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Cisco Vulnerability Management (formerly Kenna.VM) vs Tenable Nessus comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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

Cisco Vulnerability Managem...
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
1
Ranking in other categories
Cisco Security Portfolio (11th), Risk-Based Vulnerability Management (19th)
Tenable Nessus
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.0
Number of Reviews
87
Ranking in other categories
Vulnerability Management (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

While both are Security Software solutions, they serve different purposes. Cisco Vulnerability Management (formerly Kenna.VM) is designed for Risk-Based Vulnerability Management and holds a mindshare of 2.7%, up 2.0% compared to last year.
Tenable Nessus, on the other hand, focuses on Vulnerability Management, holds 5.1% mindshare, down 10.3% since last year.
Risk-Based Vulnerability Management Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Cisco Vulnerability Management (formerly Kenna.VM)2.7%
Qualys VMDR12.5%
Rapid7 InsightVM10.8%
Other74.0%
Risk-Based Vulnerability Management
Vulnerability Management Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Tenable Nessus5.1%
Wiz6.6%
Qualys VMDR5.0%
Other83.3%
Vulnerability Management
 

Featured Reviews

AshishPaliwal - PeerSpot reviewer
Self-employed at Self-employed
Offers contextual prioritization and risk-based remediation of vulnerability
An improvement would be some sort of an integration with any GRC suite. There are a lot of GRC suites available, like Archer, MetricStream, Rsam, Protiviti, for example. So how would a solution like this work if my company has already invested thousands or maybe millions in a GRC solution? Do I still need it and how does it fit into an existing SAP environment? There could be interoperability, having more data sources, integrating Splunk, Qualys, FireEye, Rapid7, Carbon Black. I'm sure all that can be done to an extent, with a little more insight and a little more accuracy on the industry numbers and trends. I'd like the solution to offer any sort of assistance in any way with the remediation part, not just identification of vulnerability risk, and that is second.
MohammedJaffir - PeerSpot reviewer
Founder at Cipheroot
Has enabled me to reduce false positives and perform deep credential auditing with seamless integrations
I mostly use the configuration audit feature for the audit configuration as a scan policy, and I will use it for credential audit, which helps me scan credentials access such as local administrator or root access, performing a deeper and more accurate check of local configuration settings and file systems, making it a highly recommended feature. Regarding integration capabilities, we can integrate Tenable Nessus with SIM tools such as Splunk, IBM QRadar, and Azure Sentinel, as well as with ticketing systems such as ServiceNow, Jira, and Slack. There is no complexity as it is very easy to integrate everything. In terms of the reporting feature, while vulnerability scanning can throw some false positives, Tenable Nessus has very few, achieving a reduction of 75% to 80% false positives with manual analysis needed. We can generate standard Nessus reports that typically include host summaries and vulnerabilities by host and plugin, alongside solutions and remediation recommendations. The main benefits I get from Tenable Nessus are complete asset inventory and comprehensive attack surface management, allowing us to prioritize vulnerabilities based on risk, focusing on true risk and threat path analysis.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The risk context of any vulnerability is a valuable feature."
"Overall Zoom is a good solution."
"It gives a holistic view of your entire environment."
"The value that Tenable Nessus brings to my company is significant because we can see risks; it is also good to see the pages risk and system risks, and it saves money."
"The reports are pretty nice and easy to understand."
"I am impressed with the tool's vulnerability scanning."
"The solution provides time saving and cost saving benefits."
"It also has an executive report where you don't have to provide the client all the detail for them to sift though. But if they wish to dig through the detail they can."
"The solution is easy to understand for users because instructions are included on the platform."
 

Cons

"An improvement would be some sort of an integration with any GRC suite."
"We feel the solution's technical support to be very bad."
"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."
"The user interface of Tenable Nessus feels outdated and could be more user-friendly."
"One area with room for improvement is instead of there just being a PDF format for output, I'd like the option of an Excel spreadsheet, whereby I could better track remediation efforts and provide reporting off of that."
"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."
"The pricing point has increased significantly in recent years. The product's pricing has roughly tripled within the last couple of years, making us reconsider renewing the license for the scanner."
"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 inventory management function in this solution needs improvement."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I think the pricing is based on the number of endpoints, so it's more subscription-based."
"We paid about six thousand dollars per license."
"The price of Tenable Nessus is too expensive for each service center."
"One problem with Tenable is its pricing policy. Optimal results can be achieved with Greenbone Solutions which has much more friendly pricing policies."
"The pricing is much more manageable versus other products."
"The price of Tenable Nessus is much more competitive versus other solutions on the market."
"The solution has a single price for unlimited assets."
"The price is okay. I would give it a seven out of ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive."
"The newer tools are quite pricey. There is a case of some fine tuning that can be done in terms of licensing. The IP based licensing that is offered makes the tool very expensive. If they want the IT industry to adopt it, the price should be looked at."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
18%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Retailer
14%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Government
10%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Computer Software Company
10%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business39
Midsize Enterprise19
Large Enterprise35
 

Questions from the Community

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How would you choose between Rapid7 InsightVM and Tenable Nessus?
You have full visibility across cloud, network, virtual, and containerized infrastructures with Rapid7 Insight VM. You can easily prioritize vulnerabilities using attacker analytics. Overall, Rapid...
What's the difference between Tenable Nessus and Tenable.io Vulnerability Management?
Tenable Nessus is a vulnerability assessment solution that is both easy to deploy and easy to manage. The design of the program is such that if a company should desire to handle the installation t...
What do you like most about Tenable Nessus?
We have around 500 virtual machines. Therefore, we conduct monthly scans and open tickets for our developers to address identified vulnerabilities. These scans cover the servers, other network equi...
 

Also Known As

Kenna.VM, Kenna Security, Kenna, Kenna Security Platform
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

TransUnion
Bitbrains, Tesla, Just Eat, Crosskey Banking Solutions, Covenant Health, Youngstown State University
Find out what your peers are saying about Qualys, Tenable, Rapid7 and others in Risk-Based Vulnerability Management. Updated: February 2026.
881,733 professionals have used our research since 2012.