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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 (2nd), Breach and Attack Simulation (BAS) (1st)
Tenable Nessus
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
81
Ranking in other categories
Vulnerability Management (3rd)
 

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 30.4%, up 27.2% compared to last year.
Tenable Nessus, on the other hand, focuses on Vulnerability Management, holds 10.2% mindshare, down 13.4% 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The user interface of Tenable Nessus feels outdated and could be more user-friendly.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

"The platform's most valuable features are credential management and vulnerability management."
"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 product is easy to use."
"Maybe there are some remediation steps on the website, we can mask sensitive information on the website better."
"Pentera has many authentic features."
"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."
"With the Tenable Nessus enterprise edition, you have unlimited licenses to scan the device."
"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."
"The initial setup of Tenable Nessus is very easy."
"Tenable Nessus has a good performance, is very user-friendly, and is easy to use."
"It is easy to deploy and easy to use. Its reporting is good. From this reporting, you can see the pain point in your network, which makes it easy to fix them. It is easy to understand the reports and export them."
"Tenable Nessus streamlines the process of scanning for our organization."
"The solution is great for scanning servers."
"I am impressed with the tool's vulnerability scanning."
 

Cons

"The licensing and IP management need improvement. When the IP is imported into a system, we cannot withdraw or revoke the license."
"The vulnerability scanner, exploit achievements, and remediation actions are all great."
"The licensing and IP management need improvement."
"There is room for improvement in virtualization compatibility."
"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."
"One area for product improvement could be the inclusion of a dashboard to cover multiple branches and subsidiaries, allowing for centralized monitoring."
"Maybe scalability. I know that the Pentera right now is high level in order to scan big deals over 500 IPs and not less, and not less. That can be more granular. This will be useful."
"The reporting could be improved. The reporting in Rapid7 is much better."
"We feel the solution's technical support to be very bad."
"We use credentialed scans. They need more permissions and more changes or settings on Windows and Linux."
"It wasn't very clear how the scripts are running the scans. There's information about the script but it's not straightforward. The script information for each of the plugins should be available, but it doesn't give us straightforward direct information about how it was executed. That needs to be more clear."
"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."
"There is room for improvement in finishing the transition to the cloud. We'd like to see them keep on improving the Tenable.io product, so that we can migrate to it entirely, instead of having to keep the Tenable.sc on-prem product."
"To be honest, I haven't used it much to tell you that these are the things that should be improved. But I believe the UI should be enhanced somewhat. For example, there are two ways to find a report, and people are frequently confused as to which is the correct method for locating a full report. Sometimes they go in the opposite direction, so this is an area that may be improved."
"There should be a possibility to install agents on scanned machines. Tenable IO provides the capability of using local agents to check local problems, but this feature is not there in Tenable Nessus Professional. It would be nice to have something similar in Tenable Nessus Professional. We should have the capability to use local agents installed on the machines to locally check a problem."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The product's cost is reasonable. I rate the pricing a three out of ten."
"The tool is relatively cheap."
"It's not that expensive, but it could be more cost-effective."
"We have to pay a yearly licensing cost for Pentera."
"In general, it is extremely expensive."
"The price of Tenable Nessus is much more competitive versus other solutions on the market."
"Nessus is affordable, but its licensing model could be improved with more flexibility for adding assets."
"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."
"While Tenable Nessus is a good enterprise solution, the high price would likely make it prohibitive to smaller organizations."
"There is an annual license required to use this solution."
"I would like to see better discounts."
"The price is okay. I would give it a seven out of ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive."
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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
41%
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.
844,944 professionals have used our research since 2012.