FOSSA vs FOSSology

FOSSA scans software projects for dependencies, vulnerabilities, and license issues across the development lifecycle. Its open-source dependency analysis covers more than 30 languages, and its policy engine can enforce organization-wide license, security, and quality requirements, including build-blocking rules. Teams can generate, import, export, and manage software bills of materials (SBOMs). Scanning options include CLI and CI/CD workflows, container analysis, snippet detection, Quick Import from code hosts, and enterprise binary and SBOM uploads. Quick Import scans source without running the build, so its results are less complete than a CLI scan. Documented integrations include Jira, GitHub, Slack, Bitbucket, GitLab, APIs, and OIDC providers. FOSSA offers web, Linux, API, and self-hosted options; customers can operate its on-premises deployment using Kubernetes and Helm. Free includes five projects, 10 contributing developers, and five imported SBOMs. Business is listed at $2,020,710 a year; Enterprise pricing is custom and not listed.

FOSSology is an open-source system for examining software for license, copyright, and export-control information. Upload individual files or packages, then unpack and scan them with selected agents. Nomos looks for license indicators through phrases, regular expressions, and heuristics; Monk checks text against stored license texts or phrases supplied by users. Its web interface supports review of findings, license-text management, bulk recognition, aggregated file views, and reusing reviews for files with matching hashes. It can identify copyright statements and presents keyword-based findings that users can review for possible export-control relevance. Reports include SPDX 2.0 exports, Debian copyright files, hierarchical file lists with license identifiers, and Readme files with identified license and copyright details. A REST API supports CI/CD use, uploads, and scan triggers from other applications; the command line can retrieve SPDX files. Deployment options include Docker, Vagrant with VirtualBox, or source installation. It is free, with on-premise deployment options. One stated limit: it cannot determine which libraries produced a binary; binary analysis tools are needed for that task.