Rapid7 Metasploit vs Skybox Security Suite comparison

Rapid7 and Tufin are both solutions in the Vulnerability Management category. Rapid7 is ranked #23 with an average rating of 8.4, while Tufin is ranked #46 with an average rating of 7.3. Rapid7 holds a 1.2% mindshare in VM, compared to Tufin’s 0.6% mindshare. Additionally, 95% of Rapid7 users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 81% of Tufin users who would recommend it.

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 14, 2025

Rapid7 Metasploit and Skybox Security Suite compete in vulnerability management and penetration testing. Rapid7 Metasploit seems to have the upper hand in terms of affordability and open-source advantages, whereas Skybox provides extensive enterprise solutions, making it preferable for large-scale networks.

Features: Rapid7 Metasploit offers integration with PostgreSQL and NMAP, a mix of graphical and command-line interfaces, and around 800 active modules. Skybox Security Suite delivers extensive firewall management, vulnerability control, and integration with various security tools. It provides a comprehensive network view and supports large-scale vulnerability management.

Room for Improvement: Rapid7 Metasploit could improve its exploit updates and effectiveness against antivirus software and enhance reporting and GUI integration with popular vulnerability scanners. Skybox Security Suite faces user interface consistency challenges, costly pricing, automation, and license model flexibility issues.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Both Metasploit and Skybox primarily offer on-premises deployment. Metasploit's open-source version lacks direct technical support; its Pro version provides better assistance. Skybox ensures technical support but has criticism for delayed responses and complex processes in service quality.

Pricing and ROI: Metasploit offers a free open-source version, presenting an economical choice, while the reasonably priced Pro version provides good value with deep integration. Skybox Security Suite is costly with significant licensing and renewal fees and offers good value for large enterprises, though not as justified for mid-sized companies.

To learn more, read our detailed Rapid7 Metasploit vs. Skybox Security Suite Report (Updated: December 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Rapid7 Metasploit vs. Skybox Security Suite

December 2025

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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

Zafran Security

Mindshare comparison

As of December 2025, in the Vulnerability Management category, the mindshare of Zafran Security is 1.1%, up from 0.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Rapid7 Metasploit is 1.2%, down from 1.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Skybox Security Suite is 0.6%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Vulnerability Management Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Zafran Security	1.1%
Rapid7 Metasploit	1.2%
Skybox Security Suite	0.6%
Other	97.1%

Vulnerability Management

Featured Reviews

Reviewer6233

Works at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees

Has become an indispensable tool in our cybersecurity arsenal

While Zafran Security is already a powerful tool, there are areas where it could be further improved to provide even greater value. One key area for enhancement is the searching capabilities within its vulnerabilities module. By incorporating the ability to create Boolean searches, users would gain the ability to apply more complex filters and customize their search criteria. This would greatly enhance the precision and efficiency with which security teams can identify and prioritize vulnerabilities. Having such tailored search capabilities would save time and resources by narrowing down vast lists of vulnerabilities to those that meet specific parameters relevant to our unique risk environment. Additionally, integrating more robust reporting and visualization tools would be advantageous. Enhanced dashboards that offer customizable visual representations of risk configurations and threat landscapes would facilitate better communication with stakeholders, making it easier to explain vulnerabilities and the rationale behind certain security measures. This would also aid in demonstrating the improvements and value derived from existing security investments to leadership and non-technical team members.

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reviewer1247523

Head of Sales Services Department at a comms service provider with 51-200 employees

Extensive exploit database and seamless integration enhance penetration testing capabilities

The automated approach in the audits or in the hacking testing with Rapid7 Metasploit could be improved because even the same attack you provide today will go in different ways another day. I prefer when the auditor or pen-tester provides the attack in a non-automated mode. For some, it might be a valuable option, but I'm not sure it's valuable for us, as after the attack has been provided, we should release a report detailing how it transpired and what the customer should improve to block this way of attack. If the attack was provided in an automated mode, you cannot receive sufficient information that helps with this final report for the customer. While you can check the vulnerability, and the system will tell you there is no vulnerability, usually, a human can change one, two, or three parameters and using the same technique and the same scripts can break the system. Rapid7 Metasploit could be improved in areas concerning the experience with finding particular scripts pre-installed in the solution. Customers, administrators, and pen-testers spend considerable time trying to locate the specific component they need by the name of the technique or the name of the attack, so any improvements in making it easier to find those predefined components by name or timeframe would be beneficial. Search filters could be a correct improvement.

