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Pentera vs Tenable Nessus comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 12, 2025

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

Pentera
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
9
Ranking in other categories
Penetration Testing Services (1st), Breach and Attack Simulation (BAS) (1st)
Tenable Nessus
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
80
Ranking in other categories
Vulnerability Management (4th)
 

Mindshare comparison

Pentera and Tenable Nessus aren’t in the same category and serve different purposes. Pentera is designed for Breach and Attack Simulation (BAS) and holds a mindshare of 30.6%, up 27.1% compared to last year.
Tenable Nessus, on the other hand, focuses on Vulnerability Management, holds 8.6% mindshare, down 11.2% since last year.
Breach and Attack Simulation (BAS)
Vulnerability Management
 

Featured Reviews

Richard Marlow - PeerSpot reviewer
Provides good features and helps monitor the status of ransomware protection in an organization
The tool is quite scalable. There's a one-to-one relationship between the engine and how many scans we can do. We can only do one scan with one engine. We had some issues around the password assessments because we added a lot of users. It took a long time. I rate the scalability a seven out of ten. We have three users in our organization.
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The user interface of Tenable Nessus feels outdated and could be more user-friendly.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

"What I like the most about Pentera is its solution-oriented approach."
"The product is easy to use."
"Pentera has many authentic features."
"The solution is SaaS-based. From a cloud perspective, it has Pentera Surface and Pentera Core. The Core is the on-prem deployed solution, while the Surface is the cloud-hosted solution that scans your public infrastructure. From the Surface perspective, the most valuable feature so far has been the attack surface mapping."
"The tool showed us that our ransomware protection wasn’t working on some machines."
"The vulnerability scanner, exploit achievements, and remediation actions are all great."
"The most valuable feature of Pentera is that you can do continuous vulnerability assessment, which is automated."
"The platform's most valuable features are credential management and vulnerability management."
"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."
"The initial setup is very straightforward."
"It is a mature tool."
"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."
"Makes ransomware checking and OS auditing and implementation relatively easy."
"Tenable integrates well with other solutions such as SIEM and batch management."
"Tenable Nessus has provided increased visibility across the organization's servers."
"You can then direct your team to create a report on the discovered vulnerabilities."
 

Cons

"The licensing and IP management need improvement. When the IP is imported into a system, we cannot withdraw or revoke the license."
"The licensing and IP management need improvement."
"Pentera's general dashboards could be improved and made more specific in terms of vulnerabilities that I'm discovering."
"The automated penetration testing features must be improved."
"The vulnerability scanner, exploit achievements, and remediation actions are all great."
"There is room for improvement in virtualization compatibility."
"One area for product improvement could be the inclusion of a dashboard to cover multiple branches and subsidiaries, allowing for centralized monitoring."
"One of the big issues we have is that the tool has an additional license for compromised credentials. Suppose compromised credentials for any of your domains appear in leaks, dumps, or are being sold. In that case, they try to aggregate that data and highlight that, for example, ten users appeared in recent dumps as compromised credentials. However, they don't provide much information about where those compromises came from or their source information, probably to protect their sources."
"We'd like to see more integration potential within the solution."
"It would be better if they had application-level support for mobile devices. They don't have anything to scan mobile devices. Tenable Nessus doesn't have a mobile application vulnerability assessment. I also have issues with the false positive rates. The product has limited features."
"We feel the solution's technical support to be very bad."
"The reports should be improved in Tenable Nessus. For example, when you are auditing compliance with CIS standards. It provides very poor reports."
"Some things in the user interface could be better. The user interface could allow more adjustments to plugins. The price could also be better."
"Tenable Nessus could improve the price."
"They should improve the I/O reporting and the customized spreadsheet export feature."
"EQA's and dashboards should be addressed in the next release."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We have to pay a yearly licensing cost for Pentera."
"The product's cost is reasonable. I rate the pricing a three out of ten."
"It's not that expensive, but it could be more cost-effective."
"The tool is relatively cheap."
"We incurred a single cost for a perpetual license, although I cannot comment on the price as this is above my management level."
"The price is reasonable."
"We pay approximately $2,500 on a yearly basis."
"Cost-wise, it's an affordable tool."
"The price of the solution is reasonable."
"There is an annual license required to use this solution."
"I rate the product's price seven or eight on a scale of one to ten, where one is low price and ten is high price."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
14%
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Educational Organization
6%
Educational Organization
40%
Computer Software Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Government
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Pentera?
What I like the most about Pentera is its solution-oriented approach.
What needs improvement with Pentera?
The licensing and IP management need improvement. When the IP is imported into a system, we cannot withdraw or revoke the license.
What is your primary use case for Pentera?
I am using the OpenIntra solution for pentesting and managing candidates in my environment. I also use this solution for house customers.
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...
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Blackstone Group Caterpillar Apria Healthcare Taylor Vinters Sandler Capital Management Drawbridge BNP Paribas British Red Cross
Bitbrains, Tesla, Just Eat, Crosskey Banking Solutions, Covenant Health, Youngstown State University
Find out what your peers are saying about Pentera vs. Tenable Nessus and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.
842,388 professionals have used our research since 2012.