ScanCode is the leading license detection tool out there, and ScanCode licenseDB is the largest database of software licenses.

- does hash, automation, and sequence matching based analysis
- largest community maintained, curated database of software licenses, license obligations
- Reduced false-positives by using `required phrases`: detecting the important parts of license statements
- Follow references: `see license in LICENSE.txt`
- Support license statements from all major package manifests and metadata collection from all major software ecosystems
- License summarization through important files, file type classification and scanning source/binary packages
- Open data and public instances to scan/provide license data by packageURL
- Highlighting unique license detections across codebase and issues to review
- analysis to figure out deployed part of source
- Comprehensive SBOM generation, attribution generation by templates

ScanCode is also used to perform massive scans and improve license data and SBOM quality across ecosystems:
- by software heritage
- by HuggingFace to create a dataset of permissively licensed code for training LLMs
- by Clearlydefined (used by github)