Heimdal Patch and Asset Management vs. Tenable Nessus

Heimdal Patch and Asset Management has really helped us consistently patch our endpoints in what has become a much more flexible work environment. It picks up updates immediately upon release (looking at you patch Tuesday!), lets you set automatic install windows for "zero touch" deployment where appropriate and more manual control for clients you may want a slower roll-out for. Support staff are knowledgeable and quick to respond!

Incentivized

It is an excellent tool for scanning servers, workstations, and network devices to identify missing patches and misconfiguration; we regularly use it to confirm patch effectiveness after the update; it also helps us for preparing audits such as iso 27001, and regulatory requirements, it also helps us to identify open ports and services that violate security.

• Fast updates of well-known 3rd party applications
• Fast Management with only seldom cases in which we need to stop a change
• Quick Support-Team that will handle problems professionally
• Good amount of settings in the Dashboard with Group Policy options to allow custom settings for different Departments or Sub-Companies

Incentivized

• Nessus is best at performing vulnerability scans, in fact, it gives findings and moreover accurate findings of the assessments. It does not do penetration testing or exploit the vulnerabilities because it is concerned about scanning the systems/applications.
• In fact, Nessus has multiple profiles/policies to perform different types of scans such as, scans oriented for PCI-DSS, malware scans, web application scans, bad shell shock detection scan to name a few.
• Nessus has the ability to classify the vulnerabilities into risk-based categories from critical to even informational which I think is one of the things that separates Nessus from other vulnerability scanners.

Incentivized

• Interface could be more user friendly but when you know how it works its allright
• Easier way to quickly see what updates are installed on what machines

Incentivized

• The tool has lots of options for setting up before scanning any device, this methodology could be simplified further with default configuration for various devices predefined, anyhow we can use this technique by making use of policies.
• For advanced users we cannot disable the plugins inside the plugin groups, we can enable the whole set of plugins at a time, for few hundreds its ok, but thousands of plugins are of waste of resource and time.

Incentivized

Nessus is best and easy to use application for Vulnerabilities finding and reporting, it has multiple platforms and wide scope covering almost all devices for security improvement so far, thus we are very likely to continue its services.

Incentivized

Tenable Nessus is a great product and provides a lot of value, but it is difficult to set up and use and the amount of data it generates can be overwhelming. It does help us prioritize based on the severity of the detection, however there are sometimes mitigating factors that we have implemented that Nessus does not account for, which causes lots of noise in the reports.

Incentivized

I haven't needed to contact support yet. But issues are easily solved with a quick internet search which means support and by extension, the larger community are involved and knowledgeable.

Incentivized

We Kaseya VSA as our RMM tool and this also incorporates patch and asset management. Although it overlaps Heimdal Patch and Asset Managment, VSA has a different database of 3rd party software. We use both solutions to give us a greater coverage of patches to ensure as many vulnerabilities as possible are patched.

Incentivized

Sometimes when we identify a vulnerability with Nessus that has an exploit, we made a proof of concept with Metasploit in order to show to the IT managers the importance of the software/hardware hardening.

Incentivized

• A slight positive ROI according to the Heimdal Patch and Asset Management dashboard
• Malware detection rates are excellent with detections occuring live rather than during scheduled scans

Incentivized

• Nessus certainly has a positive impact while me while performing my job, either as security research, or performing vulnerability assessments for clients. It gives a lot of information about the system/application after performing scans. The number of false positives is also less compared to other vulnerability scanners.
• The professional edition is very useful as policy templates available in this edition are very handy and useful even to perform compliance scan like PCI DSS scan.
• Also, the ability to export the scan results into reports in formats like HTML, PDF is very useful which could be for performing system/application reviews.

Incentivized