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reviewer2697804

Security Engineer at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

Tool identifies vulnerabilities and monitors connectivity effectively

Skybox Security Suite was a very good tool for my organization. I used it for monitoring connectivity between internal and external sites, monitoring our AWS instances, and ensuring workstations and Layer 3 devices met security specifications. The tool successfully helped in preventing vulnerabilities and breaches, but unfortunately, operations ceased before completing a migration to SaaS.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"With Zafran Security, it integrates with your security controls, allowing you to take that risk score and reduce it based on the controls in place or increase the risk based on different factors, such as if the issue is internet reachable or if there's an exploit in the wild."

"Overall, we have seen about eighty-seven percent reduction of the number of vulnerabilities that require urgency to remediate, specifically the number of criticals."

"Zafran is an excellent tool."

"Zafran has become an indispensable tool in our cybersecurity arsenal."

"We are able to see the real risk of a vulnerability on our environment with our security tools."

"We saw benefits from Zafran Security almost immediately after deploying it."

"When I compare Metasploit with Nessus, I find that Metasploit is faster and it does not burden the system as much."

"The option to generate phishing emails has proven to be very valuable in understanding the behavior of users."

"Stability-wise, I rate the solution a nine out of ten...Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a nine out of ten."

"The most valuable features of the solution are the scripts, the modules, and the tools that the Rapid7 Metasploit framework has."

"The solution is open source and has many small targetted penetration tests that have been written by many people that are useful. You can choose different subjects for the test, such as Oracle databases or Apache servers."

"Rapid7 Metasploit is a useful product."

"Technical support has been helpful and responsive."

"I don't have any other tools like it, and I always use it when I'm doing a pen test. Metasploit is a great solution for penetration testing,"

More Rapid7 Metasploit pros

"The features that I have found most valuable with Skybox Security Suite, and this is because I work on the security side, are the firewall assurance, the change manager and the vulnerability control. These three features are the most impressive from Skybox Security."

"This type of tool does a great job of reaching into those other devices producing risk recommendations, compliance recommendations, and a single plane of glass to do your queries, so you can find where these rules might exist."

"Skybox Security Suite was a very good tool for my organization."

"We are currently working on rule review and compliance. The logging features are good."

"We use Network Assurance for network visualisation and troubleshooting."

"Key features for us include the firewall change audit every week. Also, being able to track firewall ACL usage, so that we can produce semiannual reports on ACL usage and shadowed and redundant rules on the firewall."

"The most valuable features are Firewall Assurance and Vulnerability Control."

"The most valuable feature is firewall management."

More Skybox Security Suite pros

Cons

"Initially, we were somewhat concerned about the scalability of Zafran due to our large asset count and the substantial amount of information we needed to process."

"I think the ability to have some enhanced reporting capabilities is something they can improve on, as they have good reports but we have asked for some specific reporting enhancements."

"The dashboarding and reporting functionality of Zafran Security is an area that definitely could use some improvements."

"The initial setup was a bit "tweaky" for the open-source version."

"The open-source version has reporting limitations. You need to develop these capabilities yourself. Built-in reporting is an excellent feature for penetration testing, but it isn't a must-have. The solution could also cover more vulnerabilities. Metasploit has around 10,000 exploits in its library, but more is always better."

"The solution is not user-friendly and has room for improvement."

"The reporting feature needs improvement. The time taken to fetch reports based on the number of events can be extensive, unlike Tenable, which is more user-friendly and faster."

"I think areas with shortcomings that need improvement are more integration and automation."

"The solution is not very scalable, it does not provide any automation to be able to scale it."

"At the time I was using it, the graphical user interface needed some improvements."

"If your company's patch is not up to date, but you have other detection or defense solutions such as endpoint detection and response and antivirus software, the product exploit may not work effectively. This is because its exploit database update process is slow and not real-time. For zero-day vulnerabilities or new security threats, relying on Rapid7 Metasploit alone may not be effective."

More Rapid7 Metasploit cons

"Change Manager can be improved. If they can improve Change Manager so that whatever we want to do on a firewall, we are able to do it through Change Manager, it will be helpful for us. Whenever we are doing a change, it only does them at an L3 and L4 level, but all the firewalls are at the application layer. So, whatever needs to be done on the firewall, we aren't able to get it done through Change Manager. Currently, this functionality is not there because of which we are sometimes losing customers. I can create a role on Layer 3, Layer 4, but when it comes to the application layer, such as configuring and defining URLs or other things at the application level, it can't be done through Change Manager. Customers demand that they should be able to do everything through Change Manager. They don't want to do it through some other mechanism to accomplish their complete change management policy. They don't want to use a firewall manager because sometimes, they don't have any manager. They ask if they can use our solution so that a manager is not required. If Change Manager can do all the management automatically without involving any other manager, it will be great. They can also provide better integration with other managers so that everything can be done through a central point."

