What’s the Best SCA Tool?: Black Duck vs. Mend vs. Finite State

When it comes to choosing an SCA solution, any responsible decision maker should consider Black Duck and Mend (formerly WhiteSource). Black Duck has been around longer than any other player in the space, and WhiteSource was a household name in enterprise cybersecurity (until they changed their name to Mend in May 2022). But is either solution right for you?  

Selecting the right Software Composition Analysis (SCA) tool is a critical decision that will shape your organization’s cybersecurity posture for years to come. But with the growing complexity of cyber threats and ever-changing regulatory demands, the challenge lies not just in choosing a tool but understanding what sets them apart and identifying the one best suited for your needs. 

In this post, we’ll compare Black Duck, Mend, and Finite State across the five most critical areas where a quality SCA tool needs to perform: developer guidance, SBOM support, accuracy (false positive rate), DevOps integrations, and total cost of ownership. 

This guide is based on our extensive industry experience, conversations with cybersecurity professionals, and our own research. If you have any questions about the data shared in the table, reach out to the team here.

Black Duck vs. Mend vs. Finite State: A Side-by-Side Comparison

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1. Developer guidance with compatibility check
2. Comprehensive SBOM support
3. Low false positives output
4. Integration to the DevOps process with runtime protection 
5. Total cost of ownership

We’ll unpack these individual competencies in a moment, but first here’s how Black Duck, Mend, and Finite State 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.

“Wait—Finite State just gets to give themselves a perfect score?”

We’ll explain the quantitative reasons why Finite State comes out on top in these areas, but for the sake of good faith, here are a few general reasons why the scores shook out this way: 

• This scoring system focuses on the five areas that are absolutely 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 over and over. 
• 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. It’s almost certain that Black Duck and Mend would outscore us in these and other areas. However, getting reliable numbers for such factors is difficult, and even if we did get accurate numbers, they could change next week.
• Finite State was specifically built to master these five areas. When companies switch from one of these other players to Finite State, it’s because of one (or several) of these factors.  

Let’s look at how Black Duck, Mend, and Finite State stack up against each other in detail.

Black Duck vs. Mend vs. Finite State on Developer Guidance

At the very least, any SCA tool should alert your developers to third-party vulnerabilities in your applications. However, an advanced SCA can do much more to close the gap between finding and patching a vulnerability. 

This is important to consider, because companies often let third-party vulnerabilities linger within their applications simply because developers don’t have the time or direction necessary to fix them. In fact, 59% of respondents to a 2021 IBM Security™ study cited delays associated with patching vulnerabilities as a reason their organizations hadn’t become more resilient to cyber threats.

Finding the problem is only the beginning, and a strong SCA solution can help your developers through every step of the patching process. A high degree of developer guidance saves you immense amounts of time in labor, and reduces the amount of time your application remains vulnerable to hackers.

We graded these tools’ developer guidance capabilities on the following five-point scale:

The Takeaways —

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.

Mend is a little better: If your developers are using Mend (formerly WhiteSource), they will gain an understanding of the risks associated with implementing a given recommended patch. This saves some of your time, but your dev team will still need to figure out if the patch is compatible with your software and is trusted by other developers. 

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. Mend (WhiteSource) 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: one that not only shows vulnerabilities and licenses, but also points out technical debt (portions of code that need future cleanup).

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

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

The Takeaways —

Mend does the bare minimum, and not much else: While you can export SBOMs, you can’t choose from multiple formats, you can’t import SBOMs, and you can’t intuitively see how your components nest within each other. 

Black Duck and Finite State are the strongest: Both tools allow you to import and export multiple SBOM formats, and clearly delineate all dependency relationships between the components and subcomponents in your application. 

Black Duck is especially strong in its analysis of C languages. If your application is built on components using C and/or C++ and your application has millions of lines of code, you can expect at least 65% of your vulnerabilities to come from code in these languages. 

Finite State in particular lets you visually navigate your SBOM, so you can see how your third-party code is nested and where any given vulnerability lies.

Black Duck vs. Mend vs. Finite State on False Positives

SCA false positives are just plain bad for business. In our 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:

The Takeaways —

Both Black Duck and Mend generate a lot of false positives: And even though Mend has an edge on Black Duck, it still generates five to ten times as many false positives as Finite State. 

The Finite State advantage: 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. By design, Finite State is the most accurate SCA tool on the market today.

Black Duck vs. Mend 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 Takeaways —

Mend is the weakest: While Mend integrates with your build environment and repository, it cannot be used to scan licensed third-party code.

Black Duck is better: You can use Black Duck to scan vendor’s applications as well as your own—but it won’t cover you in runtime.

The Finite State advantage: Finite State is the only SCA on the market that offers runtime protection. Finite State is built on a Shift Left Security philosophy: it protects your build pipeline and runtime, integrates with your repository, and allows for both container and binary scanning.

Black Duck vs. Mend vs. Finite State on Total Cost of Ownership

Price is important when considering SCA options. You want to know how much you’re going to pay your SCA vendor—and ideally, there won’t be any surprises. Unfortunately, an SCA’s price isn’t always easy to determine. Some SCAs are transparent with pricing, others use complex formulas based on variable directional metrics, and others are entirely opaque. 

But when evaluating the cost of an SCA solution, you need to look past the initial price tag. An SCA should help keep your application safe from vulnerabilities, but it should also reduce the cost of labor spent on fixing those vulnerabilities. For example, an SCA that costs an extra $1,000 per month in subscription fees may save you $10,000 a month in labor via some of the factors described above, e.g., a lower false positive rate, or more advanced developer guidance.

So when cross-evaluating SCA options, we looked for two factors:

1. Competitive pricing: The vendor uses transparent, straightforward pricing.
2. Labor savings: The tool has robust enough capabilities to reduce software supply chain security supply labor costs.

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

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

The Takeaways — 

Black Duck is costly: It has a high price tag, but it’s particularly weak in terms of developer guidance and accuracy—which means you spend a lot more labor realizing the value of this tool.

Mend is a little better: Their pricing is relatively straightforward (and their customers tend to say that they’re a fair and transparent vendor to work with). However, Mend users will still spend a lot of unnecessary labor making up for false positives and limited developer guidance.

The Finite State advantage: Our pricing model is entirely transparent, with no hidden fees or limits—plus, Finite State saves 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

When we take all these factors into consideration, Black Duck has a slight edge on Mend—but neither shines in these five competencies like Finite State.

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 exploring SCA options and still aren’t convinced, or if you’d like to delve even deeper into comprehensive analyses, continue reading these following pages:

• Snyk vs. Black Duck vs. Finite State
• Snyk vs. WhiteSource (now Mend) vs. Finite State

Book a demo to learn more about how Finite State can help protect your software supply chain today.