Orca Security vs Tenable Nessus comparison

Orca Security and Tenable are both solutions in the Vulnerability Management category. Orca Security is ranked #9 with an average rating of 8.7, while Tenable is ranked #1 with an average rating of 8.3. Orca Security holds a 4.9% mindshare in VM, compared to Tenable’s 12.6% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Orca Security users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 98% of Tenable users who would recommend it.

Orca Security

Read 19 Orca Security reviews

6,139 Views
4,242 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Tenable Nessus

Read 80 Tenable Nessus reviews

15,036 Views
11,200 Comparison Views

98% willing to recommend

Orca Security

Tenable Nessus

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 9, 2024

Tenable Nessus and Orca Security compete in the cybersecurity tools category. Orca Security seems to have the upper hand due to its agentless architecture, cloud focus, and rapid support.

Features: Tenable Nessus offers extensive vulnerability scanning, predictive prioritization, and an integration ability that supports risk management across environments. Orca Security's SideScanning technology allows agentless data collection, ranking and prioritizing vulnerabilities, and providing detailed cloud-level visibility.

Room for Improvement: Tenable Nessus could improve in reporting customization, intuitive interfaces, and reducing false positives. Orca Security could expand its on-premise integration and visualization capabilities, automatic remediation features, and enhance communication on updates.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Tenable Nessus is mostly deployed on-premises, and feedback on technical support is mixed. Orca Security is deployed in the cloud with minimal setup and is praised for ease of use and quick support response.

Pricing and ROI: Tenable Nessus is competitively priced for smaller organizations and presents a strong ROI through its management capabilities. Orca Security is generally more expensive but justifies cost with its feature suite and value in reducing the need for multiple tools.

To learn more, read our detailed Orca Security vs. Tenable Nessus Report (Updated: December 2024).

Buyer's Guide

Orca Security vs. Tenable Nessus

December 2024

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Categories and Ranking

Orca Security

Ranking in Vulnerability Management

9th

Average Rating

9.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.9

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Container Security (10th), Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) (9th), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (7th), Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPP) (6th), Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) (5th), Cloud Detection and Response (CDR) (1st)

Tenable Nessus

Ranking in Vulnerability Management

1st

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.3

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of December 2024, in the Vulnerability Management category, the mindshare of Orca Security is 4.9%, down from 5.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Tenable Nessus is 12.6%, down from 15.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Vulnerability Management

Featured Reviews

Cédric Thian-Meng

Presales Security Engineer / CSM at Cybersel Group

It contacts your account provider and fetches metadata, eliminating the need for snapshots or reserved space to copy client infrastructure

Orca Security has patented technologies. It's an agentless solution, so you don't need to install an agent. Instead, it contacts your account provider and fetches metadata, eliminating the need for snapshots or reserved space to copy client infrastructure. The multi-cloud capability displays essential information and potential vulnerabilities with granular detail. For instance, it identifies paths that attackers might exploit to gain root or admin access to machines. It is comprehensive, covering a wide range of software needs. They also integrate with CI/CD pipelines, enabling developers to ensure security from the early stages of code deployment. This integration provides a 100% guarantee on security, safeguarding images, configurations, and other crucial information throughout the development process.

Read full review

Matthew Weisler

Sole Proprietor at Core-Infosec

Unlimited assets for one price and quick, agentless results

The solution has a single price for unlimited assets. Value wise, the solution is also great for pen testers and consultants. The solution is useful for vulnerability and patch management from both the internal and public facing sides. Quick assessments, compliance scores, and results are provided without having to do agents.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"With its Cloud Security Posture Management capability, we have the ability to read across all of our cloud-based environments, which includes AWS and Azure. We have visibility into those environments. Seeing all vulnerabilities and configurations is really powerful for us, but ultimately, the ability to use the API to query across the fleet to understand what is the current state, what is the patch level, which ones are potentially exposed for a new CVE that just came out is even more valuable. It allows us to gather really specific intelligence through simple queries."

"I find Orca Security's CIEM feature invaluable, as it focuses on entitlement and posture management, identifying assets with older OS versions, and asset misconfiguration."

"The reporting and automated remediation capabilities are valuable to me. They're real game-changers."

"Orca's dashboard is excellent. My team needs to be able to focus on specific areas for improvement in our cloud environment. And most recently, we've started to get good use out of sonar, the search capabilities, and the alert creation."

