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

Snyk is the most well-known (and widely marketed) SCA tool in the cyber security industry today—but a popularity contest shouldn’t decide your application’s security.

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 and Finite State on five capabilities that companies find most important when choosing an SCA tool. 

This guide is based on our extensive industry experience, conversations with cybersecurity professionals, and our own research. These scores are based on each tool’s capabilities as of January 2023.

Snyk vs. Finite State: a side-by-side comparison

We measured Snyk and Finite State’s competencies in the five most critical areas where a quality SCA tool needs to perform. 

1. Developer guidance
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 on a scale of 1–5. 

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

That is a fair point, but there are a few good reasons for this: 

1. 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. 
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.

Snyk vs Finite State on developer guidance

Developers are at the heart of securing your software supply chain, but many Software Composition Analysis (SCA) tools fail to support them effectively. Most SCAs stop at identifying vulnerabilities, leaving developers with minimal guidance on how to address them. This often forces developers to spend additional time researching solutions.

An effective SCA solution should go beyond mere detection. It should provide comprehensive developer guidance, precise compatibility checks, and robust suppression management. With these features, your developers can quickly find the optimal upgrade path, enhancing both productivity and security. 

Here’s how each tool performs in the area of developer guidance

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

The Takeaway — While Snyk does provide versions and risks for each patch it recommends, it doesn’t give guidance on upgrade compatibility and popularity. Finite State provides all of this and can implement patches automatically.

Snyk vs. Finite State on SBOM support

The Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) is increasingly crucial for both software companies and their enterprise customers. As regulatory and compliance demands grow, organizations delivering software are under pressure to produce a comprehensive SBOM. This SBOM should not only identify vulnerabilities and licenses but also highlight technical debt—code that requires future attention.

For enterprise customers, requesting an SBOM from your software vendors has become standard practice. However, it's equally important to validate the accuracy and completeness of these SBOMs. An advanced SCA tool can assist in this validation process. Let’s explore how Snyk and Finite State measure up in this critical area:

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

The Takeaway —  In terms of SBOM support, Finite State is the clear winner. Snyk allows users to export SBOMs, which is important when selling into highly regulated industries. However, Finite State equips you to do much more, including importing and exporting in multiple formats and integrating nested dependency information into every SBOM you generate.

Snyk 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 identified reducing false positives as a higher business priority than increasing true positives. False positives waste valuable time, drain productivity from both development and security teams, and can even strain inter-team relationships.

To evaluate the effectiveness of SCA tools, we tested Snyk and Finite State on a set of applications with 511 known vulnerabilities. Our goal was to see how many vulnerabilities each tool would catch, miss, and falsely flag. Here’s how they performed:

We graded their accuracy on the following five-point scale:

The Takeaway — Snyk may reduce the time your developers spend on false positives, but it still generates more than twice as many false positives as Finite State. Finite State was specifically designed to tackle this issue in the SCA space, ensuring minimal false positives while still accurately identifying true vulnerabilities.

Snyk vs. Finite State on DevOps integration

Both of these tools integrate with your build pipeline and repository and support container scanning to some degree. However, only Finite State offers binary application scanning and runtime protection:

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.

Snyk vs. Finite State on total cost of ownership

Every SCA tool comes with a cost. This goes beyond the price you pay for the tool, though: you should also consider the cost of labor to use the tool. For example, a tool with a high false positive rate will eat up your developer’s time—and the less developer guidance a tool provides, the more labor you spend figuring out how to respond to vulnerability alerts.

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 and Finite State stack up:

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

The Takeaway — One of the sharpest contrasts between Finite State and Snyk is in pricing models. Snyk has a reputation for initially seeming affordable, but extra fees start to stack up when customers hit certain limits. One reason companies switch from Snyk to Finite State is for a more transparent and predictable pricing situation.

Choose the SCA that’s right for you

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.

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