Acunetix Reviews

We use Acunetix for POC.

We have a scanner site website. We have two web applications, related to banking, that primarily serve our customers. We use Acunetix Vulnerability Scanner to ensure that the APAs that have been exposed to the customers are well-protected and don't have any major vulnerabilities.

We wanted to have some kind of vulnerability scanner which could evaluate our requests and tell us where any vulnerabilities may reside. For that purpose, we use Acunetix scanner.

Originally, we used version 3.12, but they provided us with different products including Acunetix premium and Acunetix 360. We figured Acunetix 360 would be much better suited for our solutions; that's why we are currently using the trial version of Acunetix 360 at the moment.

Within our company, there are around five to ten people using this solution. Some from DevOps, IT Security, and a few penetration testers use it.

The reporting is pretty good. I haven't seen reporting of that level in any other tool. It also allows for segregation. If I want to generate a report regarding vulnerabilities, I can simply select that particularly vulnerable section and it will generate a report with all the work in the web application. 

Similarly, for PCAD assisting, I can also generate a report — in multiple formats, including PDF, HTML, and doc files. 

Segregation of reports is really, really good with Acunetix; it provides us with a lot of in-depth details. This feature stood out when comparing Acunetix with other tools.

It provides me with a list of vulnerabilities that we weren't able to identify when doing manual penetration testing. It located and picked out some hidden vulnerabilities as well, which are hard to spot with the naked eye.

The scanning speed could be faster. It digs really deep, so that could be one of the reasons why it takes a while. If I want to scan an application, it's going to take over three to four hours. That's something I think they could improve.

Instead of posting hundreds of requests to find the vulnerability, if it simply had the capability to find that particular vulnerability in the payload itself, that would make a big impact.

The vulnerability identification speed should be improved. It takes more time compared to other tools I have used. 

Simply put, Acunetix passes too many payloads in order to identify one part of the ratio. That's probably why it can take a while to identify a particular issue. Other tools are able to identify vulnerabilities with just a few requests. Acunetix takes more time to make certain if a vulnerability exists. That's one of the areas which they can improve on.

The scan configuration could be improved. The first thing that we need to do is set up a site policy and a scan policy. By site policy, I mean we have to choose what kind of technology our site is developed with so that it will only pass payloads related to that technology.

For example, if I'm using MySQL or Python as my backend database, it will only check payloads related to MySQL or Python; it won't check Java or other programming languages.

We have to define the scanning configuration as well as the site configuration each and every time. This has to be done whenever we are adding a new set of sites or domains.

Other tools provide a list of predefined scan policies, but with Acunetix, we have to create our own every time. We have to spend a lot of time setting up these configurations, rather than just picking them from a vast variety of predefined sets of configurations, which is much easier.

We have been using a trial version of Acunetix for about a month.

The stability is good. The scans always produce consistent and reliable results.

We used Acunetix to scan three of our web applications.

I think it needs to expand to other operating systems because most organizations use a Linux- based environment, which it currently doesn't support. I think that's a big problem.

The technical support is really good. Whenever we experienced an issue, we just scheduled a call. It's not directly with Acunetix, their providers in India got in touch with us. 

They are the ones who told us about the product, its features, and its specifications. They are who we speak with if we have any issues or need support. They act as a middle-man between Acunetix and us — they are resellers.

Initially, I believe Acunetix provided us with two solutions. One was a SaaS, which means that they host it on their cloud. They also provide the option to host Acunetix on our internal servers, behind our firewalls, with an on-premise version.

The problem with the on-premise version is that it works only on Windows Servers. I can't install it on a Mac or a Linux-based machine. That was quite challenging for us because all of our cloud infrastructure has been AWS instance, which is of a Linux-based operating system. 

As far as security testing is concerned, we would prefer to host Acunetix, on-premise, because everything would be within our firewall. If we wanted to host it on the cloud, then we would have to sign a non-disclosure, because they know what vulnerabilities exist on our site.