"It's expensive."

"The solution needs to add more automation and orchestration capabilities. Those features would make the solution much stronger."

"The features that I appreciated the most in Skybox Security Suite were not comparable with Tufin, as Tufin was far ahead in terms of the technology and the user interface."

"The only place where Skybox has room for improvement, and they're working on releasing this, it's just a slow-go, is the UI. The user interface has historically been via a locally installed thick client. They are moving to a web-based console and it's slowly coming out."

"Skybox Security Suite's attack surface management feature needs improvement."

"Reporting. A lot of the reports, out of the box, are limited to a certain number of either configuration violations or access rule violations. So when you first set up a new firewall to be monitored by Skybox, you don't get a real full report. You have to really tweak it to get everything."

"The stability is something that is questionable. I don't know whether it is because of the kind of infrastructure we have or because of the product in itself. We're running it on a virtual machine right now. Maybe once a month, or once in every 45 days, it requires a restart because the application fails to connect. So I have to restart the whole Skybox Manager itself, the Skybox server itself, and then connect to it from our Skybox Manager."

More Skybox Security Suite cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available

"Rapid7 Metasploit is cheaper than Tenable.io Vulnerability Management."

"The great advantage with Rapid7 Metasploit, of course, is that it's free."

"I have used the free version of Rapid7 Metasploit."

"I use the open-source version of this product. Pricing is not relevant."

"There are two versions available, one of which is the Pro version, and the other is the free version."

"On a scale of one to ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive, I rate the product's pricing a six. So it's fairly priced."

"It is a reasonably priced solution. I would rate it from five out of ten."

"The pricing structure involves a one-time purchase cost of approximately twenty thousand dollars or euros for all customers."

More Rapid7 Metasploit pricing and cost advice

"The solution is based on a subscription model for annual licenses."

"Skybox comes with extra licenses and has a change management license. The licenses are expensive, but they come with extra value."

"The price of the Skybox Security Suite can be expensive."

"The software is expensive. I rate its pricing an eight out of ten."

"I think for the cost, what we got definitely is worth it. The only caution I would give is that whenever you license for Firewall Assurance at the same time, for some weird reason, you have to get one Network Assurance license, just to manage one firewall. That's a little bit of overkill. But otherwise, in general, the pricing is fairly okay."

"Fully understand the total cost of ownership. They have gone to a new model where you have to replace the hardware every X amount of years at a very substantial cost and fully understand your intended number of nodes. To operate a firewall, you have to pay two licenses, a firewall node and a network node. If you are a reasonable-sized organization, this gets expensive very quickly."

"With licensing, the number of network nodes becomes very expensive to the point where you have to rationalize if the tools are warranted anymore."

"The product's pricing is excellent value. In terms of licensing, make sure you understand your network components, all your hops through your network, thoroughly, before you decide on the total cost. If you want to do point-to-point flow analysis and such, you need to have the configuration of all the devices in between point A and point B. A lot of people don't realize all their network components until they start using this product."

More Skybox Security Suite pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

11%

Computer Software Company

Manufacturing Company

Outsourcing Company

Computer Software Company

15%

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

Comms Service Provider

Financial Services Firm

17%

Computer Software Company

12%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Energy/Utilities Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	9
Midsize Enterprise	4
Large Enterprise	11

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	21
Midsize Enterprise	4
Large Enterprise	21

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Zafran Security?

Since we stood Zafran Security up in our private cloud, we handle the maintenance on our side. As we opted not to use...

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What needs improvement with Zafran Security?

In terms of areas for improvement, Zafran Security is doing a really great job as a new and emerging company. Oftenti...

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What is your primary use case for Zafran Security?

My use cases for Zafran Security revolve around two primary areas. One is around vulnerability management and priorit...

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What do you like most about Rapid7 Metasploit?

I use Rapid7 Metasploit for payload generation and Post-Exploitation.

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Rapid7 Metasploit?

The pricing of Rapid7 Metasploit is quite affordable. It has a free version that many customers start with, and after...

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What needs improvement with Rapid7 Metasploit?

The automated approach in the audits or in the hacking testing with Rapid7 Metasploit could be improved because even ...

See all answers

What do you like most about Skybox Security Suite?

Overall, the tool has helped us reduce risks. If any step is missing, it's easier for my team or engineers to identif...

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Skybox Security Suite?

From a commercial perspective, AlgoSec is more expensive compared to Skybox Security Suite. Skybox Security Suite is ...

