We performed a comparison between Tenable Nessus and Tenable SC based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Tenable SC is the winner in this comparison. Tenable SC received higher marks for its support than Tenable Nessus did. In addition, its users feel that it is the more reasonably priced solution.
"Ease of reviewing scores, identifying vulnerabilities, and getting information on them."
"The stability is very good."
"I have experience with it on my attack stations, and it's pretty good to optimize. Personally, I think Nessus is quite a good product."
"Tenable Nessus is an absolutely stable and fantastic product."
"The trial version is very good for testing whether it will suit your needs."
"With the Tenable Nessus enterprise edition, you have unlimited licenses to scan the device."
"Security is the key number because it can start to scan with a few clicks instead of credits, which is a bit complicated. So simplicity is the first advantage. Then the generated reports are well done and easy to present to management. The quality of the scan is quite good in detecting the severity. The solution has simplicity. Also, it has frequent updates so that is also a valuable feature."
"It provides multiple recommendations towards the remedy of vulnerabilities."
"This product has the best results in terms of the lowest number of false-positives and false-negatives."
"The scanning part, the agent part – that's the valuable aspect."
"Tenable.sc's best features are the availability model, accident management, and scoring."
"Feature-wise, Tenable Security Center is a very fast tool with many dashboards and reports, and it covers all our systems."
"Tenable SC is good for reporting and alerting. The filtering feature is also very valuable. Its integration with multiple vendors is quite good. It can be integrated with SIEM solutions and PAM solutions such as Thycotic, which is very helpful."
"The solution is completely stable and operation is user-friendly."
"What is useful to me is being able to fulfill very customized scanning policies. In the clinical environment, because of vendor control, we can't perform credential-vulnerability scanning. And network scans, which I've done before, can cause a lot of impact. Being able to create very customized policies to be able to routinely scan and audit our clinical networks, while simultaneously not causing impact, is important to us."
"The most valuable feature of the product is the Assurance Report Card, which gives us an overview of the security poster in just a simple glance."
"I would like to see more on the automation side."
"In Nessus Professional, the main drawback was that we could have a single-user login password. So it could be better in terms of security."
"The problems I faced with Tenable Nessus were related to its dashboard's customization capabilities and its ability to provide data to third-party sources."
"Pricing is one of the most important features, and it is something that they can improve on."
"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."
"The report for counters is too simple and would be improved by a dashboard."
"EQA's and dashboards should be addressed in the next release."
"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."
"Tenable.sc's user interface could be improved."
"We are facing some challenges related to our channel."
"The tool's initial configuration is not so easy."
"If I want to have a very low-managed scan policy, it's a lot of work to create something which is very basic. If I use a tool like Nmap, all I have to do is download it, install it, type in the command, and it's good to go. In Security Center, I have to go through a lot of work to create a policy that's very basic."
"The vulnerability scan does not work correctly until the access privileges are set by the system administrator."
"For downloading reports, we have to go to the scan and then we have to go to the reports and download the Excel or CSV or PDF. I think these menus and clicks can be minimized."
"Current web page needs improvement, slows down processes."
"The user interface can be improved."
Tenable Nessus is ranked 3rd in Vulnerability Management with 75 reviews while Tenable Security Center is ranked 1st in Vulnerability Management with 48 reviews. Tenable Nessus is rated 8.4, while Tenable Security Center is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of Tenable Nessus writes "Unlimited assets for one price and quick, agentless results". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Tenable Security Center writes "A security solution for vulnerability assessment with automated scans". Tenable Nessus is most compared with Qualys VMDR, Rapid7 InsightVM, Tenable Vulnerability Management, Pentera and Microsoft Defender Vulnerability Management, whereas Tenable Security Center is most compared with Tenable Vulnerability Management, Qualys VMDR, Rapid7 InsightVM, Horizon3.ai and Tanium. See our Tenable Nessus vs. Tenable Security Center report.
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We monitor all Vulnerability Management reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.