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Cisco SecureX [EOL] vs Qualys Web Application Scanning comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Cisco SecureX [EOL]
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
8.2
Number of Reviews
13
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Qualys Web Application Scan...
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.3
Number of Reviews
40
Ranking in other categories
Application Security Tools (16th), Static Application Security Testing (SAST) (11th)
 

Featured Reviews

Alon K - PeerSpot reviewer
CTO & VP of Cyber Solutions, Israel at Rockwell Automation
Gives our customers visibility and they don't have to go multiple management consoles anymore
One of the examples is related to forensics. The forensics are amazing because when you have enrichment, and the solutions talk with each other, when you need it, you have the ability to know everything in the organization: when, why, whatever. With just one click you have information from email, from the endpoint, from the web. Let's say that tomorrow morning, you have a ransom[ware] attack in your organization and you would like to know from which email it came, or where the customer saved the file, even though the incident didn't occur at the same moment. With SecureX, you have Cisco Threat Response inside. [With] one click, you get all of the flow. That's amazing value. That also releases resources for our customers. The customers don't have to connect many systems and try to register the event on each system, or to go to the SIEM and do a correlation. That's the one-stop shop for the customers, and that's amazing.
AnkitSharma13 - PeerSpot reviewer
Security Officer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Web scanning needs improvement but offers good vulnerability detection
The downside of Qualys Web Application Scanning is that it cannot crawl automatically. If I provide an IP address and a login form, it does basic testing, but it doesn't go deep as IBM AppScan does. If Qualys Web Application Scanning could improve its crawling capability, it would be more user-friendly. Qualys Web Application Scanning does IP-level testing, requiring direct input of credentials, and can only scan a few pages to provide known generic vulnerabilities, which isn't as beneficial from my point of view. The Vulnerability Management also relies heavily on version numbers and will flag vulnerabilities based on the component version, but it doesn't check if a real fix exists, leading to flags on components that actually have workarounds available.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"Our customers find the product's third-party integrations valuable. Our customers are also impressed with the tool's capability to pick up third-party threat feeds and use that as part of the decision-making process."
"It is one of my favorite things that has ever been built."
"Its cybersecurity and resilience have been extremely important for our organization."
"The most valuable feature is its ability to manage all the applications and visibility. For example, if there is malware, spam, or another component that wants to attack the company in my servers, network, or applications, then SecureX will react to the problem."
"SecureX takes all the separate pieces of security within your company, adds in intelligence from different sites and services on the internet, and makes them work together."
"Using SecureX, we can aggregate the data from all our security products, automate many of our tasks that we had to do manually before, save a huge amount of time, and provide many reports about usage of our systems and networks to our leaders and managers to show what we can do to make our security better."
"SecureX has been keeping our devices safe during the pandemic and we haven't had any major threats that have come in or that have been found on our devices."
"The ability to create firewalls online has been most valuable including the ability to create rules."
"The most valuable feature is that we are able to scan the services and put credentials like a user ID password, and we can verify the vulnerability level."
"It is a cloud-based solution, so it is easy to scale."
"We’re a Linux shop and Qualys gave us good Linux vulnerability scanning; it reports only a few glaring false-positive errors, and the long baseline of iterative results was valuable to track changes and our rate of improvement while access to the API let us automate its use in our CI/CD pipeline for machine images."
"Automated scanning has significantly improved our web application security management by reducing manual work."
"Qualys WAS' most valuable features are the navigation flow of the UI and the option for a different layer of security (identification and operation through email and mobile)."
"It protects against zero-day vulnerabilities, like Heartbleed."
"The feature that I have found most valuable is the progressive scan. It is good. It's done in 24 hours."
"Licensing is the most valuable. Qualys provides the best licensing for companies. It is the best product for the development purposes of web applications. The product has a lot of integrations."
 

