Amazon Inspector vs Qualys VMDR comparison

Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Qualys are both solutions in the Vulnerability Management category. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is ranked #20 with an average rating of 8.6, while Qualys is ranked #3 with an average rating of 8.6. Amazon Web Services (AWS) holds a 1.7% mindshare in VM, compared to Qualys’s 5.0% mindshare. Additionally, 90% of Amazon Web Services (AWS) users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 94% of Qualys users who would recommend it.

Amazon Inspector

Read 9 Amazon Inspector reviews

2,762 Views
2,458 Comparison Views

90% willing to recommend

Qualys VMDR

Read 96 Qualys VMDR reviews

12,798 Views
8,703 Comparison Views

94% willing to recommend

Amazon Inspector

Qualys VMDR

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 25, 2026

Qualys VMDR and Amazon Inspector both operate in the vulnerability management category. Qualys VMDR appears to have the upper hand in features such as continuous monitoring and cloud-based capabilities, while Amazon Inspector is preferred for its AWS integration and automated assessment capabilities.

Features: Qualys VMDR is noted for comprehensive vulnerability management including continuous monitoring, customizable dashboards, and effective integration with different environments. It provides robust reporting capabilities and maintains an updated vulnerability registry. Amazon Inspector offers automated security assessments integrated with AWS environments, providing a real-time inventory and automated scanning for services like EC2 and ECR. It effectively categorizes findings by instance and container repositories which aids in prioritization.

Room for Improvement: Qualys VMDR could enhance its user interface, expand integrations beyond cloud infrastructures, and simplify its deployment process. Users also suggest improving reporting customization. Amazon Inspector could expand its scanning scope, improve automation features and enhance integration capabilities for non-native AWS services. Reducing false positives is a common area for improvement noted for both tools.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Qualys VMDR offers versatility across private, public, and hybrid clouds but receives mixed reviews on customer service with noted delays in response. Amazon Inspector, optimized for AWS, generally receives positive feedback for deployment ease within AWS environments, supported by AWS's robust infrastructure, although lacking flexibility outside of AWS.

Pricing and ROI: Qualys VMDR is considered expensive, especially for smaller enterprises, with pricing based on asset count, though it offers ROI through improved security management. Amazon Inspector offers transparent, scalable pricing based on a pay-per-scan model, suitable for organizations invested in AWS, offering good value for the number of scans and AWS service integrations.

To learn more, read our detailed Amazon Inspector vs. Qualys VMDR Report (Updated: December 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Amazon Inspector vs. Qualys VMDR

December 2025

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Helped 881,707 peers since 2012

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

Amazon Inspector

Ranking in Vulnerability Management

20th

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

6.3

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

IT Vendor Risk Management (6th)

Qualys VMDR

Ranking in Vulnerability Management

3rd

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

IT Asset Management (3rd), Configuration Management Databases (3rd), Container Security (9th), Risk-Based Vulnerability Management (1st)

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2026, in the Vulnerability Management category, the mindshare of Amazon Inspector is 1.7%, down from 2.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Qualys VMDR is 5.0%, down from 9.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Vulnerability Management Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Qualys VMDR	5.0%
Amazon Inspector	1.7%
Other	93.3%

Vulnerability Management

Featured Reviews

Abdalla Kenawy

AWS DevOps SRE/Infrastructure Engineer at Capgemini

Automated insights streamline data security assessment

For Amazon Inspector, we have many EC2 or virtual machines deployed inside our AWS environment, and the problem is that the existing package deployed inside this EC2 instance has already outdated packages. As we progress with time, this package needs to be updated for security enhancement, which requires us to uninstall the package, install the new version, and then we should be fine. However, the challenge comes with how to scan all our EC2 instances for security vulnerabilities, which is currently managed by Amazon Inspector. Amazon Inspector can scan EC2 instances or ECR, which is the ECR registry where we can save artifacts Docker images. Amazon Inspector can also scan Docker images uploaded to ECR for Elastic Registry service, and it can scan databases and S3 based on the latest updates. I noticed this from a couple of months ago, and it provides huge benefits for security. Regarding the best features of Amazon Inspector, it gives us a list of all existing outdated packages as part of a deployed package on EC2 instances or specific Python packages that are part of the Docker file and the Docker image itself, which are causing security concerns. Amazon Inspector can list these security concerns and offer guidance on how we can remediate it by updating the package to a specific upper version or something similar.

