Rapid7 AppSpider vs. Tenable Nessus

Rapid7 AppSpider could be your default DAST (Dynamic Application Security Testing), it covers the OWASP top 10 for web and APIs. Great tools, with a very nice and understandable report and analytics, work excellent for one-shot or continuous monitoring of your web assets. Also has a fair amount of integrations with other popular tools.

Incentivized

Nessus is perfectly suitable for performing comprehensive vulnerability assessment scans being a vulnerability scanner. It is less appropriate for performing penetration testing since it is not a penetration testing tool, it does not have the ability and modules to exploit the vulnerabilities of the system.

Incentivized

• Does a great job scanning Single Page Apps as well as APIs etc.
• We use this weekly and have faced no scan errors due to process failures or accidentally DoSing etc.

Incentivized

• With Nessus we can find the missing critical patches for a server or workstations.
• Nessus points out any vulnerable or outdated software Technologies used in the system, thus eliminating any chances for security flaws being turned up.
• Nessus typically points any configuration level issues in accordance with the OWASP guidelines. Even the configuration of SSL related which are most of the time handled by some vendors or 3rd parties.
• Nessus not only lists out these Vulnerabilities but describes clearly the vulnerabilities in details with its thousands of plugins updated regularly, the tool also recommends solution with practical details of easy implementation.

Incentivized

• Scan might be slow compared to other tools.
• Not a lot of training on the vendor side.

Incentivized

• Could use an upgrade within reports.
• Scans can take a long time to complete. Have to break them down in small sections.

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

It's very much a plug and play application that the user can go into with limited knowledge and set-up scans in minutes.

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

BurpSuite isn't a competitor necessarily but still for the price of a few hundred dollars per user it is a great tool, however, AppSpider blew it out of the water with its accuracy in terms of vulnerabilities reported as well as other aspects such as UI, customer support etc.

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

• Great ROI for consultant projects.

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