Black Duck Signal™ vs Grafeas: Side-by-Side Comparison (2026)
Features, pricing, ratings, and pros & cons — compared head-to-head.
Black Duck Signal™ is a commercial software composition analysis tool by Black Duck Software, Inc.. Grafeas is a free software composition analysis tool. Compare features, ratings, integrations, and community reviews side by side to find the best software composition analysis fit for your security stack.
CST VerdictBased on our analysis of NIST CSF 2.0 coverage, core features, company size fit, deployment model, here is our conclusion:
Mid-market and enterprise development teams drowning in open source vulnerabilities will get the most from Black Duck Signal™ because its AI actually flags risky dependencies before they hit production, not after. The platform covers ID.RA and GV.SC functions with equal weight, meaning you get both vulnerability detection and supply chain context in one workflow. Skip this if your primary concern is runtime application behavior; Black Duck Signal™ is built for left-shift scanning, not post-deployment monitoring.
DevSecOps teams managing complex supply chains across multiple build systems and registries should adopt Grafeas for its metadata standardization layer; it forces consistency where point tools create fragmentation, and the free, open-source model means no vendor lock-in on your attestation data. The API spec has 1,564 GitHub stars and backing from Google and IBM, indicating real production use rather than theoretical architecture. Skip this if you need out-of-the-box scanning or policy enforcement; Grafeas is a metadata foundation that requires you to wire it into your existing pipeline, not a replacement for SCA or SBOM tools.