For this reason, we generally prefer to host it on-premise so that they will have a restriction within our firewall, so no one can gain access from the outer wall. Setting up the on-premise version of Acunetix is quite challenging and it's not that straightforward because it only supports one operating system.

However, we found it so difficult to host on-premise that we actually had to stop. Instead, we have decided to go for the cloud version. All we have to do is send them our application to scan in their cloud.

We followed an implementation strategy. With our compliance and security team, we followed a procedure with Acunetix so that any vulnerable information that exists on our site remains safe and secure.

We didn't deploy it ourselves because we used their SaaS model. There is no deployment from our side. Initially, we thought of hosting it on our own server; if we did, we would have required a dedicated person to look after the deployment and setup.

Since we don't have a Windows Server, we opted for the SaaS model because the on-premise version is only compatible with a Windows Server. We don't have a license for a Windows Server so instead of purchasing all of the licensing, we just opted for the SaaS solution. 

The pricing is a little high, and moreover, it's kind of domain-based. For example, if I have one site that has a lot of sub-domains, they will register all of the sub-domains as individual sites. That caused problems for us.

We have three sites with 10 sub-domains each — so technically 30. We ended up having to purchase 30 licenses, which costs a lot. Instead of paying per site, I think it would be better if they proposed some other kind of pricing and licensing model, like Burp's model. That's why we preferred Burp over Acunetix.

With Burp,10 agents can scan 10 sites. Even if we scale our application, we don't have to purchase a new license. We can reshuffle the agents to scan multiple websites. One agent can scan our site today, and the same agent can scan another site tomorrow. This is the pricing model of Burp, which was perfect for us.

The Acunetix licensing and pricing model is somewhat complicated. If we calculated all of our domains and sub-domains, the sum would be huge. That's why we thought of leaving Acunetix.

I believe we also evaluated Zap and Portswigger Burp suite.

The false-positive rate is not that high, but it's not very low either. There were a few false-positive cases that were triggered when we scanned both of our web applications. So, they're not minimal, but they're not high either, they occur somewhere in between.

The time it takes to remediate issues with Acunetix depends on the type of issue. Minor issues can be resolved within a day. Bigger issues, involving debugging from scratch can take around a week.

In total, we experienced about five high-level vulnerabilities, three mid-level, and 17 low-level vulnerabilities. We also found a few DOM-based, cross-site scripting vulnerabilities.

If you're interested in this solution, you have to consider the pricing model, because when your application is scaling, the cost of Acunetix also spikes up. If you want to scale, you need to look into the cost of Acunetix as well.

Also, the on-premise version takes a lot of effort. Maintaining a Linux-based system is a lot easier; it's difficult for some engineers to maintain a Windows-based operating system. 

On a scale from one to ten, I would give this solution a rating of five.

On the positive side, they have a good reporting module and scanner, which is capable of identifying most vulnerabilities. On the negative side, I think the on-premise version needs to be improved. Rather than sticking to one operating system, it needs to support multiple operating systems.

Apart from that, the pricing model also needs to be revisited. If you want to scale an application, you have to spend more money with Acunetix because it uses a domain-based pricing model, which is not something I like using. For these reasons, I am giving Acunetix Vulnerability Scanner a rating of five. 

The primary use case of the solution is to scan our web applications for vulnerabilities.

The most valuable feature of the solution is the speed at which it can scan multiple domains in just a few hours.

The solution can be improved by adding the ability to scan subdomains automatically, and by providing reports that can be exported to external databases to share with other solutions. The solution is also costly and can use a price reduction.

I have been using the solution for two years.

The initial setup is not complex. You can be set up and start your first scan within an hour.

The implementation was done in-house.

The cost is based on two types of licenses, ConsultLite, and ConsultPlus, as well as the number of domains that are scanned. The minimum package is five domains or subdomains.

The other options I evaluated are AppSpider, Netsparker, and HCL AppScan.

I give the solution nine out of ten.

The solution is faster than AppSpider when scanning primary domains but it does not scan subdomains. If you require a solution that does a more in-depth scan I don't recommend the solution.  