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What needs improvement with Skybox Security Suite?

The features that I appreciated the most in Skybox Security Suite were not comparable with Tufin, as Tufin was far ah...

See all answers

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Compared 25% of the time

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Compared 14% of the time

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Compared 4% of the time

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Compared 4% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Zafran Security

December 2025

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Buyer's Guide

Rapid7 Metasploit

December 2025

Download Rapid7 Metasploit product report

Buyer's Guide

Skybox Security Suite

December 2025

Download Skybox Security Suite product report

Also Known As

No data available

Metasploit

No data available

Overview

Zafran Security integrates with existing security tools to identify and mitigate vulnerabilities effectively, proving that most critical vulnerabilities are not exploitable, optimizing threat management.

Zafran Security introduces an innovative operating model for managing security threats and vulnerabilities. By leveraging the threat exposure management platform, it pinpoints and prioritizes exploitable vulnerabilities, reducing risk through immediate remediation. This platform enhances your hybrid cloud security by normalizing vulnerability signals and integrating specific IT context data, such as CVE runtime presence and internet asset reachability, into its analysis. No longer reliant on patch windows, Zafran Security allows you to manage risks actively.

What are the key features of Zafran Security?

Threat Exposure Management: Utilizes existing tools to prioritize vulnerabilities and manage threats.
Integrative Analysis: Combines security data with IT context for precise vulnerability management.
Real-time Risk Reduction: Enables immediate risk management without waiting for patches.
Hybrid Cloud Compatibility: Functions across diverse cloud environments for comprehensive security.

What benefits can users expect from Zafran Security?

Improved Security: Enhances protection by efficiently identifying and mitigating risks.
Cost Efficiency: Reduces unnecessary patching expenses by confirming non-exploitable vulnerabilities.
Time Savings: Frees developers to focus on root causes by handling immediate threats.
Comprehensive Insight: Offers a holistic view of security threats and vulnerabilities.

In industries where security is paramount, such as finance and healthcare, Zafran Security provides invaluable protection by ensuring that only exploitable vulnerabilities are addressed. It allows entities to maintain robust security measures while allocating resources efficiently, fitting seamlessly into existing security strategies.

Zafran Security

Attackers are always developing new exploits and attack methods—Metasploit penetration testing software helps you use their own weapons against them. Utilizing an ever-growing database of exploits, you can safely simulate real-world attacks on your network to train your security team to spot and stop the real thing.

Rapid7

Skybox Security Suite provides comprehensive tools for network and firewall compliance, vulnerability management, and change management, with a focus on risk reduction and network optimization.

Skybox Security Suite supports over 130 vendors with massive scalability and seamless integration, notably with Nessus and Qualys. Its features include network path analysis and offline attack simulation, which enhance management effectiveness. Despite its robust offering, improvements are needed in its UI, web interface, reporting detail, and customization. Automation, orchestration, and device policy provisioning require better support, and integration with tools like Rapid7 could be improved. Enhancements in firewall configuration checks, cloud connectivity, pricing, and marketing awareness are also called for, alongside a transition from Java GUI to a consistent web-based system.

What Are Key Features of Skybox Security Suite?

Network Assurance: Enhances visibility and optimization of network paths.
Firewall Assurance: Facilitates firewall rule set audits for compliance.
Vulnerability Management: Offers path detection and risk prioritization.
Compliance Management: Ensures adherence to standards like PCI.
Change Management: Simplifies management across extensive infrastructures.

What Benefits and ROI Can Users Expect?

Scalability: Supports numerous vendors and large-scale deployments.
Integration: Seamlessly connects with tools like Nessus and Qualys.
Risk Reduction: Improves security across network infrastructures.
Simplified Management: User-friendly interface and reporting tools enhance usability.
Network Optimization: Streamlines processes and improves performance.

Skybox Security Suite is commonly used in industries requiring strict compliance like finance and healthcare. Firms employ it for firewall audits, enhancing network visibility, and managing configurations against standards such as PCI, ensuring security and policy compliance across expansive networks.

Tufin

Sample Customers

Information Not Available

City of Corpus Christi, Diebold, Lumenate, Nebraska Public Power District, Prairie North Regional Health, Apptio, Automation Direct, Bob's Stores, Cardinal Innovations Healthcare Solutions, Carnegie Mellon University

ADP, Blue Cross Blue Shield, BT, USAID, Delta Dental, EDF Energy, EMC, HSBC, Johnson & Johnson

Buyer's Guide

Rapid7 Metasploit vs. Skybox Security Suite

December 2025

Free Report: Rapid7 Metasploit vs. Skybox Security Suite

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