Qualys vs. Nessus

Qualys and Nessus are two powerful vulnerability scanning tools with some common features and some unique traits. Qualys is more focused on cloud security monitoring while Nessus is a typical web vulnerability assessment tool. Here's a comparison for you to understand how they fare against each other.

Qualys provides its customers with continuous monitoring, vulnerability management, compliance solutions, and web application firewalls.


Nessus has been in the market for over 20 years and improved its service offerings based on community feedback to become one of the most trusted vulnerability assessment services.

4 Reasons To Look For Qualys Alternative

Insufficient Remediation Assistance: The lack of well-developed remediation measures acts as a hindrance to seamless CI/CD integrations.
No Manual Pentests: Qualys provides automated vulnerability scans without any manual security expertise, resulting in vulnerabilities left undiscovered, and raising false positives.
No Vetted Scans: Qualys does not offer manual vetting of scan results to weed out false positives thus unnecessary allocation of time and resources for remediation.
Delayed Customer Support: Customer support provided by the tool is delayed frequently impacting the overall user experience with the vulnerability scanner.

Top Pentest Companies

Astra
Invicti
Intruder.io
Probely
Rapid7
Pricing
$1,999/ year
Not Mentioned
$1,958/year
$4,788/ year
$2100/ year
Scans behind logins
Yes
Yes
Yes
Pentest by security experts
Yes
Yes
Yes
Continuous automated scanning
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Number of vulnerability scans
Unlimited
Unlimited
Unlimited
Yes
Unlimited
Zero false positives ensured with vetted scans
Yes
Cloud security review for AWS/GCP/Azure
Yes
Yes
Yes
Compliance reporting
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Publicly verifiable pentest certificate
Yes
Collaboration with expert pentesters
Yes
Yes
Yes
Remediation support within 24-hours
Yes
Yes
Integrations
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Continuous compliance scanning
Yes
Only for PCI-DSS
Actionable vulnerability risk scoring
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
12/12
4/12
8/12
5/12
5/12
Pricing
Scan behind login
Pentesting by Security Experts
Continuous automated scanning
Number of Vulnerability Scans
Zero false positives with Vetted scans
Compliance Reporting
12/12
7/12
8/12
10/12
7/12

Qualys vs Nessus

Nessus

Pricing on the higher side

Nessus provides its top package at $5,888.20 per year. It is built to scan modern attack surfaces to find any vulnerabilities and protect the assets from the same. 

Qualys

Pricing not mentioned

Qualys offers a free trial version but does not mention its pricing and packages on the website. 

It provides a cloud-based continuous scanning solution and detection of vulnerabilities and misconfigurations.

Easy to navigate

Nessus provides a point-in-time vulnerability assessment solution that can easily identify vulnerabilities like missing patches, malware, and misconfigurations. 

It offers a limited number of scans but ensures zero false positives with its scanning.

Easy to navigate

Qualys provides a web security scanning solution that is easy to use, navigate and set up. 

It provides a deep scan of the internal and external environment and even the APIs for web apps and mobile apps. 

Does not ensure zero false positives with its scanning which is a drawback of the tool. This leaves the users feeling dissatisfied with the scanning experience. 

No Pentest

Nessus mainly opts for thorough vulnerability assessments and as such does not provide manual expert pentesting or a pentest certificate.

No pentest

Qualys does not provide penetration testing. Rather it focuses on the exhaustive scanning of assets to find any unsafe exposed areas within web security. 

Remediation support

The advanced remediation support is only available for an additional $472. 

This comes with 24*365 access to phone, emails, and chat support. It is a hefty price to pay on top of the price of the package.

Insufficient remediation support

Qualys doesn’t offer a lot in terms of remediation support.

Hence, it essentially dumps the workload back onto the customers once the vulnerabilities are discovered. 


Integration 

CI/CD integration is possible with Nessus and it partners with IBM Security, Splunk, GitHub, and GitLab. 

Integration 

Qualys has integrations with Splunk, Cisco, IBM, and more. 

However, its lack of well-developed remediation measures acts as a hindrance to seamless CI/CD integrations.

Pentest Companies
Detailed comparision for top pentest companies and features

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Get clear, actionable steps to patch every issue and work together seamlessly.
Seamlessly collaborate with your team members, CXOs and our Security experts from our user-friendly dashboard.
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With features like continuous vulnerability assessment, scan behind login, and compliance-specific scans, Astra’s Pentest Platform minimizes the effort you need to put into security assessments. It’s like having your own team of security experts 🥷

The world’s top brands trust Astra to find every loophole in their security.

Collaborative dashboard
Seamlessly collaborate with your team members, CXOs and our Security experts.
Comprehensive Scanner
Our intelligent scanner find issues that other pentests often miss.
Industry-recognized certificate
Build trust among customers and partners with a security certificate.
Real-time, expert support
Get support from security experts right within and your dashboard.
Experienced team
Identify and patch security gaps in your cloud set-up.
Collaborative dashboard
Seamlessly collaborate with your team members, CXOs and our Security experts.
Comprehensive Scanner
Our intelligent scanner find issues that other pentests often miss.
Industry-recognized certificate
Build trust among customers and partners with a security certificate.
Real-time, expert support
Get support from security experts right within and your dashboard.
Experienced team
Identify and patch security gaps in your cloud set-up.
Collaborative dashboard
Seamlessly collaborate with your team members, CXOs and our Security experts.
Comprehensive Scanner
Our intelligent scanner find issues that other pentests often miss.
Industry-recognized certificate
Build trust among customers and partners with a security certificate.
Real-time, expert support
Get support from security experts right within and your dashboard.
Experienced team
Identify and patch security gaps in your cloud set-up.

“Astra’s Pentest Suite provides exactly the features we need to maximize the security of the service we provide to our clients. We are impressed by their commitment to continuous rather than sporadic testing and the way in which their technology blends with ours.”

— Wayne Garb, CEO, Ooona
472
Issues Detected
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I am very satisfied with the result and the recommendations of the audit report. It was an eye opener. We were able to optimize the security of the app to meet the expectations of our customers."

Olivier Trupiano, Founder & CEO (Signalement)
55
Issues Detected
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