Acunetix is the best service in the world. It is easy to manage. It gives a lot of information to the users to see and identify problems in their site or applications. It works very well. 

The only problem that they have is the price. It is a bit expensive, and you cannot change the number of applications for the whole year.

We have been partners for two years.

For such services, scalability is not relevant because you just scan your service and make a document of the problems that you have. After that, you have to take care of them and fix them. So, it's not like other services that have to be working 24/7. You only run it and receive information.

Its users vary because in some companies, the web is under the IT team, and in some companies, the web is under security, CISO, or something like this. It depends on how much personnel the company has to manage these tools.

The Acunetix team is in Malta. They are very good, and they provide support over the phone. They are available 24 hours a day, and they answer your queries very fast. They're very active and good.

It is a bit complicated, but their support is very good in case of any issues. It can be on-prem or on the cloud. It depends on what the customer wants.

You don't need more than one person for its maintenance.

It is a bit expensive. If you need to check five applications, you have to pay almost 14,000. It is an agreement for two years at 7,000 per year for only five applications. You cannot change the applications in the license. So, you are stuck with the same license for the five applications for one full year. 

In terms of additional costs, you may need an expert in applications/sites to write the code and fix the code problems. You can do all the things by yourself because it tells you what to do, how to fix, and what to change, but you have to give your people time to take care of those things.

For SMB customers, it is a good tool to take care of the applications and the website of the company. It works well, but it is a bit expensive. I would advise others to prepare the money for it.

I would rate it a nine out of ten.

We use the product for dynamic analysis. It also helps us to scan web applications. 

The tool's most valuable feature is scan configurations. We use it for external physical applications. The scanning time depends on the application's code. 

Acunetix needs to include agent analysis. 

I have been using the product for four years. 

I rate the tool's stability a nine out of ten. 

I rate Acunetix's scalability a seven out of ten. My company has five to four users. 

I rate the tool's deployment a nine out of ten. 

We have seen good ROI with the tool's use. 

Acunetix is good and helps to scan properly. I rate it a nine out of ten. 

Our company has more than 300 employees and we have regional offices in Japan and Malaysia. We are in the FinTech industry. We do banking solutions, mobile, branch-based, and agent banking. We are also into government projects.

We have two lines of application testing. One is for internal application deployments. Before all these deployments, we conduct testing with Acunetix and, based on the report generated, we do remediation. Once the remediation is done we will do more testing. Only once all the vulnerabilities have been fixed is it allowed to be deployed in the organization's environment. 

The second use case is that we do application development for banks. Whenever we develop backend applications or web applications, they are all tested for vulnerability. In addition, the mobile application code is tested using Acunetix.

We didn't have much in the way of exposure to this kind of information when I joined the organization. I introduced this system to test all the applications that were going to be released to customers, as well as for our internal vulnerability assessment and penetration testing purposes.

The number of "high" and "medium" vulnerabilities found using this solution will depend on the development process. But when we started using Acunetix, and other testing tools as well, we had a lot of vulnerabilities. We had to invest a lot of time in fixing vulnerabilities in those days, about two years back. Now, we don't get that many vulnerabilities because the developers and the application testers have improved a lot. They code in a way that results in fewer vulnerabilities.

Most of the vulnerability standards we've used give a fair number of false positives. But with the latest version of Acunetix, we have seen a good standard of false positive rates. Sometimes, customers actually want to have a list of false positives, but the number of false positives we now get is much less than earlier.

It's very user-friendly for the testing teams. It's very easy for them to understand things and to fix vulnerabilities. For anyone who does development, Acunetix is going to be a very powerful tool, and very easy to use. It gives all the required information for fixing your vulnerabilities.

The jargon used makes it difficult for project managers to understand the issues, and the technical explanations used make it difficult for developers to understand issues. These things should be simplified much more. That would be very helpful for us when explaining to them what needs to be fixed. The report output needs to be simplified.

We've been using Acunetix Vulnerability Scanner for the last three years and we don't have a reason to change to a different solution.

We haven't come across unexpected downtime or unexpected issues.

