Microsoft Defender for Cloud vs Tenable Nessus comparison

Microsoft and Tenable are both solutions in the Vulnerability Management category. Microsoft is ranked #7 with an average rating of 8.1, while Tenable is ranked #3 with an average rating of 8.2. Additionally, 94% of Microsoft users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 98% of Tenable users who would recommend it.

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 5, 2025

Tenable Nessus and Microsoft Defender for Cloud compete in the cybersecurity realm, focusing on vulnerability management and cloud security, respectively. Microsoft Defender for Cloud seems to have the upper hand in compliance and integration across multi-cloud environments, while Tenable Nessus stands out in detailed vulnerability management.

Features: Tenable Nessus is known for its robust vulnerability detection and comprehensive scanning capabilities. It offers predictive prioritization features and extensive coverage across various platforms. Users have praised its detailed report generation and proactive approach to discovering vulnerabilities. Microsoft Defender for Cloud offers seamless integration across multi-cloud environments, providing a holistic security overview. Its security compliance features and hybrid cloud capabilities make it a favored choice for comprehensive cloud workload security management.

Room for Improvement: Tenable Nessus could enhance its cloud capabilities and reporting features. It requires better support for public cloud vendors and improved asset tracking. Microsoft Defender for Cloud would benefit from further AI integration to improve analytics and reduce false positives. Simplifying policy management and offering more flexible pricing options would make it more appealing to smaller businesses.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Tenable Nessus is predominantly deployed on-premises or in hybrid environments, making it adaptable to local infrastructure needs. While feedback on its customer service is positive, its response times could improve. Microsoft Defender for Cloud excels with deployment in public and hybrid cloud settings, aligning well with cloud service integration. Its customer service is responsive, although users find its feature complexity challenging during deployment.

Pricing and ROI: Tenable Nessus is commended for competitive pricing, particularly for smaller networks, providing an effective ROI in vulnerability management. Its pricing structure is straightforward, making it accessible for many organizations. Microsoft Defender for Cloud is perceived as more costly, especially with full feature enablement, and its complex pricing model requires careful management. However, it delivers significant value through extensive cloud service protection and compliance monitoring, offering a substantial ROI in larger infrastructures.

To learn more, read our detailed Microsoft Defender for Cloud vs. Tenable Nessus Report (Updated: March 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Defender for Cloud vs. Tenable Nessus

March 2025

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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

Zafran Security

Featured Reviews

Israel Cavazos Landini

Associate Director IT Security Operations at Novartis

Weekly insights and risk analysis facilitate informed security decisions

I appreciate the weekly insights Zafran provides, which include critical topics for networks and IT security, allowing us to evaluate which insights apply to our environment. The organization score feature is valuable to keep the leadership team updated on how our infrastructure fares security-wise. The applicable risk level versus base risk level feature is beneficial because prior to Zafran, we only used the base risk level, but now understand that risk depends on the asset itself. Zafran is an excellent tool.

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Vibhor Goel

Senior Cloud Platform Engineer at Deutsche Börse

A single tool for complete visibility and addressing security gaps

Currently, issues are structured in Microsoft Defender for Cloud at severity levels of high, critical, or warning, but these severity levels are not always right. For example, Microsoft might consider a port being open as critical, but that might not be the case for our company. Similarly, it might suggest closing some management ports, but you might need them to be able to log in, so the severity levels for certain things can be improved. Even though Microsoft Defender for Cloud provides a way to temporarily disable certain alerts or notifications without affecting our security score, it would be better to have more granularized control over these recommendations. Currently, we cannot even disable certain alerts or notifications. There should be an automated mechanism to design Azure policies based on the recommendations, possibly with AI integration. Instead of an engineer having to write a policy to fix security gaps, which is very time-consuming, there should be an inbuilt capability to auto-remediate everything and have proper control in place. Additionally, enabling Defender for Cloud at the resource group level, rather than only at the subscription level, would be beneficial.

