Sophos Intercept X vs. Tenable Nessus

To be frank, this product is fairly expensive. So I would recommend this to companies that are mid-sized or larger to condone the cost of the purchase. It does save me a significant amount of time in my day - being able to glance at the dashboard and see if there are any outstanding issues that require my attention, as not much digging must be done to accomplish this. So for our company, with a short-staffed IT department, it's incredibly helpful to us. We also qualify for Educational pricing which brings the cost down - which helps tremendously

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.

• Sophos Intercept X is great at preventing malware infections and rolling back their effects. I have seen this happen hundreds of times since we installed it
• When combined with Sophos Central, you have an easy to use dashboard where you can manage all installations from a single pane of glass.
• It's easy to deploy on machines and stays updated.
• Good reporting features including alerts sent to the admin if there's ever something wrong with it.

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

• Sophos OOTB policies are very strict and they don't offer anything less strict without you creating new custom policies. I'm sure this is deliberate because the product starts you out in the safest way possible but it means that you will have lots of calls to your tech support desk when you first deploy it unless you do somewhat extensive testing beforehand.
• Sophos Intercept X is currently broken (at least the DLP component) by having secure boot turned on in the UEFI/BIOS. If any user wants to be able to write data to a USB drive or floppy from their PC (yes we still have a couple users who need to use floppies) we have to turn off secure boot on their PC, even if the DLP policy for that user/PC combination specifies that the user and PC are allowed to write to USB/floppy. This would be a very serious problem if it weren't for the fact that we have very few users who need to write files to USB. For us it's OK but I bet it would be a deal-breaker for others.
• I don't see a whole lot of evidence that Intercept X is any different than any other anti-virus, so maybe their admin alerts just don't clearly identify when they have identified a zero-day threat or maybe we just haven't had any zero-day threats.

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

We have gotten a great product for the price. Easy to maintain and set up on new devices. Support is great and easy to work with and understand.

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

The usability has never been a problem. Sophos Intercept X is a program you can install and let protect your company without much intervention. Apart from a few policies, Sophos will keep you protected better than most any product on the market. Sophos Intercept X works quite well when you are looking to "tighten your grip" on user's access to websites, programs, and add-ons.

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

Most of the support reps are fantastic. There have been a few though that have had to be escalated via Account Manager when they haven't followed up but this is a rare instance, and often followed up by the Support Manager for APAC.

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

Best thing was the help pushing out via group policy and was able to get instructions for that on sophos site

Incentivized

Webroot Endpoint Protection is not even in the same league as Sophos Intercept-X. I have tested and compared both sides by side, run simulations and it's not even close. Plus the Sophos central management is so much better. Easier to view user activities and apply policies and remediate threats. Sophos is the clear winner between these two products.

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

• Once our technical and commercial areas got certified, the ROI over the time spent, is great. Actual customers, and/or new ones with other tools, feel safe and advised, once they get in touch with us.
• When Sophos EndPoint is being compared against Web Management Tools (competitors), we have failed to deliver, nevertheless, there is a version of Sophos Central (Cloud) which achieves this requirement at 100% and more, since is Cloud Based (on AWS).
• We are grateful to be on Sophos "Radar" as a Platinum Partner, and "The Americas" valued partner, we have seen our business grow, thanks to this kind of technology, throughout the years.

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