"Orca Security has updated its interface, making it more user-friendly. I find it particularly useful as it allows me to easily navigate the dashboard and prioritize actions based on severity and criticality."

"I would rate the quality of support as nine stars out of ten due to their quick and helpful responses."

"I find Orca Security's CIEM feature invaluable, as it focuses on entitlement and posture management, identifying assets with older OS versions, and asset misconfiguration."

"The best features of Orca Security include its ability to perform a lot of security controls without requiring any installation of agents, making it very easy to set up."

More Orca Security pros

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

"The most valuable feature is the breadth of vulnerabilities that it finds. It's able to find across a lot of different platforms and operating systems. It's also able to combine local testing with network-based testing."

"Scanners and reports using CIS templates ("de-facto" standard, easy to fix and to locate correction tips at documentation), tests against cloud providers, database profiles, several types of telecom devices, and others highly customizable scans."

"The features of Tenable Nessus that I have found most valuable are its reliability and its ability to collate a dependable output, where we are able to get the same vulnerability when we test manually. The output is quite reliable."

"Easy to set up vulnerability scanner with good stability and a responsive technical support team."

"Tenable Nessus has a good performance, is very user-friendly, and is easy to use."

"Tenable Nessus is one of the best vulnerability assessment tools, that I know."

"Ease of reviewing scores, identifying vulnerabilities, and getting information on them."

More Tenable Nessus pros

Cons

"The main drawback in an agentless approach is that if the solution detects a virus or malware in the environment, we need to manually remove it. But from my experience with other production environments, it's not straightforward to install agents in the hope they will automatically remediate viruses, even from production environments... Ultimately, the ability to auto-remediate is something that I would like to see."

"I would be happy if they offered more automatic remediation options. They're working on that, but the more the better. For example, if they want you to harden a server, they would offer a hardening script that would be more aware of what's going on."

"Orca Security could improve its ticket creation process. Currently, it allows for creating tickets in only one bucket, which requires monitoring to redirect tickets to the appropriate team."

"I would like to see better customization options for security frameworks and better integration with reporting tools like Power BI or Grafana dashboards."

"Orca Security could improve its ticket creation process."

"I would like to see an option to do security checks on a code level. This is possible because they have access to all of the code running in the cloud provider, and combining their site-scanning solution with that would be a nice add-on."

"They can expand a little bit in anti-malware detection. While we have pretty good confidence that it's going to detect some of the static malware, some of the detections are heuristics. There could be a growth in the library from where they're pulling their information, but we don't get a lot of those alerts based on the design of our products. In general, that might be an area that needs to be filled since they offer it as a service within it."

"We are PCI DSS compliant, so we need to scan our environment externally with tools vetted by the PCI DSS organization. Orca doesn't scan the environment externally. It only scans what's currently in the cloud."

More Orca Security cons

"Tenable Nessus could improve the reporting."

"EQA's and dashboards should be addressed in the next release."

"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."

"Consumes more system resources when it's running."

"Tenable Nessus could include a broader range of IT assets."

"We would like to have the option of using the solution for the cloud as well as on-premises with the same license at the same time. That would be very helpful."

"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."

More Tenable Nessus cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It is the cost of the visibility that you get. When you really sit down and think about what do you need to do to secure an environment with a low impact on the business, and you take a look out into the world, I think this tool is well justified around cost."

"Orca is very competitive when compared to the alternatives and is not the most expensive in the market, that's for sure."

"Orca Security is cheaper compared to other solutions in the same space."

"The pricing depends on how many assets you have running in your cloud and how many environments you have. If you have a dev environment, test environment, and a production environment then it's really important that you have coverage for all of them."

"While it's competitive with Palo Alto Prisma, I think Orca's list price is very high. I would advise Orca to lower it because, at that price, I might consider alternatives like Wiz, which also offers agentless services."

"I think their pricing model is aligned with market demand. Of course, Orca could probably better align their pricing model with the needs of smaller businesses as well as some larger-scale enterprises with millions of assets. But in all fairness, I think the Orca sales team has been accommodating and ensured that we're happy with the pricing."

"We have a total of 25 licenses for this solution. The solution is on a pay-and-you-use model."

"Overall, the pricing is reasonable and the discounts have been acceptable."

More Orca Security pricing and cost advice

"The price of the solution is reasonable."

"We have a subscription, the licensing fees are paid yearly, and I am using the latest version."

"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."

"The price is okay. I would give it a seven out of ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive."