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HarshBhardiya

SOC Engineer at Just Dial Limited

Provided increased visibility across the organization's servers

The user interface of Tenable Nessus feels outdated and could be more user-friendly. Additionally, the documentation is not well-organized, which can be confusing when searching for solutions or specific information related to Tenable Nessus Professional. The reporting feature could be improved by allowing users to create their own templates instead of relying on predefined ones.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Zafran is an excellent tool."

"Zafran has become an indispensable tool in our cybersecurity arsenal."

"It is very intuitive when it comes to policy administration, alerts and notifications, and ease of setting up roles at different hierarchies. It has also been good in terms of the network technology maps. It provides a good overview, but it also depends on the complexity of your network."

"It offers virus management and addresses threats such as viruses, worms, spyware, and other critical security concerns."

"When you have commissioned Defender, you have these things visible already on your dashboard. This gives the efficiency to the people to do their actual work rather than bothering about the email, sorting out the email, or looking at it through an ITSM solution, whey they have to look at the description and use cases. Efficiency increases with this optimized, ready-made solution since you don't need to invest in something externally. You can start using the dashboard and auditing capability provided from day one. Thus, you have fewer costs with a more optimized, easier-to-use solution, providing operational efficiency for your team."

"The tool's most valuable feature is its support for cloud-native services like Kubernetes, containers, managed storage, and databases. Protecting these without Microsoft Defender for Cloud would be extremely challenging. For threat protection specifically, I find the signature-based detection and heuristic detection features very effective."

"It has seamless integration with any of the services I mentioned, on Azure, such as IaaS platforms, virtual machines, applications, or databases, because it's an in-house product from Microsoft within the Azure ecosystem."

"It takes very little effort to integrate it. It also gives very good visibility into what exactly is happening."

"The first valuable feature was the fact that it gave us a list of everything that users were surfing on the web. Having the list, we could make decisions about those sites."

"Microsoft Defender for Cloud has significantly enhanced our overall security posture by approximately 20 to 25 percent."

More Microsoft Defender for Cloud pros

"The most valuable aspect of this solution is that you receive the entire report, which details the breakdown, especially in terms of critical, high, low, and mediums."

"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 equipment, and appliances in our infrastructure."

"The plug-in text information is quite useful."

"Nessus' most valuable feature is vulnerability management because it helps to discover vulnerabilities proactively and integrates with patch management solutions so you can push patches."

"I have found the vulnerability assessment and the reports to be useful."

"I like the fact that it was not expensive. I like that it's user-friendly."

"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."

"The most valuable features of Tenable Nessus include its ease of access and quick usability."

More Tenable Nessus pros

Cons

"Initially, we were somewhat concerned about the scalability of Zafran due to our large asset count and the substantial amount of information we needed to process."

"Customizing some of the compliance requirements based on individual needs seems like the biggest area of improvement. There should be an option to turn specific controls on and off based on how your solution is configured."

"Microsoft sources most of their threat intelligence internally, but I think they should open themselves up to bodies that provide feel intelligence to build a better engine. There may be threats out there that they don't report because their team is not doing anything on that and they don't have arrangements with another party that is involved in that research."

"Although Microsoft Defender for Cloud is based on security, I wish it went beyond providing assessments, reports, and generic steps. More detailed procedures would be helpful, especially for lower-level support staff."

"I would like to see more connectors and plugins with other platforms."

"I would like to see better automation when it comes to pushing out security features to the recommendations, and better documentation on the step-by-step procedures for enabling certain features."

"The vulnerabilities are duplicated many times."

"Customer service and support from Microsoft are very poor. Even for high-severity cases, response or resolution time can extend to three or four weeks."

"If a customer is already using Okta as an SSO in its entire environment, they will want to continue with it. But Security Center doesn't understand that and keeps making recommendations. It would help if it let us resolve a recommendation, even if it is not implemented."

More Microsoft Defender for Cloud cons

"It wasn't very clear how the scripts are running the scans. There's information about the script but it's not straightforward. The script information for each of the plugins should be available, but it doesn't give us straightforward direct information about how it was executed. That needs to be more clear."

