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

No other major player has been in the SCA game longer than Mend (formerly WhiteSource), and Snyk is the most widely known SCA solution in the cybersecurity world. If you’re considering SCA options, you need to be familiar with both tools—but are either right for you? 

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

Interested in Black Duck? Read our comparison here.

Snyk vs Mend (WhiteSource) 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 are:
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. 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?” 

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

• 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. 
• 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.
• 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 two stack up against each other in detail.

Snyk vs. WhiteSource/Mend vs. Finite State on developer guidance

Every new vulnerability alert demands developer attention, which translates to added labor. When selecting a Software Composition Analysis (SCA) tool, choosing one that simplifies the process for developers—helping them quickly assess, address, and resolve vulnerabilities is crucial.

This matters because the effort required to fix vulnerabilities often gets overlooked. In a 2021 IBM Security™ study, 59% of respondents cited delays in patching vulnerabilities as a key reason their organizations hadn't become more resilient to cyber threats. These vulnerabilities were identified, yet the patches were never applied.

To ensure vulnerabilities are actually patched, it's essential to choose an SCA tool that provides effective developer guidance. Here’s how Snyk, Mend, and Finite State stack up:

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

The Takeaways — 

Snyk and Mend fall short: While both of these tools will provide you with recommended patches and risk assessments for each patch, they won’t tell you whether the patch will raise compatibility issues for your application—nor will they 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. WhiteSource/Mend 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. Here’s how Snyk, Mend, and Finite State stack up when it comes to SBOMs:

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

The Takeaways — 

Snyk and Mend fall short on SBOM support: 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. 

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

Snyk vs. Mend 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 Snyk, Mend, and Finite State 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 their accuracy on the following five-point scale:

The Takeaways —

Mend generates a lot of false positives: If your developers expect one in every ten to twenty vulnerability alerts to be a false alarm, your team will experience vulnerability fatigue. Not to mention, recurring wild goose chases can cause tensions between your security and development teams.

Snyk is a little better: One in fifty is much better than one in twenty. 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. WhiteSource/Mend vs. Finite State on DevOps integration

Most SCA solutions claim to protect your software and integrate seamlessly into your DevOps process. While all leading tools connect with your build pipeline and repository, and support container scanning, the depth of integration varies. For instance, not every SCA tool provides comprehensive features like binary application scanning and runtime protection. Here’s how Snyk, Mend, and Finite State compare when it comes to DevOps integration:

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

The Takeaways — 

Snyk and Mend can only scan so much: Snyk and Mend integrate with your build environment and repository, but you can’t use them to scan licensed third-party code, and they won’t protect you in runtime.

The Finite State advantage: 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 open source or licensed.

Snyk vs. WhiteSource/Mend vs. Finite State on total cost of ownership

You can’t evaluate the true cost of an SCA tool on price tag alone.

Software composition analysis tools should reduce your exposure to vulnerabilities and reduce the time you spend addressing these vulnerabilities. This means that the level of developer guidance provided and the amount of false positives generated directly affect the true cost of owning a given SCA solution—even if an SCA has a low subscription fee, the hassle it imposes on your developers can make it extremely expensive.  

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, Mend, and Finite State stack up on this front:

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

The Takeaways — 

A cautionary note on Snyk: While Snyk is competitively priced upfront, customers have remarked on Snyk’s tendency to charge new fees when limits are hit. (This is one of the reasons software companies switch from Snyk to other providers—their fees may be appealing up front, but enterprise customers often end up being charged significantly more later on.)

Mend is a little better: Their pricing is relatively straightforward (and their customers tend to say 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

Considering all these factors, Snyk has a slight edge over 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:

• Black Duck vs. Mend vs. Finite State
• Snyk vs. Black Duck vs. Finite State

Ready to experience the difference Finite State can make in securing your software supply chain? Book your demo today. 

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