"The solution is worth the cost. It's a good investment."

"In general, it is extremely expensive."

"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."

"We paid about six thousand dollars per license."

More Tenable Nessus pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

17%

Financial Services Firm

13%

Manufacturing Company

University

Educational Organization

40%

Computer Software Company

Government

Financial Services Firm

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Orca Security?

It's for protection. It's an agentless tool. We don't need to install anything at a customer's premises. We can just scan the entire assets in the cloud.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Orca Security?

The documentation for Orca Security could be improved. The compliance framework also needs enhancements, especially concerning integrations with other tools like ServiceNow's vulnerability modules,...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Orca Security?

We used Orca Security for Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM), vulnerability assessment, and several other security controls, including Shimless Security. It helped us consolidate our security...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

Comparisons

Wiz vs Orca Security

Compared 39% of the time

Microsoft Defender for Cloud vs Orca Security

Compared 9% of the time

Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks vs Orca Security

Compared 8% of the time

CrowdStrike Falcon Cloud Security vs Orca Security

Compared 5% of the time

AWS Security Hub vs Orca Security

Compared 4% of the time

More Orca Security Competitors

Qualys VMDR vs Tenable Nessus

Compared 21% of the time

Tenable Vulnerability Management vs Tenable Nessus

Compared 14% of the time

Rapid7 InsightVM vs Tenable Nessus

Compared 13% of the time

Pentera vs Tenable Nessus

Compared 8% of the time

Microsoft Defender Vulnerability Management vs Tenable Nessus

Compared 7% of the time

More Tenable Nessus Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Orca Security

December 2024

Download Orca Security product report

Buyer's Guide

Tenable Nessus

November 2024

Download Tenable Nessus product report

Learn More

Orca Security

Tenable

Overview

Orca Security is the pioneer of agentless cloud security that is trusted by hundreds of enterprises globally. Orca makes cloud security possible for enterprises moving to and scaling in the cloud with its patented SideScanning™ technology and Unified Data Model. The Orca Cloud Security Platform delivers the world's most comprehensive coverage and visibility of risks across AWS, Azure, Google Cloud and Kubernetes.

At Orca Security, we’re on a mission to make it fast, easy, and cost effective for organizations to address critical cloud security issues so they can operate in the cloud with confidence.

Key Platform Features:

Agentless: Complete, centralized coverage of the entire cloud estate, without the need for installing and configuring agents or layering together multiple siloed tools. Full visibility of cloud misconfigurations, vulnerabilities, workload protection, malware scanning, image scanning, file integrity monitoring and more.
Asset Inventory: Get a complete inventory of all your public cloud assets, including detailed information on installed OSes, software, and applications, as well as data and network assets such as storage buckets, Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs), and Security Groups.

Attack Path Analysis: Visualize attack vectors to critical assets or crown jewels. See which assets are susceptible to lateral movement, assume roles, privilege escalation, and more.

Risk Prioritization: Prioritize the 1% of risks that matter the most, based on impact scores. Secure the vulnerabilities and misconfigured targets (critical assets) and eliminate the potential risks residing on the attack paths to those targets.
Cloud Threat Detection: Monitor for malicious activity within your entire cloud estate. Be aware of detected threats, user behavior anomalies and more.

Breach Forensics: Log every change and all activity into a central repository for investigation procedures to confirm or deny entry and compromises within the cloud estate.
Cloud To Dev (Shift Left): Orca’s built-in shift left capabilities enables DevOps to focus more security attention earlier in the CI/CD pipelines. Security teams are able to trace a production risk (misconfiguration or vulnerability) directly to the original source code repository from which it came, even down to the exact line of code that is at the root of the identified risk.
Compliance: Choose from over 60 preconfigured compliance frameworks, cloud security best practices, CIS Benchmarks, or design and build your own compliance framework for fast and continuous reporting.
Security Score: The Orca Security Score is found on Orca’s Risk Dashboard and is updated daily. The overall score is calculated based on performance in the following five categories - Suspicious Activity, IAM, Data at Risk, Vulnerable Assets, and Responsiveness. Since the scores are percentage based and not raw numbers, you can objectively make comparisons to other organizations within your industry or business units of different sizes. In addition to reporting to senior management, the Orca Security Score can help with internal self-monitoring, as a way of measuring risk mitigation efforts, to know where to focus efforts, and track progress.

