WhiteSource Software Reviews

Really impressed with their service, and the response time when an unknown library needed resolution.

Very detailed information for most of the open source dependencies.

Dependency version history and their vulnerabilities have been helpful.

UI and the usability of the tool and its plugins makes it easier to use.

We still come across a lot of dependencies which are still undetected by the Tool, but they're later resolved once we request resolution manually. I suggest their Database to be frequently updated.

Some features we requested were still not implemented, specially the feature to display an attribute for "folder location" for dependencies uploaded from a disk location.

The tool needed a lot of tune up before first use.

If your requirements fits the whitesource specification, I would then definitely recommend it. Also sort out all your feature requests before purchasing the full software.

Automation of our existing process, which in-turn saves a lot of hours and the risks associated with Open source dependencies.

I find the risk report being the most useful thing, other features are on the way to being good but still need some work done. It does seem to detect potential license violations quite well but for instance it doesn't deal with dual licenses: e.g. when a component is licensed under GPL AND MIT the tool will identify it as a violation even though it's no longer the case.

Most usability issues. The tool just doesn't do the workflow that would be optimal in my opinion. The components seem disjointed, the user interface is a bit clunky and it's quite difficult to identify necessary actions once an issue has been identified. However, I do feel that the engine part is quite solid, what the tool needs is a massive re-think of the UI.

I would strongly recommend making sure that the product is suitable for the intended purposes and the in-house users are comfortable with the UI. Trialling the product can be a bit of a pain especially as they insist on knowing your full company details and intended purposes just to allow you to have a look. During trial I was very satisfied with the product and only during full deployment of our 30+ individual maven projects did I start suffering from the usability issues.

We have to identify potential non-open source components in our source code as well detect any security vulnerabilities in our 3rd party components.

With WhiteSource, the open source governance is fully automated.

We just have to add their plugin in our CI tool and our Open Source dependencies are now managed with WhiteSource.

Compare to our previous solution (manual and painful) it's a huge win.

We would like to export our reports with the PDF format, but this feature is missing for the moment.

Except that, WhiteSource is a very good software.

Before using WhiteSource, we were using a manual solution to scan our Open Source dependencies.

With WhiteSource, we now have a solution to do a continuous analysis of our Open Source dependencies.

We are spending less time on this subject and WhiteSource is able to generate all the reports we need.

that it is a hosted solution and you don't have to take care yourself about the setup or data

suggests versions of the oudated or insecure library

shows also critical and blocking bugs known in the libraries

very good dashboard with an overview of what is going on

the tool lists also the licenses of the libraries which is very important if you use open source libraries in your commercial product, which might forces you to open source your code as well (LGPL)

the web ui has a lot of animated "flashy" things which I don't like, I prefer more simple html to visualize the data

the mails regarding news could be more simple or summarized

sometimes there are false-positives listed in the security vulnerabilities because the tool expects a higher version to be fixed, but instead there is a other (lower) version which also fixes the problem, but in such cases the support is very helpful and immediately checks the issue

simply use it, because I guess you don't have any monitoring on your libraries yet

with whitesource we have now numbers of how many libraries are outdated or vulnerable

this visibility makes it easier to argue that library needs to be updated

but the main purpose of whitesource is to see security vulnerabilities

the major benefit is that with whitesource we have a list of libraries with

- current version

- newest version

- vulnerabilities

- known bugs

The online interface looks nice and is easy to use and intuitive. WhiteSource allows us to easily see all of our 3rd-party Java libraries at a glance and quickly tell which ones we need to fix- whether they conflict with our license, have security holes, or need to be updated. What used to be a manual process (as in no one ever really did it..) is now a nice automated process.

What really shines is their support- they are quick to meet with us and solve any issues we have. Even during the evaluation period, they made improvements to the product in areas we were concerned. It always pays to have awesome customer support. I know if we run into any other issues that they'll be quick to fix them.

WhiteSource has trouble with C++ libraries, but its not a deal breaker. It just requires more manual work. However, I expect it to get better as we get everything set up+ I know the WhiteSource team is continuing to improve this part.

Also, I would appreciate them improving the Jenkins plugin. It doesn't support variable replacement in the includes/excludes, so I was forced to use the command-line tool. The WhiteSource team mentioned that they would look into fixing it.

We needed to go through all our 3rd-party libraries to make sure we aren't going against our license or company policy. We also wanted to be able to fix security vulnerabilities before they make it into our product. Furthermore, in the future, we want to continue to ensure that future added libraries do not cause issues. Recently found out that they have a simple workflow for approving libraries, so that is a nice bonus.

My favorite part about whitesource is that their product is modern. Unlike the competitors, whitesource software is built with modern frameworks and CI platforms in mind. They don't assume you have a server closet or that your entire office runs windows XP :)

I don't really have any complaints. They are growing which means some features are still being built-out. But any time I have had a problem, whitesource has gone the extra mile to provide a work-around or solution. So it's not really a big deal.

Really dig in to whether or not these companies support your stack. We wasted a lot of time looking into companies that knew very well that their software didn't even work with our tech-stack. Their plan was to get you to sign a contract and then bully you into professional services.

With whitesource, run a trial. Take a sample collection of code and scan it. Have them show you the interface and play with the demo. It is such a great experience and you'll find out right in the beginning how well they fit.

Past this, it's very easy to expect a software package like this to do all these tiny little things. But once you get into it, you realize you don't actually care about half of it. So really think about what's important to you in this process and you can save a lot of time.

Also, remember that the folks at whitesource do this for a living. So if you don't understand something, or want to know how other companies handle a certain problem... ask whitesource! They have a great level of experience and could even save you a lot of time and money guiding you to the right answer.

We are trying to make sure we respect all open-source contributors and authors by respecting their licenses. And Whitesource does a great job of helping us do that. Beyond that we get the added benefit of security scans and automated alerts from their system, as well as our CI.

We would eventually like to enact some policies using whitesource so that we can find and correct license issues long before production. I haven't gotten into the policy side of whitesource too much, but it seems pretty straightforward. And I know they plan to continue expanding that.