Cons

"I'm not sure that I would call it a bug, but sometimes the solution is a little slow."
"They could expand into more areas."
"If they could make the Cisco Umbrella piece a little bit more advanced or easier to manage, that would help. We use it for filtering and when you compare it to a normal content filter, it lacks some functionality."
"I would like it to integrate with another solution, e.g., DNA."
"They could expand into more areas. The more third-parties that we have tied into it, the better. The capabilities are there. As they just continue to involve the product, the more things that you can look into, then the more analytics that you can get. Also, the more data that we can get, then the better off we will be."
"Sometimes it's a little slow so that is also something Cisco should check."
"Remediation stuff could be integrated into the product's automation."
"Enhancing automation capabilities could further improve the product."
"They should try to include business logic vulnerabilities in the scanner testing."
"The UI is not user-friendly and you don't have a yearly reporting facility where you can slice and dice in different jobs."
"In certain cases, this product does have false positives, which the company should work on."
"The tool should have a live HTTP editor and more configuration options for some situations, such as handling applications that have URL rewriting enabled."
"We procured around 110 licenses for Web Application Scanning, but we have issues running concurrent scans. I don't currently have the option to trigger scans for all 100-plus websites. The default limit is around 10 conference scans. It's not very scalable, to be honest, because of the limitation that they put on concurrent scans."
"New features need to be added, specifically LLM-based solutions."
"There could be better management and faster scanning."
"They should improve the performance of the security scanning. It should have better performance."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing is competitive, especially for education institutions. Licensing can be a little bit difficult to navigate, especially with resellers with Cisco, but for us it has been pretty easy."
"It is free. It can't get any better than that."
"Cisco SecureX is more expensive than Trend Micro. However, considering the integration capabilities with other solutions and the quality of technical support, I believe there's justification for the price difference."
"It would be nice if they had a different pricing model. Most of our budget for projects goes towards Cisco."
"The product is absolutely free to any customer. As such, the only thing one must keep in mind is that as long as he already has one Cisco security product, irregardless of what that product is, SecureX is available for free."
"You can spend less money for another solution, but if you really want to have a good solution you have to pay. We are happy that we are getting such a good solution for what we are spending."
"It comes free with all Cisco products. So, it is a good price."
"The pricing is the best part of this solution. It is free if you buy Umbrella or Duo Security. It is also a good solution."
"The product pricing is fair and reasonably priced."
"It is an expensive platform."
"Try the free trial of the product to understand the basic working mechanisms.​"
"Qualys Web Application Scanning's pricing is a bit expensive compared to other solutions available in the market."
"The cost is $30,000 USD for one year to cover WAS (Web Application Security) and the VM (Virtual Machine) security in a company with 200 employees."
"From my perspective, it is a budget-friendly option."
"​It is best to be an institutional buyer and directly contact the sales team, as they can provide over-the-top discounts for bulk orders​."
"There are different options available with respect to licensing."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Construction Company
11%
Marketing Services Firm
10%
Computer Software Company
10%
Outsourcing Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Computer Software Company
8%
Comms Service Provider
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Midsize Enterprise7
Large Enterprise3
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business8
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise27
 

Questions from the Community

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Qualys Web Application Scanning?
Regarding pricing, I think for personal use, it is costly, but if organizations are ready to pay, then it is fine as they are using it.
What needs improvement with Qualys Web Application Scanning?
The downside of Qualys Web Application Scanning is that it cannot crawl automatically. If I provide an IP address and a login form, it does basic testing, but it doesn't go deep as IBM AppScan does...
What is your primary use case for Qualys Web Application Scanning?
I use Qualys Web Application Scanning, and we are using Vulnerability Management. By Vulnerability Management, I mean not TotalCloud; they have some on-premises solutions also. Patch Management and...
 

Also Known As

Kenna.AppSec, Kenna.VI
Qualys WAS
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

NHS, Rackspace, UNC Pembroke, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Missing Piece
BskyB, Cartagena, ClearPoint Learning Systems, Connect Group, du, Fortrex Technologies, HBOR, HDI, Highlights for Children, The Lithuanian State Enterprise Centre of Registers, City of Miami Beach, Microsoft, MidlandHR, MSCI Inc., Northern Arizona University, Ofgem, Olympus Europa, PhoneFactor, RTL Nederland, ThousandEyes, VGZ Organisatie B.V.
Find out what your peers are saying about SonarSource Sàrl, Checkmarx, Veracode and others in Application Security Tools. Updated: April 2026.
892,943 professionals have used our research since 2012.