Lacework vs Tenable Nessus comparison

"Polygraph compliance is a valuable feature. In our perspective, it delivers significant benefits. The clarity it offers, along with the ability to identify and address misconfigurations, is invaluable. When such issues arise, we promptly acknowledge and take action, effectively collaborating with our teams and the responsible parties for those assets. This enables us to promptly manage problems as soon as they arise."

"Lacework is helping a lot in reducing the noise of the alerts. Usually, whenever you have a tool in place, you have a lot of noise in terms of alerts, but the time for an engineer to look into those alerts is limited. Lacework is helping us to consolidate the information that we are getting from the agents and other sources. We are able to focus only on the things that matter, which is the most valuable thing for us. It saves time, and for investigations, we have the right context to take action."

"The compliance reports are definitely most valuable because they save time and are accurate. So, instead of relying on a human going through and checking or providing me with a report, I could just log into Lacework and see for myself."

"The most valuable feature is Lacework's ability to distill all the security and audit logs. I recommend it to my customers. Normally, when I consult for other customers that are getting into the cloud, we use native security tools. It's more of a rule-based engine."

"For the most part, out-of-the-box, it tells you right away about the things you need to work on. I like the fact that it prioritizes alerts based on severity, so that you can focus your efforts on anything that would be critical/high first, moderate second, and work your way down, trying to continue to improve your security posture."

"The most valuable aspects are identifying vulnerabilities—things that are out there that we aren't aware of—as well as finding what path of access attackers could use, and being able to see open SSL or S3 buckets and the like."

"There are many valuable features that I use in my daily work. The first are alerts and the event dossier that it generates, based on the severity. That is very insightful and helps me to have a security cap in our infrastructure. The second thing I like is the agent-based vulnerability management, which is the most accurate information."

"I find the cloud configuration compliance scanning mature. It generates a lot of data and supports major frameworks like ISO 27001 or SOC 2, providing reports and datasets. Another feature I appreciate is setting custom alerts for specific events. Additionally, I value the agent-based monitoring and scanning for compute nodes. It gives us deeper insights into our workloads and helps identify vulnerabilities across our deployed assets."

"I have experience with it on my attack stations, and it's pretty good to optimize. Personally, I think Nessus is quite a good product."

"The product's most valuable features are vulnerability and asset management. It can define the rules and validate the configuration."

"With the Tenable Nessus enterprise edition, you have unlimited licenses to scan the device."

"The scanning capabilities are most valuable when compared to Nessus."

"The most valuable feature of Tenable Nessus is vulnerability detection."

"User friendly and good dashboards."

"Out of the box, the product works well for us, so it's not a tool that we need to customize very much."

"Nessus is good at finding out what nodes you have in place. It will then provide you a report, by node, of what the vulnerabilities are. It does it quickly and stealthfully."

"I would like to see a remote access assistance feature. And the threat-hunting platform could be better."

"A feature that I have requested from them is the ability to sort alerts and policies based on a security framework. Right now, when you go into alerts, you have hundreds and hundreds of them that you have to manually pick. It would be useful to have categories for CIS Benchmark or SOC 2 and be able to display all the alerts and policies for one security framework."

"Its integrations with third-party SIEMs can be better. That is one of the things that we discussed with them."

"Lacework lacks remediation features, but I believe they're working on that. They're focused on the reporting aspect, but other features need to improve. They're also adding some compliance features, so it's not worth saying they need to get better at it."

"The biggest thing I would like to see improved is for them to pursue and obtain a FedRAMP moderate authorization... I don't believe they have any immediate plans to get FedRAMP moderate authorized, which is a bit of a challenge for us because we can only use Lacework in our commercial environment."

"The configuration and setup of alerts should be easier. They should make it easier to integrate with systems like Slack and Datadog. I didn't spend too much time on it, but to me, it wasn't as simple as the alerting that I've seen on other systems."

"Visibility is lacking, and both compliance-related metrics and IAM security control could be improved."

"The solution lacks a cohesive data model, making extracting the necessary data from the platform challenging. It uses its own LQL query language, and each database across different layers and modules is structured differently, complicating correlation efforts. Consequently, I had to create extensive custom reports outside Lacework because their default dashboards didn't communicate risk metrics. They're addressing these issues by redesigning their tools, including introducing the dashboard, which is a step closer to actionable insights but still needs refinement."

"We feel the solution's technical support to be very bad."

"Model OS costs (and its segregation schema for individual modules)."

"I think the reporting templates could be improved with Tenable Nessus."

"Tenable Nessus could improve by having more steady updates which will reduce the vulnerabilities."

"One area with room for improvement is instead of there just being a PDF format for output, I'd like the option of an Excel spreadsheet, whereby I could better track remediation efforts and provide reporting off of that."

"Multiple steps to create an actionable plan will be a great addition to Nessus."

