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Amazon Inspector vs Tenable Security Center comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 9, 2024

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

Qualys TotalCloud
Sponsored
Ranking in Vulnerability Management
11th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
39
Ranking in other categories
Container Security (11th), Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) (8th), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (8th), SaaS Security Posture Management (SSPM) (1st), Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPP) (6th)
Amazon Inspector
Ranking in Vulnerability Management
25th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.3
Number of Reviews
9
Ranking in other categories
IT Vendor Risk Management (6th)
Tenable Security Center
Ranking in Vulnerability Management
7th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
56
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (12th), Risk-Based Vulnerability Management (3rd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2026, in the Vulnerability Management category, the mindshare of Qualys TotalCloud is 1.0%, up from 0.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Amazon Inspector is 1.2%, down from 2.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Tenable Security Center is 2.6%, down from 4.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Vulnerability Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Tenable Security Center2.6%
Qualys TotalCloud1.0%
Amazon Inspector1.2%
Other95.2%
Vulnerability Management
 

Featured Reviews

RO
IT Security Expert at Alior Bank S.A.
Unified risk scoring has improved our cloud visibility and simplifies remediation priorities
Qualys TotalCloud provides unified vulnerability and threat assessment across both IAS and SaaS. This solution provides a single prioritized view of risk, which helps reduce the work I would have to do. We are no longer based on CVSS; we are based on Qualys risk scoring, which is based on CVSS plus internal findings made by Qualys, and then assigns its own score. The TruRisk insight feature has found a small number of assets with high vulnerability scores, though I am cautious since some information is classified. Qualys TotalCloud has positively impacted our bank's performance, and we have definitely seen benefits after implementing this solution.
Abdalla Kenawy - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
reviewer1534134 - PeerSpot reviewer
Head of Information Security at a consultancy with 1,001-5,000 employees
Centralized analytics have strengthened patch visibility and support efficient regulatory reporting
From my experience, I assess the product's analytics capabilities as successful. It helped us significantly with patching and managing the risk of the patching process across all our environments, including network devices with Windows and Unix systems. The product covered several environments and gave us exactly what we needed in our environment. Tenable Security Center's centralized platform helped with risk assessment and management across our IT environments. It covered the patching process, and we previously faced many issues regarding how to patch different environments, how to monitor the patching process, and whether it was successful or not. We obtained good reports showing when patches were closed and the details of each patch, including who executed it and everything related to the patching process until it was closed. This gave us good details about the process which helped us significantly in our reporting and even in audits, whether internal or external. We learned how to close audit issues safely and successfully. We used the dashboards for real-time threat insights and extracted several dashboards from Tenable Security Center. We use these dashboards in our cybersecurity dashboard and committees that we have. These dashboards are part of our committees, especially the cybersecurity committee and other committees that we attend.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Its excellent graphical interface makes the scanning process simple."
"Vulnerability and threat detection and assessment of the criticality of the vulnerabilities exposed are most valuable."
"Once you have your vulnerabilities fixed and your patches pushed out using Qualys TotalCloud, then you are able to eliminate threats and cyber risk."
"I would recommend Qualys TotalCloud to other users because it is cost-efficient and has a good return on investment."
"It is a cloud-native app that integrates with both IaaS and SaaS. It seamlessly integrates with other platforms."
"I would definitely recommend Qualys TotalCloud to other customers."
"I would definitely recommend Qualys TotalCloud to other users."
"One of Qualys' best features is its categorization, which allows us to see the types of assets, their security postures, and the AI-powered version of the tool."
"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 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."
"It operates continuously, so as soon as resources are created, it scans them for vulnerabilities."
"The automated vulnerability detection aspect is most valuable."
"The scalability of the solution itself is unparalleled."
"Amazon Inspector is highly stable, rated ten out of ten, and this stability impacts business security and administration positively."
"It is scanning the whole repository for any sort of vulnerabilities, so it allows us to be more confident in our DevSecOps and not put a lot of folks or attention to it."
"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."
"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."
"I found the dashboard features very useful, as they made it easy to track remediation progress and allowed me to publish dashboards to remediation teams and track the progress on the dashboards."
"Tenable's most valuable features are the credential scan, vulnerability reports, and vulnerability ratings (VPR)."
"The most valuable features of Tenable SC are the reports and the dashboards."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is the vulnerability assessment."
"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."
"It is a much better solution than other competitors and provides almost everything that is required in terms of vulnerability management."
"I find Tenable SC to be a very scalable product."
 