Read full review

Vaibhav Ghule

Soc Lead & Edr Administration at Persistent Systems

Continuous risk-based monitoring has strengthened incident response and vulnerability prioritization

I haven't explored Qualys VMDR's vulnerability lifecycle automation yet. One of my analysts mentioned that queries lack grouping operators in Qualys VMDR. From my experience, I would appreciate improvements in the query options in Qualys VMDR, specifically in the query-building process where I would need more features and operators. Additionally, we have been facing issues with Qualys on the cloud level. We cannot download the configuration profile from the cloud agent, and it is showing a pending action for download. During 2025, we noticed outages of Qualys a couple of times. I want to mention that there is an issue with receiving timely RCA deliveries. While this is not necessarily about the tool, it relates to support. The support has not been very responsive, and we are receiving RCAs a little delayed whenever we raise support cases or communicate with the TAMs. Additionally, the UI has a slight latency, which I and my team have experienced. They have also reported this latency issue when navigating through different pages.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"My experience with AWS technical support is very good, I didn't face any specific challenges, and even the documentation of AWS is good for both Microsoft, which is Azure, and AWS."

"The vulnerability discovery is valuable, and they also rank those vulnerabilities for you. So, you could rapidly attack some of the higher, severe vulnerabilities as they pop up, if they do pop up."

"The most valuable feature of Amazon Inspector is the categorization of findings, which filters vulnerabilities by instance, container image, container repository, and Lambda function."

"The assessment reports provided by Amazon Inspector have helped me in identifying security vulnerabilities in my cloud applications by giving us a nicely designed dashboard that provides all the security information we need to work on remediation."

"The integration of Amazon Inspector with other AWS services has enhanced our security. Security Hub is a major asset because it allows us to centralize data from various AWS services. We can integrate third-party tools as well. It is just a single-click option."

"The findings dashboards are neat and easy to understand, offering clear demarcations for different types of findings and detailed insights into specific vulnerabilities and their associated instances. It is not a place where everything is dumped together. It offers an easy-to-understand layout."

"The scalability of the solution itself is unparalleled."

"The automated vulnerability detection aspect is most valuable."

More Amazon Inspector pros

"Technical support is great and we've never really had a problem."

"We also like the flexibility in their licensing."

"The product's patch management is excellent for keeping our critical servers and third-party applications updated efficiently."

"Overall, the solution is highly rated because of its simplicity and efficiency."

"The Vulnerability Management and Patch Management features are the most valuable features of this solution."

"The initial setup is straightforward."

"I find the solution's dashboard interesting...The response time is fine. You can pull up reports without dragging or consuming bandwidth."

"The most valuable feature is that this solution is very lightweight."

More Qualys VMDR pros

Cons

"There isn't too much to improve right now. Scanning on demand or as a part of the pipeline versus a post pipeline solution would be good, but it is not a deal breaker by any means."

"It has a limited scope. So, AWS Inspector primarily focuses on the security of the EC2 instance. So, if your architecture includes other AWS services, then you may need to use additional tools for your comprehensive security assessment. So that is one con. Another is, like, we have a dependency on agents."

"There is room for improvement in the scanning capabilities. I'd like to see broader coverage in terms of the vulnerabilities detected."

"It has automated vulnerability assessment, yet I seek more flexibility in defining custom vulnerability checks tailored to my needs, which is more difficult."

"One major area for improvement is remediation. My team works on remediating findings over time, likely using available patches. However, easier integration with Amazon's patching services would be very helpful."

"The other point is that the reporting features of Inspector need improvement. For example, I am in an organization with millions of CVEs, and getting an overview of all this is challenging."

"The false positive rate of Amazon Inspector is a little high, and it is not covering all different applications and scanning."

"The most challenging aspect I faced with Amazon Inspector during integration was automating the remediation process."

More Amazon Inspector cons

"Qualys VM's machine learning and artificial intelligence features could be improved."

"The disadvantage of working with Qualys is that the graphical interface is quite outdated."

"The IoT scan is not great."

"Support could be improved since the response can be slow."

"I would like to see this solution more developed and competitive in the Cloud space."

"Could use additional security for the app."

"It's too early for me to say if there is any room for improvement since we're in the first couple of months of using this solution."

"Sometimes we face a problem with accessing the tool and not getting an expected result. From a technology point of view, they need to look into this."

More Qualys VMDR cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It is scaled as you go. There are probably a certain number of scans per month, and there are tiers. If you're under a certain tier, it is free. The second level is pennies, and then all the way up to like a million. So, it has a tiered pricing program. They're pretty good with your initial scanning, and there is room to scale based on being affordable, but it is fairly cheap. There are no additional costs. They pretty much think about it as a pay-per-scan type model."

"It's priced according to market standards for its services."

"The pricing is very transparent and clear."

"The lowest cost would be around $10 for a few small accounts, however, for thousands of accounts, it could be around $5000 to $6000 dollars per month."

"They have recently changed the pricing model, which is now better than it was before."

"We do see over $100,000 in terms of price, for mid-size programs. You likely will pay more than $100,000 without any discount. It is a bit pricey."

"In Nigerian Naira, we spend about roughly four to five million to use this solution and this is expensive compared to solutions like Nessus."

"There are no additional fees in addition to the standard licensing fees."

"It is different for every company, but for us, it's every three years."

"Qualys VM is reasonably priced."