"The price could be more reasonable. I used the free Nessus version in my lab with which you can only scan 16 IP addresses. If I wanted to put it in the lab in my network at work, and I'm doing a test project that has over 30 nodes in it, I can't use the free version of Nessus to scan it because there are only 16 IP addresses. I can't get an accurate scan. The biggest thing with all the cybersecurity tools out there nowadays, especially in 2020, is that there's a rush to get a lot of skilled cybersecurity analysts out there. Some of these companies need to realize that a lot of us are working from home and doing proof of concepts, and some of them don't even offer trials, or you get a trial and it is only 16 IP addresses. I can't really do anything with it past 16. I'm either guessing or I'm doing double work to do my scans. Let's say there was a license for 50 users or 50 IP addresses. I would spend about 200 bucks for that license to accomplish my job. This is the biggest complaint I have as of right now with all cybersecurity tools, including Rapid7, out there, especially if I'm in a company that is trying to build its cybersecurity program. How am I going to tell my boss, who has no real budget of what he needs to build his cybersecurity program, to go spend over $100,000 for a tool he has never seen, whereas, it would pack the punch if I could say, "Let me spend 200 bucks for a 50 user IP address license of this product, do a proof of concept to scan 50 nodes, and provide the reason for why we need it." I've been a director, and now I'm an ISO. When I was a director, I had a budget for an IT department, so I know how budgets work. As an ISO, the only thing that's missing from my C-level is I don't have to deal with employees and budgets, but I have everything else. It's hard for me to build the program and say, "Hey, I need these tools." If I can't get a trial, I would scratch that off the list and find something else. I'm trying to set up Tenable.io to do external PCI scans. The documentation says to put in your IP addresses or your external IP addresses. However, if the IP address is not routable, then it says that you have to use an internal agent to scan. This means that you set up a Nessus agent internally and scan, which makes sense. However, it doesn't work because when you use the plugin and tell it that it is a PCI external, it says, "You cannot use an internal agent to scan external." The documentation needs to be a little bit more clear about that. It needs to say if you're using the PCI external plugin, all IP addresses must be external and routable. It should tell the person who's setting it up, "Wait a minute. If you have an MPLS network and you're in a multi-tenant environment and the people who hold the network schema only provide you with the IP addresses just for your tenant, then you are not going to know what the actual true IP address that Tenable needs to do a PCI scan." I've been working on Tenable.io to set up PCI scans for the last ten days. I have been going back and forth to the network thinking I need this or that only to find out that I'm teaching their team, "Hey, you know what, guys? I need you to look past your MPLS network. I need you to go to the edge's edge. Here's who you need to ask to give me the whitelist to allow here." I had the blurb that says the plugin for external PCI must be reachable, and you cannot use an internal agent. I could have cut a few days because I thought I had it, but then when I ran it, it said that you can't run it this way. I wasted a few hours in a day. In terms of new features, it doesn't require new features. It is a tool that has been out there for years. It is used in the cybersecurity community. It has got the CV database in it, and there are other plugins that you could pass through. It has got APIs you can attach to it. They can just improve the database and continue adding to the database and the plugins to make sure those don't have false positives. If you're a restaurant and you focus on fried chicken, you have no business doing hamburgers."

"The solution could improve security updates."

"The pricing has gotten better. That scenario was somewhat unstable. They have a rather interesting licensing structure. I believe you get 200 resources per "Lacework unit." It was difficult, in the beginning, to figure out exactly what a "resource" was... That was a problem until about a year or so ago. They have improved it and it has stabilized quite a bit."

"My smaller deployments cost around 200,000 a year, which is probably not as expensive as Wiz."

"The licensing fee was approximately $80,000 USD, per year."

"It is slightly expensive. It depends on how big your environment is, but it is expensive. Right now, we are spending a lot of money. We have covered all of the cloud providers and most of our colocation facilities as well, so we cannot complain, but it is slightly expensive. It is not super expensive."

"It has a fair cost and very good cost-benefit ratio."

"The product is free."

"In general, it is extremely expensive."

"The solution has a single price for unlimited assets."

"Its pricing is great and can't be improved. It is very cheap. It is less than 2,000 pounds a license, and you can't really ask for more. It has unlimited IPs and unlimited scans. There are no particular pricing constraints. The only additional cost is the inherent cost of the people to actually review the actual scans."

"The solution has free options."

"The price of Tenable Nessus is too expensive for each service center."

"Nowadays, your vulnerability applications are going to be kind of pricey because lots of them, including Rapid7, are based upon a base price, but then they add in the nodes. That's where they get you. If you're a big network, obviously, you need to scan everything. Therefore, it's going to be costly. The risk and insurance money associated with having ransomware on my networks is going to cost me more money, time, and marketing than the price of the tool. That's why I'm speaking only as an information security officer to security operations. This is the tool that is there in my toolbox to say whether we vulnerable or not. At this point, I don't care about how much it costs my company to have it because if I wasn't able to report it and we got ransomware, then who cares? I'm probably going to be out of business because it happened. That's why I don't care about the price. I have it, and I could use it effectively and do my report. At the end of the day, even if we get ransomware, as long as I reported it, followed my protocol, and put in the change, irrespective of whether it was ignored or denied, I did my job."