We performed a comparison between Tenable Nessus and Acunetix based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison results: Based on the parameters we compared, Tenable Nessus comes out ahead of Acunetix. Even though both solutions offer beneficial vulnerability scanning and a proactive approach, Acunetix’s two-year licensing plan is less flexible than that of its competitor, and its need for manual resolution of false positives leaves room for improvement.
"Acunetix has an awesome crawler. It gives a referral site map of near targets and also goes really deep to find all the inputs without issues. This was valuable because it helped me find some files or directories, like web admin panels without authentication, which were hidden."
"One of the features that I feel is groundbreaking, that I would like to see expanded on, is the IAS feature: The Interactive Application Security Testing module that gets loaded onto an application on a server, for more in-depth, granular findings. I think that is really neat. I haven't seen a lot of competitors doing that."
"It can operate both as a standalone and it can be integrated with other applications, which makes it a very versatile solution to have."
"The scalability is good. The scalability is more than good because it can operate both as a standalone and it can be integrated as part of applications. So that really makes it a very, very versatile solution to have."
"There is a lot of documentation on their website which makes setting it up and using it quite simple."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is the speed at which it can scan multiple domains in just a few hours."
"The automated approach to these repetitive discovery attempts would take days to do manually and therefore it helps reduce the time needed to do an assessment."
"We are able to create a report which shows the PCI DSS scoring and share it with the application teams. Then, they can correlate and see exactly what they need to fix, and why."
"We have around 500 virtual machines. Therefore, we conduct monthly scans and open tickets for our developers to address identified vulnerabilities. These scans cover the servers, other network equipment, and appliances in our infrastructure."
"The solution is very stable."
"It's scalable."
"Nessus gives me a good preview of vulnerabilities and good suggestions for remediation. It's easy to find a description of a given vulnerability and solutions for it."
"The most valuable feature of Tenable Nessus is the GUI and user-friendliness. Additionally, the environment is easy to work with."
"It is easy to deploy and easy to use. Its reporting is good. From this reporting, you can see the pain point in your network, which makes it easy to fix them. It is easy to understand the reports and export them."
"The most valuable feature is how it scanned and detected through its database to let us know exactly what fixes we needed to put in place for the vulnerabilities. It detects and it also gives you the way to fix it."
"Overall Zoom is a good solution."
"The solution limits the number of scans. It would be much better if we could have unlimited scans."
"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."
"Acunetix needs to be dynamic with JavaScript code, unlike Netsparker which can scan complex agents."
"There is room for improvement in website authentication because I've seen other products that can do it much better."
"Integration into other tools is very limited for Acunetix. While we're trying to incorporate a CI/CD process where we're integrating with JIRA and we're integrating with Jenkins and Chef, it becomes problematic. Other tools give you a high integration capability to connect into different solutions that you may already have, like JIRA."
"There's a clear need for a reduction in pricing to make the service more accessible."
"In terms of what needs improvement, the way the licensing model is currently is not very convenient for us because initially, when we bought it, the licensing model was very flexible, but now it restricts us."
"Tools that would allow us to work more efficiently with the mobile environment, with Android and iOS."
"The professional version is not very scalable."
"Consumes more system resources when it's running."
"EQA's and dashboards should be addressed in the next release."
"Tenable Nessus could improve reporting and information sharing. It would be helpful if we could share the reports and have a little bit better flexibility in the reporting of the data."
"One significant drawback we encounter is the tool's tendency to flag patched packages incorrectly. For instance, if a package is patched by Debian maintainers but not updated to a major or minor version, Nessus may still flag it as vulnerable based on its database. This discrepancy leads to false alarms and requires our developers, system admins, and DevOps teams to address them."
"Vulnerability recommendations are outdated and not in line with industry standards."
"There is room for improvement in finishing the transition to the cloud. We'd like to see them keep on improving the Tenable.io product, so that we can migrate to it entirely, instead of having to keep the Tenable.sc on-prem product."
"One area that has room for improvement is the reporting. I'm preparing reports for Windows and Linux machines, etc. Currently, I'm collecting three or four reports and turning them into one report. I don't know if it is possible to combine all of them in one report, but that would be helpful."
Acunetix is ranked 15th in Vulnerability Management with 26 reviews while Tenable Nessus is ranked 3rd in Vulnerability Management with 75 reviews. Acunetix is rated 7.6, while Tenable Nessus is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Acunetix writes "Fantastic reporting features hindered by slow scanning ". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Tenable Nessus writes "Unlimited assets for one price and quick, agentless results". Acunetix is most compared with OWASP Zap, Tenable.io Web Application Scanning, PortSwigger Burp Suite Professional, HCL AppScan and Qualys Web Application Scanning, whereas Tenable Nessus is most compared with Qualys VMDR, Rapid7 InsightVM, Tenable Security Center, Tenable Vulnerability Management and Snyk. See our Acunetix vs. Tenable Nessus report.
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