"The solution should be able to support more devices."

"The inventory management function in this solution needs improvement."

"The solution could improve by having better integration with different vendors' IPS solutions. The ACLs and IPS policies signatures should be enabled based on the results of Tenable Nessus automatically, we currently have to do it manually which is very time-consuming. It has done a good job integrating with Fortinet but we would like it to be better integrated with other solutions that we have."

"Nessus' reporting could be more user-friendly."

"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."

"The price and scalability of the solution could improve."

"Online learning could be a bit better."

More Tenable Nessus cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available

"Currently, Microsoft offers only one plan at the enterprise level which is $15 per machine."

"The pricing model for most plans is generally good, but the cost of the new Defender for Storage plan is high and should be revisited, as it could lead to disabling desirable security features due to cost."

"Azure Defender is a bit pricey. The price could be lower."

"Its pricing is a little bit high in terms of Azure Security Center, but the good thing is that we don't need to maintain and deploy it. So, while the pricing is high, it is native to Azure which is why we prefer using this tool."

"Our clients complain about the cost of Microsoft Defender for Cloud."

"It has global licensing. It comes with multiple licenses since there are around 50,000 people (in our organization) who look at it."

"Azure Defender is definitely pricey, but their competitors cost about the same. For example, a Palo Alto solution is the same price per endpoint, but the ground strikes cost a bit more than Azure Defender. Still, it's pricey for a company like ours. Maybe well-established organizations can afford it, but it might be too costly for a startup."

"Pricing is difficult because each license has its own metrics and cost."

More Microsoft Defender for Cloud pricing and cost advice

"I rate the product's price seven or eight on a scale of one to ten, where one is low price and ten is high price."

"The solution has a single price for unlimited assets."

"The cost is around $4,300 per year. Use is unlimited. You don't pay more if you want to use it for another IP."

"While Tenable Nessus is a good enterprise solution, the high price would likely make it prohibitive to smaller organizations."

"There is an annual license required to use this solution."

"The solution is expensive."

"We pay approximately $2,500 on a yearly basis."

"The price of Tenable Nessus is much more competitive versus other solutions on the market."

More Tenable Nessus pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

13%

Financial Services Firm

12%

Manufacturing Company

Retailer

Computer Software Company

14%

Financial Services Firm

13%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Educational Organization

41%

Computer Software Company

Financial Services Firm

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Zafran Security?

Pricing for Zafran Security is not expensive. We have a contract for five years, and the cost is lower than other too...

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What needs improvement with Zafran Security?

I would like to see an integration with Check Point firewalls. It's essential for us and they are currently working o...

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What is your primary use case for Zafran Security?

We use Zafran Security for threat prioritization. We establish priority to understand which risks should be patched o...

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How is Prisma Cloud vs Azure Security Center for security?

Azure Security Center is very easy to use, integrates well, and gives very good visibility on what is happening acros...

See all answers

What do you like most about Microsoft Defender for Cloud?

The entire Defender Suite is tightly coupled, integrated, and collaborative.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Microsoft Defender for Cloud?

Initially, the cost was reasonable, but additional services from Microsoft sometimes incur extra expenses that seem h...

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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. Yo...

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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 ...

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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 addre...

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM)

March 2025

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Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Defender for Cloud

March 2025

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Buyer's Guide

Tenable Nessus

March 2025

Download Tenable Nessus product report

Also Known As

No data available

Microsoft Azure Security Center, Azure Security Center, Microsoft ASC, Azure Defender

No data available

Interactive Demo

Demo not available

Zafran Security

Microsoft

Demo not available

Tenable

Overview

Zafran Security integrates with existing security tools to identify and mitigate vulnerabilities effectively, proving that most critical vulnerabilities are not exploitable, optimizing threat management.

Zafran Security introduces an innovative operating model for managing security threats and vulnerabilities. By leveraging the threat exposure management platform, it pinpoints and prioritizes exploitable vulnerabilities, reducing risk through immediate remediation. This platform enhances your hybrid cloud security by normalizing vulnerability signals and integrating specific IT context data, such as CVE runtime presence and internet asset reachability, into its analysis. No longer reliant on patch windows, Zafran Security allows you to manage risks actively.