We don't scan more than 35 solutions, but we are always working on improving them and, whenever an improvement comes up, we scan it.

We initially decided that it was going to be deployed on a central server and we didn't look into the scalability. We set up the environment and we have been using it for some time. We haven't come across the need for scalability.

We have five usernames for Acunetix, but most of the time only two of them are being used. Generally, in a week, we may conduct five or six tests. We don't have much load on it. We do intend to expand the number of users in another six months' time with an additional three or four users, as we are expecting more application testing in that time.

We had to contact technical support some ago but not since then. Sometimes the blog provides support very well, and we have also attended certain webinars.

We would really appreciate it if they would provide training on advanced usage or technical knowhow. That would help us to attend to things and sort them out.

The company had been using InMap and was using manual vulnerability assessment practices, using Kali Linux and some open source applications. But once I joined the company, we changed to a different level because we are an ISO 27000 certified company as well as being PCI DSS application certified with a PCI DSS certified data center. We host payment applications on behalf of Sri Lankan and Malaysian banks. Because of that we introduced these automation systems. We use Acunetix and we use PortSwigger and some other tools.

We used Nessus and we have experience with QualysGuard as well, but Acunetix gives us code-level identification of vulnerabilities and a good understanding of the code-level vulnerability fixes. It is much more helpful for us because we can understand how to fix the vulnerabilities at the code level. The vulnerability identification is much more powerful in Acunetix than in any other tool.

The initial setup is very simple. 

We use this application for testing in different environments, such as production and DR, and implementing of scanning in those environments can sometimes be a little bit tough. But that is not due to the complexity of the application but more because of the complexity of the environments that we maintain, to keep our compliance level high.

The way we set it up is that once development is over, we push it to a single location. For that, it's not a very complex environment, it's a single PC. We do the scanning on that PC so that development is actually on a single server. The setup for that didn't take much time. Within two to three days, the complete setup was finished and the initial testing was run.

We have seen ROI with Acunetix. That's the most convincing point I have to prove to my management when it comes to the next budgeting cycle. The ROI is seen in the fact that, at the time of application releases, we hold off the risk. When we do the assessment, we see that the distributed cost of Acunetix, across all our releases reduces our risk. It's a very convincing point.

When compared with other products, the pricing is a little bit high. But it gives value for the price. It serves the purpose and is worthwhile for the price we pay. Other than the licensing, we haven't come across any other costs.

We are very comfortable with the granularity of tests. Sometimes, for certain specific areas, we use different tools, but we feel that Acunetix is much more helpful for all the development teams in understanding the output of the system. In certain cases, the scope of the application and the exposure of the application is varied and then, for additional security measures, we use different tools to evaluate these applications. That makes us much more comfortable in explaining to our customers that we don't only rely on a single tool, that we use multiple tools to identify things in complex environments. Customers want to have different views, not only a single view, of application testing. 

Acunetix provides the primary vulnerability assessment. Once we believe we can rely on Acunetix, we will be able to save money on other licenses. The most interesting part is that the application security vulnerability reports of Acunetix are much more explainable in simple terms, for developers.

Also, the jargon that some of the applications that I have looked at—certain open source applications—use and the setup required are highly technical. You have to do a lot of maintenance to keep the environment up and running. Acunetix is a lot more comfortable. Newly recruited people and project managers can easily understand it. This is one of the winning points of Acunetix.

In our tests of Acunetix, we didn't find much difference, performance-wise, when comparing it with other applications. It's lightweight but it doesn't matter if it is a little bit heavy, since it provides a much broader spectrum of vulnerabilities. Acunetix is much more customizable for granular levels of testing.

In terms of the amount of time it takes to complete a scan using Acunetix, a web application, for example, with two or three endpoints takes between half an hour and 40 minutes. If I use the Kali Linux, it will take more time, and then you have to do much more customization which requires heavy technical knowledge. Other solutions take time to scan and may give a much more broader spectrum, but they do not identify vulnerabilities for the purpose of fixing them. They identify them to explore them. Acunetix scans for most commonly identified issues. The problem with other solutions is that, while we may be able to see a lot of vulnerabilities, if the solution has not been identified we end up with questions as to whether we are able to release it or not. We don't come up against that issue with Acunetix.