Orca Security Benefits

Consolidate technologies to reduce costs and complexity:

“The more I can get out of this one solution, the better. I see Orca as the tool where we get all cloud-related security data.” - Joshua Scott, Head of Security and IT | Postman

Avoid costly breaches:

"I look at proactive asset discovery, configuration management, and vulnerability management as being able to find a vulnerability before the bad guys do and being able to deal with it before something exploits it. This is what Orca does for us." - Doug Graham, CSO & CPO | Lionbridge

Increase team productivity and efficiency by focusing on high-value activities and solving the 1% of risks that matter most:

"Orca is unique in that it locates vulnerabilities with precision and delivers tangible, actionable results – without having to sift through all the noise." - Aaron Brown, Senior Cloud Security Engineer | Sisense

Quick Time-to-Value with Immediate ROI:

"Orca told us we could have some visibility within 5 or 10 minutes, and I thought, ‘There’s no way.’ Well, I was wrong. They really did it." - Thomas Hill, CISO | Live Oak Bank

Reduce MTTR and remove operational friction:

“We can’t ask developers things like ‘Did you think about security? When you start a new VM on AWS, can you please let me know so I’m able to scan it? Can you please deploy an agent on that machine for me?’ We need a better way to work. Orca provides that better way by eliminating organizational friction.” - Erwin Geirnaert, Cloud Security Architect | NG Data

Tenable Nessus is a vulnerability management solution that aims to empower organizations to be aware of threats that both they and their customers face. It is the most deployed scanner in the vulnerability management industry. Organizations that use this product have access to the largest continuously updated global library of vulnerability and configuration checks. They can stay ahead of threats that Tenable Nessus’s competitors may be unable to spot. Additionally, Tenable Nessus supports a greater number of technologies than its competitors.

Tenable Nessus Benefits

Some of the ways that organizations can benefit by deploying Tenable Nessus include:

Ease of use. Tenable Nessus is designed with security administrators in mind. It is built so that users can manipulate it intuitively without having to undergo special systems training. Users can create security policies with the greatest level of ease and can initiate scans of their entire networks with only a few clicks.

Support and resources. Tenable Nessus has both a support system of clarification resources and technical support for users to rely on. The solution has a resource center that contains guides and tips that can clarify things that confuse users and can aid them in gaining the maximum level of value. Additionally, users can reach out to Tenable Nessus’s technical support team, which is available around the clock and is reachable via a number of methods. This makes it simple for users to get help if they need it.

Reduction of threat vectors. Tenable Nessus provides users with the ability to reduce the number of potential threat vectors that a hacker can exploit. It enables users to find where the vulnerabilities in their networks are so their security won’t be compromised. They can then quickly address those weak points and head off issues before any have the chance to arise.

Tenable Nessus Features

Report customization. Tenable Nessus enables users to customize the security reports that their system produces. They are able to set Tenable Nessus to generate reports that contain the information that is most relevant to their business objectives. Users can also utilize these report customization capabilities to customize the formats of their reports.

Vulnerability triage capability. Included in the Tenable Nessus security suite is a feature that enables users to conduct a triage of their vulnerabilities. The solution can apply one of five ratings to vulnerabilities that it detects. This makes it possible for organizations to work on addressing issues by order of severity.

Scaling. Tenable Nessus can scale to meet an organization’s needs by migrating the network that it is connected to, to other Tenable solutions. Users can scale up their systems as their security demands increase. It is capable of reaching hundreds of thousands of systems.

Reviews from Real Users

Tenable Nessus is a solution that stands out when compared to many of its competitors. Two major advantages it offers are its ease of use and its vulnerability scanning feature.

Rallis F., the principal security architect at a technology vendor, writes, “The ease of use is the primary valuable feature. This specific version is very straightforward. I like the ability to modify it and configure it based on the different policies.”

Sandip D., a cyber security expert at Birlasoft India Ltd, writes, “The vulnerability scanner is the most valuable feature. It's an important feature for us. We use the plugin output for that. It shows us the exact version of Nessus and what is needed for remediation. Based on that, we decide what should be remediated first to get the best result for security.”

Sample Customers

BeyondTrust, Postman, Digital Turbine, Solarisbank, Lemonade, C6 Bank, Docebo, Vercel, and Vivino

Bitbrains, Tesla, Just Eat, Crosskey Banking Solutions, Covenant Health, Youngstown State University

Buyer's Guide

Orca Security vs. Tenable Nessus

December 2024

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