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

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. 

This comparison evaluates Snyk, Black Duck, and Finite State on five capabilities that companies find most important when choosing an SCA tool. 

Interested in Mend? Read our comparison here. 

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

We measured these tools’ competencies in the five most critical areas where a quality SCA tool needs to perform. This guide is based on our extensive industry experience, conversations with cybersecurity professionals, and our own research. 

The five core areas we’ll compare are:

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

We’ll unpack these individual competencies in a moment, but here’s how these tools stack up against each other at a glance. These scores are based on each tool’s capabilities as of January 2023.

At this point, you’re probably thinking, “Wait—Finite State just gave themselves a perfect score?”

While this may look a little suspect initially, there are a few good reasons why the scores shook out this way. 

1. This scoring system focuses on the five areas that are vital to choosing a robust 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, 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 one of these other players to Finite State, it’s because of one (or several) of these factors.  

Let’s look at how these three SCA solutions stack up against each other in detail.

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

When a Software Composition Analysis (SCA) tool identifies a vulnerability, it's crucial for developers to act swiftly. However, the ease of response can vary significantly among different SCAs. 

Advanced SCA solutions often empower developers by offering recommended patches, outlining the risks associated with those patches, assessing compatibility between patches and your application, showcasing patch popularity within the development community, and providing automated patching features to streamline the remediation process.

Here’s how Snyk, Black Duck, and Finite State compare in terms of developer guidance:

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.

Snyk is a little better: Snyk provides recommended patches and risk assessments for each patch. However, the tool won’t tell you whether the patch will raise compatibility issues for your application or give you a good idea of how popular a given patch is in the development community.

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

Snyk vs. Black Duck vs. Finite State on SBOM Support

The software bill of materials (SBOM) is essential for both software companies and their enterprise customers, particularly as more regulations like the EU CRA come into effect. 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, 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. Here’s how Snyk, Black Duck, and Finite State stack up on SBOM support:

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

The Takeaways —

Snyk does the bare minimum, and that’s about it: Snyk doesn’t have any import functionality for SBOMs, nor does it incorporate dependency information.

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

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

In a 2022 report, The True Costs of False Positives in Software Security, 62.1% of technology leaders indicated that decreasing false positives is a higher business priority than increasing true positives.  False positives not only waste valuable time but also significantly impede productivity for both development and security teams, often straining their relationships.

To evaluate the accuracy of these tools, we tested each one against a set of applications containing 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 Snyk, Black Duck, and Finite State stacked up:

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

The Takeaways —

Black Duck falters here: While their SBOM support is strong, a common complaint among Black Duck users is that a great deal of time is spent addressing false positives. If your developers expect one in every ten vulnerability alerts to be a false alarm, your team is going to experience vulnerability fatigue—which makes it harder to take alerts to genuine threats seriously.

Snyk is a little better: One in fifty is much better than one in ten, so Snyk will save your developers some time on the false positives front, but they still generate more than twice as many false positives as Finite State. 

The Finite State advantage: One of the reasons we built Finite State was to solve the problem of false positives in the SCA space—without missing true positives. 

Snyk vs. Black Duck vs. Finite State on DevOps Integration

Most SCA solutions claim to protect and integrate into your DevOps process. Snyk, Black Duck, and Finite State all integrate with your build pipeline and repository and support container scanning, but further integration capabilities vary by tool. For example, not every SCA offers binary application scanning and runtime protection. Here’s how these tools stack up:

We graded their DevOps integration capabilities on the following five-point scale:

The Takeaways —

Snyk can only scan so much: Although it integrates with your build environment and repository, you can’t use Snyk to scan licensed third-party code, and it won’t protect you in runtime.

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

The Finite State advantage: Finite State is built on a Shift Left Security philosophy. Our comprehensive software security solution 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.

Snyk vs. Black Duck vs. Finite State on the Total Cost of Ownership

Every SCA tool comes with two general sets of costs: the fees the vendor charges you and the labor you spend using the tool. The price tag isn’t the end of the story.

For example, an SCA with a high subscription fee and a high degree of developer guidance might cost more upfront but save you a great deal in labor. Likewise, an inexpensive SCA with a high false positives rate could actually end up costing you a great deal of unnecessary labor.

Then, there’s the pricing structure itself to consider. Some SCAs are transparent with pricing, others use complex formulas based on variable directional metrics, and others are entirely opaque.

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 Snyk, Black Duck, 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 on both fronts: Black Duck already has a high price tag compared to Snyk and Finite State. When you consider its lack of developer guidance and relatively high false positive rate, Black Duck comes with additional costs in the form of unnecessary labor.

Snyk is competitively priced—at first: Snyk has a lower total cost of ownership than Black Duck. However, one of the primary complaints we hear from Snyk customers is their tendency to impose usage fees. Snyk customers have been known to run up against limits within the tool and need to pay extra to get full use of the program.  

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

Snyk outperforms Black Duck in developer guidance, accuracy, and total cost of ownership. In contrast, Black Duck excels in SBOM support, an area where Snyk falls short. However, neither tool matches Finite State’s capabilities across these five essential competencies.

Choosing the right Software Composition Analysis (SCA) tool is crucial for safeguarding your organization, and these five factors are key indicators of an SCA's value. 

At Finite State, we designed our solution to help you secure your software supply chain rapidly and efficiently without disrupting your business operations. Schedule a demo today to discover how we can empower your organization.