I would definitely recommend Acunetix to anyone who wants to do one vulnerability assessment from an application development perspective.

The amount of time it takes to remediate something will depend on the developer's knowledge and ability to fix vulnerabilities. That doesn't depend on the solution, on Acunetix, but rather on the technical knowhow of the people who engage in that.

But that particular jargon and the technical explanations we have for fixing vulnerabilities need to be improved, so that managers who don't have technical knowhow, can easily understand what needs to be done to fix the vulnerabilities.

Overall, I would rate the solution as a seven out of 10. While we use this tool for application testing, we need another tool to test application traffic interception. Acunetix doesn't have that ability. If it did, I would definitely rate it as nine or 9.5. After using Acunetix for application and code-level testing, the same application will be tested again for application traffic interception. With the results of the traffic interception, we again go back to the code level and then identify where the issues are. If Acunetix had that capability, I would be able to raise it as a nine or 9.5.

We use the solution for the scanning of vulnerabilities like SQL injections. 

Acunetix needs to be dynamic with JavaScript code, unlike Netsparker which can scan complex agents. 

I have been working with the solution for three years. 

Acunetix is very stable. 

The solution is scalable if you use the cloud version. You will face limitations with RAM and processor on the desktop. 

We have not faced any issues to complain about. 

I have used Netsparker before. 

Acunetix is easy to install and took only two minutes to deploy. For desktop applications, you need to download an EXE file. Deployment over the cloud requires API. 

I would rate Acunetix an eight out of ten. I don't recommend it for dynamic websites. It is recommended for static pages. 

This solution is a WAF (web application firewall). The primary use case of this solution is to secure web applications against cross-site scripting and other forms of malware that occur at the application level.

We last used Acunetix in December and we have switched to Barracuda.

The scalability is more than good. It can operate both as a standalone and it can be integrated with other applications, which makes it a very versatile solution to have. 

This solution is simple enough, especially with the cloud. You can download the client onto your machines and then you start filtering your traffic from there.

An area that we wanted to test was if it will tie bandwidth and does it throttle traffic?

How much bandwidth usage does it consume when it sorts out the traffic. When monitoring the traffic we always have issues with the bandwidth consumption and the throttling of traffic.

Everything now is moving to the cloud. If they would consider SD1 possibilities, it would give it the longevity that it needs in the market. They may not need it, as they would be able to integrate it with other SD1 platforms as an extra feature.

By definition, they are not next-generation. The next-generation is fully cloud, properly load-balanced, and you would want something that is tailored along those lines from the get-go. It would give you more deployment, less support, and less technical hands looking at the solution.

We have been dealing with Acunetix since 2017. 

We provide services to our clients.

It's a stable solution. It doesn't report a lot of false positives or false negatives. You can put it on and look at your logs and your reports.

This solution is scalable.

I haven't contacted technical support because I am supposed to be the first line of their support. Contacting them would mean that I have problems beyond my scope.

We are now doing a profile on Barracuda because we are partners but we don't have clients yet. It is very difficult to profile because we don't have a live environment. The only way we could have a live environment is if we deploy it in-house.

We deployed in-house to test the cloud solution and we are moving to LV1 solutions within our MSP.

We were bringing everything on top of a CASB, a cloud broker for security. We had to look at different solutions to see what could be brought on top of the CASBplatform and what we would be leaving out from the previous partnerships. We wanted to look at a different solution.

The initial setup is straightforward. You just need to download the client from the website or get a license from them, then you can deploy it.

It can take a couple of hours or less to deploy.

We have a team in the company.

This is a solution that I would recommend.

I would rate it an eight out of ten.

We use the product for application security.

The tool's most valuable feature is performance.

Acunetix needs to improve its cost.

I have been using the product for a year.

The tool is stable.

Acunetix is scalable.

The tool's support is good.

Positive

I rate the product a nine out of ten.