Black Duck
Application security testing platform unifying SAST, SCA, DAST and AI-powered software risk analysis.
By Black Duck Software · HQ Boston, US · 4.0/5 Value-Position score (estimate)
Positioning guardrails
Best for
- Enterprises with large codebases needing SCA, SAST and SBOM coverage in one platform
- Regulated industries such as financial services, medical devices and automotive with formal standard obligations
- DevSecOps teams embedding security gates into CI/CD pipelines and developer IDEs
- Security programs wanting agentic AI to triage and remediate vulnerabilities at scale
Ideal size: 100+ developers or a dedicated AppSec team people · Enterprise with an established DevSecOps and AppSec program
Not for
- Small teams wanting cheap self-serve tooling with published list pricing
- Buyers without any application security or security engineering function
- Companies that only need lightweight open source license scanning
Value metrics scorecard
Time-to-Value
1-3 months
~60 days to first production value
Total Cost of Ownership
On request
Quote-based enterprise licensing; no public list pricing. Scoped per project or application.
Implementation Friction
4/5
Engineering + admin effort required
Value-Position score
out of 5 · model estimate
Full cost breakdown
Mandatory implementation fee
None
Seat tiers
Not published; contracts scoped per project or application rather than seats.
Add-on costs
- None
Company & support
Who is behind Black Duck, and how your team gets help once it is live.
Company
- Founded
- 2002 · 24 yrs in business
- Headquarters
- Boston, US
How you get support
We haven’t recorded support channels for Black Duck yet. Nothing here means unverified — not absent.
Market position
Where Black Duck sits against its closest alternatives. Pick any two of cost, speed, friction and buyer score, and up to 9 companies to compare.
Quadrant view
Typical annual cost × Time-to-value
The lines cross at the median of the solutions shown, so about half sit on each side of each line.
Companies on the chart 6 / 10
- Black Duck
- Checkmarx
- EcoVadis
- Kiteworks
- Arena PLM
- Darktrace
Add or change companies
Up to 10 companies including Black Duck. Listed closest first.
Stack fit signal
Compatibility with standard B2B ecosystems.
No supported MCP path today, so it cannot be driven from an AI client.
AI & MCP readiness
What Black Duck ships in AI, and what it asks of your ecosystem.
AI features shipped
Black Duck Assist gives in-IDE issue summaries and suggested fixes; Signal performs LLM-powered agentic vulnerability detection and remediation; AI Model Risk Insights surfaces embedded AI models, versions and licenses in SBOMs.
Your data & models
- Trains on your data
- Not recorded — ask the vendor
- Runs on
- Not recorded
- AI pricing
- Not recorded
In your ecosystem
- AI connection
- Not supported
- Model key
- Not recorded
- AI usage audit
- Not recorded
Compliance attestations
* IAPP AIGP certifies individuals, not products. It means named staff hold the credential — not that the platform does.
Bottom line
Black Duck is an application security testing vendor, formerly the Synopsys Software Integrity Group, covering SAST, SCA, DAST, IAST and fuzzing across the SDLC. Its Polaris SaaS platform, Coverity static analysis, Black Duck SCA and Signal agentic AI address vulnerable open source, license and supply chain risk alongside SBOM and compliance reporting for regulated industries. Deployment is SaaS, on-premises or hybrid with CI/CD, IDE and SCM integrations. Pricing is quote-based and not published.
Frequently asked questions
What risks does Black Duck actually cover?
The portfolio covers static analysis (Coverity, Polaris fAST Static, Code Sight), software composition analysis for open source and third-party components, dynamic and interactive testing, and fuzzing. It targets known CVEs, license compliance, malicious packages, code quality defects and now AI-generated code risks.
How is Black Duck priced, and what will a contract cost?
Black Duck does not publish list pricing; the site routes buyers to sales. Expect quote-based enterprise licensing scoped by project or application rather than per seat. Budget for a paid proof of concept and possible on-premises deployment costs if data residency applies.
How long does implementation take?
The vendor does not publish a time-to-value figure. Given on-premises options, CLI and plugin rollout, policy tuning and CI/CD wiring, plan on roughly one to three months from kickoff to production enforcement, with a pilot on a few repositories first.
Does Black Duck use AI, and does it train on our code?
Signal and Assist use LLM-powered analysis to summarize, detect and suggest fixes. Black Duck states that AI Model Risk Insights catalogs embedded AI models in SBOMs. No vendor page states whether customer code is used to train models, so that question must be settled contractually.
Which compliance frameworks does Black Duck support?
The vendor lists ISO 27001/27002, NIST, GDPR, HIPAA, PCI DSS, SOC 2, FedRAMP, EU Cyber Resilience Act, EO 14028, DISA-STIG, DO-330/DO-178C, MISRA, AUTOSAR, ISO 26262, ISO/SAE 21434 and FDA Section 524B. These are customer-side obligations the tooling helps evidence, not Black Duck certifications.
Can we connect Black Duck to our own agents via MCP?
No vendor page names the Model Context Protocol, so no MCP server can be confirmed. Black Duck does document REST APIs, webhooks and CLI tooling (Detect, Bridge) plus IDE, SCM and CI plugins, which is the realistic path for custom automation today.