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Cisco Vulnerability Management (formerly Kenna.VM) vs Tenable Nessus 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 Vulnerability Managem...
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
1
Ranking in other categories
Cisco Security Portfolio (11th), Risk-Based Vulnerability Management (18th)
Tenable Nessus
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
80
Ranking in other categories
Vulnerability Management (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

While both are Security Software solutions, they serve different purposes. Cisco Vulnerability Management (formerly Kenna.VM) is designed for Risk-Based Vulnerability Management and holds a mindshare of 2.8%, up 1.8% compared to last year.
Tenable Nessus, on the other hand, focuses on Vulnerability Management, holds 12.5% mindshare, down 15.3% since last year.
Risk-Based Vulnerability Management
Vulnerability Management
 

Featured Reviews

AshishPaliwal - PeerSpot reviewer
Offers contextual prioritization and risk-based remediation of vulnerability
An improvement would be some sort of an integration with any GRC suite. There are a lot of GRC suites available, like Archer, MetricStream, Rsam, Protiviti, for example. So how would a solution like this work if my company has already invested thousands or maybe millions in a GRC solution? Do I still need it and how does it fit into an existing SAP environment? There could be interoperability, having more data sources, integrating Splunk, Qualys, FireEye, Rapid7, Carbon Black. I'm sure all that can be done to an extent, with a little more insight and a little more accuracy on the industry numbers and trends. I'd like the solution to offer any sort of assistance in any way with the remediation part, not just identification of vulnerability risk, and that is second.
HarshBhardiya - PeerSpot reviewer
Provided increased visibility across the organization's servers
The user interface of Tenable Nessus feels outdated and could be more user-friendly. Additionally, the documentation is not well-organized, which can be confusing when searching for solutions or specific information related to Tenable Nessus Professional. The reporting feature could be improved by allowing users to create their own templates instead of relying on predefined ones.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The risk context of any vulnerability is a valuable feature."
"The reports are pretty nice and easy to understand."
"Among the most valuable features are scanning for vulnerabilities and the reporting. The reporting templates are okay. I like that I can see all the hosts with different vulnerabilities."
"A valuable feature of the solution is that it is easy to understand."
"It's scalable."
"The most valuable features are that it's fast, it's easy to use and it provides good reports."
"The most valuable feature of Tenable Nessus is real-time monitoring."
"I find the features that are most valuable are the policies that help us identify the vulnerabilities. These policies are then used for scanning instabilities and then identifying the particular vulnerabilities."
"The most valuable feature of Tenable Nessus is vulnerability detection."
 

Cons

"An improvement would be some sort of an integration with any GRC suite."
"The reports are okay, but the interface is a bit difficult to navigate in some cases."
"The scalability of Tenable Nessus is good. However, it could be more flexible."
"We feel the solution's technical support to be very bad."
"They have added a new Tenable Nessus Expert. That is their new product, which caters to the cloud and everything else. I am assuming that the new features and product enhancements are based on that tool set, but we haven't reviewed it yet."
"They need more flexible pricing."
"The price could be reduced."
"Scans aren't done properly and some devices aren't pinged."
"There is room, overall, for improvement in the way it groups the workstations and the way it detects, when the vulnerability is scanned. Even when we would run a new scan, if it was an already existing vulnerability, it wouldn't put a new date on it."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I think the pricing is based on the number of endpoints, so it's more subscription-based."
"One problem with Tenable is its pricing policy. Optimal results can be achieved with Greenbone Solutions which has much more friendly pricing policies."
"I would like to see better discounts."
"When comparing the price of Tenable Nessus to other similar solutions, such as Acunetix, Tenable Nessus is not as expensive. It is averagely priced in the market. We pay for the solution annually."
"This solution is affordable."
"Tenable Nessus is affordable."
"Its price is high for Libya. The companies here in Libya don't have the awareness of and a good budget for cybersecurity services. If you want them to go for a product, you need to provide something different. This differentiation is related to the price. They should give about 40% to 45% discount per person on the current cost."
"We incurred a single cost for a perpetual license, although I cannot comment on the price as this is above my management level."
"The solution has a single price for unlimited assets."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
23%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Retailer
8%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Educational Organization
41%
Computer Software Company
9%
Government
6%
Financial Services Firm
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

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How would you choose between Rapid7 InsightVM and Tenable Nessus?
You have full visibility across cloud, network, virtual, and containerized infrastructures with Rapid7 Insight VM. You can easily prioritize vulnerabilities using attacker analytics. Overall, Rapid...
What's the difference between Tenable Nessus and Tenable.io Vulnerability Management?
Tenable Nessus is a vulnerability assessment solution that is both easy to deploy and easy to manage. The design of the program is such that if a company should desire to handle the installation t...
What do you like most about Tenable Nessus?
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 equi...
 

Also Known As

Kenna.VM, Kenna Security, Kenna, Kenna Security Platform
No data available
 

Learn More

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

TransUnion
Bitbrains, Tesla, Just Eat, Crosskey Banking Solutions, Covenant Health, Youngstown State University
Find out what your peers are saying about Tenable, Qualys, Rapid7 and others in Risk-Based Vulnerability Management. Updated: January 2025.
831,265 professionals have used our research since 2012.