Qualys TruRisk Platform vs. Tenable Nessus vs. Tenable Vulnerability Management

Qualys Cloud Platform is well suited for organizations that need additional tools to secure and bolster their security from end to end. The automated, real-time threat protection is very quick to notify an admin of potential vulnerabilities and risks, as well as recommending quick fixes to resolve/close the gap before an incident occurs. QCP excels at portraying all of these in a single pane of glass, and find that the Qualys reports are more detailed than competitor product lines. One of our big issues with QCP is that you do have to pay for each scanner, which can quickly add up to large costs. For this reason, I would rate Qualys at a ~7 due to great features and functionality, but overall value could be better for a large organization. I would also say that QCP may make more sense for smaller organizations due to this pricing model.

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.

I've been using this product since it began as an open source product, I really like it and for the money, I think it's probably the best choice for most companies who need a product like this. Over the years I've seen the interface change quite a bit and sometimes I think it's a bit unclear how to do certain things and the different packages can be confusing, these are the only reasons I'm giving it a 9 instead of a 10.

Incentivized

• It really does well at vulnerability scanning, which it is well known for. It's accuracy at finding vulnerabilities is top notch, more so than a lot of other vulnerability tools out there. In an organization/company you want this kind of accuracy at finding vulnerabilities in your network/endpoints
• It is very good at managing endpoints on a consistent basis, meaning you can add endpoints to Qualys and have the platform scan/track/protect for vulnerabilities on an ongoing basis, without user intervention
• It does really well at separating out and identifying what levels of criticality each vulnerability should fall into. This way, an organization/company can attack the more critical vulnerabilities first

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

• Setup of the internal scanner was fairly simple and straight forward.
• An update came out for the internal scanner that allows you to add an Internal Certificate Authority for lookup.
• Has automated reporting to keep executives and compliance departments informed.
• Internal scanner can be configured to auto-update itself.
• "Recast Rules" allows your organization to redefine a vulnerabilities' classification, if it is not applicable or your disagree.
• External PCI scans allow you to remediate before submitting to Tenable.io for review.
• Tenable.io staff was very patient and helpful. They provided some limited guidance with remediation.
• Internal and External scans can be automated. schedule for the automated scans is very granular.

Incentivized

• This program is really complicated, the multiple functions that are presented to us are not very clear and in some cases, it is a matter of intuition to execute a function, it is not very informative.
• The interface of this program can be a real problem; for our taste, this program looks a bit messy, and the interface does not help or guide you to find the options you need.

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

• Expensive - You do pay a slight premium for the best product in the space.
• Asset management is difficult to work with if you have a lot of asset turnover, the license can be ''held'' for 3-6 months after the asset is gone from your environment.

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

We like to renew tenable each year we have had it so far.

Incentivized

Again, the usability of Qualys has been a pinpoint for this entire review. It was easily the worst thing about the product and because of this, I would not recommend Qualys to anybody in my field. This should be something that Qualys strives to improve if they wish to stay in business.

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

Overall it is good, it took a little while to understand it and figure things out but once you have a good grasp on it then, it is very good.

Incentivized

They had a support page within the WAS to report any concerns or seek help. But the UI of that is not smooth. Regardless support staff were pretty responsive and helpful. They scheduled calls to understand and address our problems. Email support is good as well.

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

Support is usually really great at walking you through any steps you need to take when you get stuck on something. There are a few false positives and errors that have come up over the years that required their help to get through. Unfortunately, the steps required to diagnose some problems are more tedious than I think should be necessary. (IE: SQL instances can throw errors that clog up your logs because one plugin affects it in a certain way. The process to diagnose this is to watch timestamps of plugins in a log while monitoring the SQL logs at the same time and using your best guess as to what is causing it.)

Incentivized

As described before Qualys is used to scan periodically the environment in order to check if there are some packages (Linux) or Applications (Windows) outdated, generating reports to the Service Owners, fulfilling what's is expected from us, attending all our expectations regarding the tool. That's why we'd choose Qualys to our organization.

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

Tenable.io has a comparable set of features, with excellent support and a competitive price. After less than desirable experiences with another company, we moved to Tenable and haven't looked back since.

Incentivized

• Big time-saving tool vs. having to comb through several system reports which ultimately can still have you missing unapproved software.
• Quick snapshot via the dashboard provided a nice summary of where you're assets meet or do not meet your organization's policy requirements.

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

• Since this is a requirement for our PCI compliance and the cost is relatively low, the ROI isn't really something we need to think too much about, Tenable's pricing is fair and affordable.

Incentivized