Cons

"The cloud licensing unit system is unclear, especially since "units" aren't well-defined."
"I would like the ability to disable certain default built-in policies as they can be misleading when creating dashboards. That is the top one."
"The support is not up to the mark and seems to be overburdened."
"I sometimes have difficulty detecting or uninstalling certain versions of applications, which I have to do manually."
"In my opinion, what can be improved in Qualys TotalCloud includes pricing and container scanning."
"With the growing integration of AI, I would like Qualys to enhance its service offerings to better accommodate AI-related risks."
"There is room for improvement in vulnerability scanning, particularly for PaaS environments. Currently, Qualys does not have full access to these instances, which limits its effectiveness."
"From a downside perspective, the UI is not user-friendly and feels dated compared to other tools like Prisma Cloud."
"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."
"The most challenging aspect I faced with Amazon Inspector during integration was automating the remediation process."
"One area for improvement in Amazon Inspector is the automation aspect."
"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."
"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 false positive rate of Amazon Inspector is a little high, and it is not covering all different applications and scanning."
"There are challenges associated with the interdependencies in AWS services, like requiring an Active Directory for other services, resulting in additional charges."
"It has automated vulnerability assessment, yet I seek more flexibility in defining custom vulnerability checks tailored to my needs, which is more difficult."
"I'm having some issues with that and it's holding things up."
"The pricing is reasonable, but this could be brought down more aggressively, such as we see with Rapid7, Tenable SC's main competitor."
"The product could be user-friendly, and they could enhance the web application's security features."
"Security can always be improved."
"The vulnerability scan does not work correctly until the access privileges are set by the system administrator."
"Its reporting can be improved. It is not easy to generate a scan report the way we want. The data is okay, but we can't easily change the template to make it look the way we want."
"Support could be faster."
"The reports and plugins for reports and scans could benefit from enhancements."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Qualys TotalCloud is cost-efficient and was selected for its value compared to other products."
"The cost is high, but it meets our organizational needs."
"Qualys TotalCloud is expensive."
"Qualys TotalCloud offers cost-effective licensing flexibility."
"I am not sure about the pricing. From what I understand, it is a bit on the higher side, but I do not have the exact numbers."
"Although Qualys TotalCloud is relatively expensive due to its unique automation features, its cost-effectiveness is rated an eight out of ten, with ten being the most costly."
"While Qualys TotalCloud's pricing is currently acceptable, it is becoming increasingly expensive and may soon be considered overpriced."
"Qualys TotalCloud offers competitive pricing given its comprehensive suite of features, including integration, assessment, remediation, and detection capabilities, all within a single platform."
"It's priced according to market standards for its services."
"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."
"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."
"Tenable.sc is more expensive than its competitors."
"I would rate the pricing a nine out of ten, where ten is expensive. It is the most expensive tool my company is using."
"I rate the solution's price as seven on a scale of one to ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive. The tool is quite expensive."
"The pricing is more than Nexpose."
"We pay around 60,000 on a yearly basis."
"Compared to other companies or other products it could maybe be a little bit less, but the price is okay. I would say it's not very expensive."
"Though reasonable, the main competitor of Tenable SC, Rapid7, offers a more aggressive and better priced product."
"I use a local license to perform penetration testing and I'm pretty happy with everything when it comes to pricing and licensing."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
18%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Construction Company
7%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
8%
Government
7%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Government
9%
Computer Software Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business10
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise29
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business2
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise6
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business22
Midsize Enterprise12
Large Enterprise27
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Qualys TotalCloud?
Areas that need improvement in every solution include the remediation part. The remediation steps should be simple en...
What is your primary use case for Qualys TotalCloud?
Our use case involves the assets that we have under cloud, the assets exposed to the internet, and the internal appli...
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 be...
What needs improvement with Amazon Inspector?
They might launch support for third-party environments in the next version regarding the best features in Amazon Insp...
What is your primary use case for Amazon Inspector?
I mostly use Amazon Inspector for vulnerability scanning on AWS native applications. For hybrid applications, we have...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Tenable SC?
The price of Tenable Security Center is not so high; it's relatively a cheaper solution.
What needs improvement with Tenable SC?
We did conduct a long implementation which relates to what I think can be improved about Tenable Security Center. In ...
What is your primary use case for Tenable SC?
The typical use case for Tenable Security Center is that it is an on-premise solution, and it can use the agent and a...
 

Also Known As

Qualys TotalCloud with FlexScan
No data available
Tenable.sc, Tenable Unified Security, Tenable SecurityCenter
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
betterment, caplinked, flatiron, university of nutri dame
IBM, Sempra Energy, Microsoft, Apple, Adidas, Union Pacific
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon Inspector vs. Tenable Security Center and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
900,644 professionals have used our research since 2012.