What are the key features of Zafran Security?

Threat Exposure Management: Utilizes existing tools to prioritize vulnerabilities and manage threats.
Integrative Analysis: Combines security data with IT context for precise vulnerability management.
Real-time Risk Reduction: Enables immediate risk management without waiting for patches.
Hybrid Cloud Compatibility: Functions across diverse cloud environments for comprehensive security.

What benefits can users expect from Zafran Security?

Improved Security: Enhances protection by efficiently identifying and mitigating risks.
Cost Efficiency: Reduces unnecessary patching expenses by confirming non-exploitable vulnerabilities.
Time Savings: Frees developers to focus on root causes by handling immediate threats.
Comprehensive Insight: Offers a holistic view of security threats and vulnerabilities.

In industries where security is paramount, such as finance and healthcare, Zafran Security provides invaluable protection by ensuring that only exploitable vulnerabilities are addressed. It allows entities to maintain robust security measures while allocating resources efficiently, fitting seamlessly into existing security strategies.

Zafran Security

Microsoft Defender for Cloud is a comprehensive security solution that provides advanced threat protection for cloud workloads. It offers real-time visibility into the security posture of cloud environments, enabling organizations to quickly identify and respond to potential threats. With its advanced machine learning capabilities, Microsoft Defender for Cloud can detect and block sophisticated attacks, including zero-day exploits and fileless malware.

The solution also provides automated remediation capabilities, allowing security teams to quickly and easily respond to security incidents. With Microsoft Defender for Cloud, organizations can ensure the security and compliance of their cloud workloads, while reducing the burden on their security teams.

Microsoft

Tenable Nessus provides an efficient vulnerability management system with swift deployment and comprehensive scanning capabilities, making it an ideal choice for organizations seeking to enhance their security posture through effective threat detection and mitigation strategies.

Renowned for its top-tier vulnerability detection, Tenable Nessus offers a robust platform that integrates effortlessly across systems, enhancing threat management through automation, real-time monitoring, and customizable scanning options. Its broad asset coverage, including network devices and applications, coupled with ease of deployment, positions it as a go-to option for risk assessment and compliance. Organizations value its extensive reporting features and database, although they suggest enhancements in reporting formats and false positive detection. A more intuitive interface, improved cloud support, and competitive pricing models are sought after to cater to evolving enterprise needs.

What are the key features of Tenable Nessus?

Comprehensive Vulnerability Detection: Identifies security gaps across systems and platforms.
Remedy Recommendations: Provides actionable insights for vulnerability fixes.
Predictive Prioritization: Helps in focusing on critical vulnerabilities first.
Seamless Integration: Compatible with diverse platforms for cohesive threat management.
Automation Capabilities: Streamlines routine scans and reports.

What benefits and ROI should users look for?

Fast Setup: Quick deployment that saves time and resources.
Cost-Effective: Affordable pricing supports budget-conscious cyber strategies.
Real-Time Monitoring: Offers continuous oversight of system health.
Extensive Reports: Detailed insights enhance decision-making processes.

In industries such as finance, healthcare, and tech, Tenable Nessus is implemented for scanning internal and external networks, identifying risks, and ensuring data protection compliance. Organizations conduct regular scans to detect security vulnerabilities in servers and databases, leveraging its capabilities to strengthen their security frameworks while managing cloud infrastructures and enterprise networks efficiently.

Tenable

Sample Customers

Information Not Available

Microsoft Defender for Cloud is trusted by companies such as ASOS, Vatenfall, SWC Technology Partners, and more.

Bitbrains, Tesla, Just Eat, Crosskey Banking Solutions, Covenant Health, Youngstown State University

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Defender for Cloud vs. Tenable Nessus

March 2025

Free Report: Microsoft Defender for Cloud vs. Tenable Nessus

Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft Defender for Cloud vs. Tenable Nessus and other solutions. Updated: March 2025.

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