions of vulnerable components of your software, it won’t help them much beyond that. It’s on your developers to research the risks associated with the patch, assess whether or not the patch is compatible with your application, and find out whether or not other developers are satisfied with the patch in question.

The Finite State advantage: Not only does our tool provide information on each patch’s risks, compatibility, and popularity, but Finite State can automatically implement safe patches for you—so your product and security teams can make informed decisions and move on.

Black Duck vs. Finite State on SBOM support

The software bill of materials (SBOM) plays an essential role for both software companies and their enterprise customers. Organizations that deliver software applications face increasing regulatory and compliance pressures to produce a comprehensive SBOM that shows vulnerabilities and licenses and points out technical debt (portions of code that need future cleanup).

For enterprise customers, asking your vendor for an accompanying software bill of materials is more common. Still, it’s important to validate the SBOMs that these vendors provide—which an advanced SCA tool can help you do.

We graded the tools’ SBOM support on the following five-point scale:

Both tools get a perfect score of 5 in this area. 

Finite State allows you to import and export multiple SBOM formats, and it clearly delineates all dependency relationships between the components and subcomponents in your application. (Plus, you can visually navigate your SBOM inside Finite State, so you can see how your third-party code is nested and where any given vulnerability lies.)

Black Duck vs. Finite State on false positives

SCA false positives are just plain bad for business. In a 2022 report, The True Costs of False Positives in Software Security, 62.1% of surveyed technology leaders revealed that decreasing false positives is a higher business priority than increasing true positives. False positives waste valuable time and significantly hamper productivity on both development and security teams—and they can even harm relationships between teams. 

We ran each of these tools against a set of applications with 511 known vulnerabilities to see how many they’d catch, how many they’d miss, and how many false positives they’d flag. Here’s how they stacked up:

We graded these tools’ accuracy on the following five-point scale:

For all of Black Duck’s strengths, its ability to accurately call out vulnerabilities is not one of them. But one of the reasons we built Finite State was to take on the problem of false positives in the SCA space—without missing true positives. 

Black Duck vs. Finite State on DevOps integration

Most SCA solutions claim to protect and integrate into your DevOps process. Each of these leading tools integrates with your build pipeline and repository, and supports container scanning, but some integrate more fully than others. For example, not every SCA offers binary application scanning and runtime protection. Here’s how these particular tools stack up against each other:

We graded these tools’ DevOps integration capabilities on the following five-point scale:

The Takeaway — 

Finite State is built on a Shift Left Security philosophy. Our SCA tool protects your build pipeline and runtime, integrates with your repository, and allows for both container and binary scanning—so you’re always aware of known vulnerabilities in your third-party code, whether it’s open source or licensed.

Black Duck vs. Finite State on total cost of ownership

Each SCA tool comes with a cost that goes beyond its price tag—you also need to factor in the labor required to use it. For instance, a tool with a high false-positive rate can consume your developers' time, and if it lacks clear guidance, you’ll spend even more effort figuring out how to address vulnerability alerts.

Additionally, the pricing structure itself is crucial. Some SCAs offer transparent, straightforward pricing, while others rely on complex formulas based on variable metrics, or remain entirely opaque. When evaluating SCA options, we focused on two key factors:

• Competitive Pricing: The vendor offers clear, straightforward pricing.
• Labor Savings: The tool's robust features reduce the labor costs associated with maintaining software supply chain security.

Here’s how Black Duck and Finite State stack up:

We graded these tools’ total cost of ownership on the following five-point scale:

The Takeaways — 

Between the two, Black Duck is far and away the more costly solution. Finite State’s pricing model is entirely transparent, with no hidden fees or limits—plus, we save labor with a low false positive rate, clear developer guidance, automatic patching, prioritization, and other remediation options. 

Choose the SCA that’s right for you

Selecting the right SCA is critical to protecting your organization, and these five factors are the strongest indicators of how valuable an SCA tool can be to your organization. 

We built Finite State so you can rapidly secure your software supply chain without slowing down your business. If you’re considering SCA options, book a demo to discover the Finite State difference.