PortSwigger Burp Suite vs. Tenable Nessus

Burp Suite is a good general tool to test websites as long as your website is not too large or you have the time for it to complete. We have some websites that only about five to ten minutes for Burp Suite to complete an attack and a spider only takes about two minutes. Other websites have taken a few hours to complete. I have seen a tester actually run Burp Suite against one of our websites and it took all day to complete.

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

• The passive scan feature is really awesome, it kind of covers areas that you might miss.
• The CSRF POC is really helpful to my team. It helps development team see the issue and understand it.
• Burp intruder and repeater are the features I myself and my team uses the most as it helps us use our payloads in a variety of different ways.
• Active scan helps the team to ensure coverage for the whole application.

• 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• Nessus points out any vulnerable or outdated software Technologies used in the system, thus eliminating any chances for security flaws being turned up.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

• More features to be available for the free/community version to allow more learning
• Manual updating of plugin without network connectivity
• More controls with the manual testing with scenario inputs

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

Given this tool's wide area of testing functionality for mobile and web applications, it's a great tool to invest in for security testing. Though it lacks documentation to carry out particular vulnerability findings which are very challenging for a new user of this tool

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

BurpSuite does not have an amazing customer support. All the major help that you will find is from public forums and Google. Although you will find all the required information on Google, still at time professional support helps you solve the problem in much less time and make your operations go smoothly.

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.

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The only other tool I use that works like Burp Suite is the OWASP ZAP. It works a lot like Burp but just has a different layout. I prefer how Burp has the tabs for Repeater, Intruder, Decoder, ect.

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

• Positive impact, time to complete security development stage is decreased.
• Very positive impact on budgeting for external penetration testing. We can do the bulk of the common testing ourselves now.

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