"An annual license for a single scanner costs around $3,000."

"The solution is expensive."

More Qualys VMDR pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

14%

Computer Software Company

11%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Financial Services Firm

16%

Computer Software Company

10%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	2
Midsize Enterprise	2
Large Enterprise	6

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	20
Midsize Enterprise	12
Large Enterprise	70

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Amazon Inspector?

The integration of Amazon Inspector with other AWS services has enhanced our security. Security Hub is a major asset because it allows us to centralize data from various AWS services. We can integ...

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Amazon Inspector?

I am not honestly sure about the pricing side of Amazon Inspector, but that is taken care of by a separate team. I believe it's cheaper than the other third-party solutions.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Amazon Inspector?

They might launch support for third-party environments in the next version regarding the best features in Amazon Inspector from my perspective. The false positive rate of Amazon Inspector is a litt...

See all answers

What do you like most about Qualys VMDR?

I like that we have many scanners and channels that don't overload. It helps us scan and track easily. Also, the tagging system is good for tagging. We can still use QualysAgent task ID tools even ...

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Qualys VMDR?

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing shows that we can consider both time and money saved.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Qualys VMDR?

See all answers

Comparisons

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Compared 15% of the time

Microsoft Defender for Cloud vs Amazon Inspector

Compared 11% of the time

Tenable Vulnerability Management vs Amazon Inspector

Compared 9% of the time

Qualys CyberSecurity Asset Management vs Amazon Inspector

Compared 6% of the time

FortiCNAPP vs Amazon Inspector

Compared 3% of the time

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Rapid7 InsightVM vs Qualys VMDR

Compared 9% of the time

Tenable Nessus vs Qualys VMDR

Compared 8% of the time

Tenable Security Center vs Qualys VMDR

Compared 5% of the time

Microsoft Defender Vulnerability Management vs Qualys VMDR

Compared 5% of the time

Wiz vs Qualys VMDR

Compared 4% of the time

More Qualys VMDR Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Amazon Inspector

January 2026

Download Amazon Inspector product report

Buyer's Guide

Qualys VMDR

January 2026

Download Qualys VMDR product report

Also Known As

No data available

Qualys VM, QualysGuard VM, Qualys Asset Inventory, Qualys Container Security

Overview

Amazon Inspector is an automated security assessment service that helps improve the security and compliance of applications deployed on AWS. Amazon Inspector automatically assesses applications for exposure, vulnerabilities, and deviations from best practices. After performing an assessment, Amazon Inspector produces a detailed list of security findings prioritized by level of severity. These findings can be reviewed directly or as part of detailed assessment reports which are available via the Amazon Inspector console or API.

Amazon Inspector security assessments help you check for unintended network accessibility of your Amazon EC2 instances and for vulnerabilities on those EC2 instances. Amazon Inspector assessments are offered to you as pre-defined rules packages mapped to common security best practices and vulnerability definitions. Examples of built-in rules include checking for access to your EC2 instances from the internet, remote root login being enabled, or vulnerable software versions installed. These rules are regularly updated by AWS security researchers.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Vulnerability Management, Detection, and Response (VMDR) is a cornerstone product of the Qualys TruRisk Platform and a global leader in the enterprise-grade vulnerability management (VM) vendor space. With VMDR, enterprises are empowered with visibility and insight into cyber risk exposure - making it easy to prioritize vulnerabilities, assets, or groups of assets based on business risk. Security teams can take action to mitigate risk, helping the business measure their actual risk exposure over time.

Qualys VMDR offers an all-inclusive risk-based vulnerability management solution to prioritize vulnerabilities and assets based on risk and business criticality. VMDR seamlessly integrates with configuration management databases (CMDB), Qualys Patch Management, Custom Assessment and Remediation (CAR), Qualys TotalCloud and other Qualys and non-Qualys solutions to facilitate vulnerability detection and remediation across the entire enterprise.

With VMDR, users are empowered with actionable risk insights that translate vulnerabilities and exploits into optimized remediation actions based on business impact. Qualys customers can now aggregate and orchestrate data from the Qualys Threat Library, 25+ threat intelligence feeds, and third-party security and IT solutions, empowering organizations to measure, communicate, and eliminate risk across on-premises, hybrid, and cloud environments.

Qualys

Sample Customers

betterment, caplinked, flatiron, university of nutri dame

Agrokor Group, American Specialty Health, American State Bank, Arval, Life:), Axway, Bank of the West, Blueport Commerce, BSkyB, Brinks, CaixaBank, Cartagena, Catholic Health System, CEC Bank, Cegedim, CIGNA, Clickability, Colby-Sawyer College, Commercial Bank of Dubai, University of Utah, eBay Inc., ING Singapore, National Theatre, OTP Bank, Sodexo, WebEx

Buyer's Guide

Amazon Inspector vs. Qualys VMDR

December 2025

Free Report: Amazon Inspector vs. Qualys VMDR

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