Orca Security vs Qualys VMDR comparison

Orca Security and Qualys are both solutions in the Vulnerability Management category. Orca Security is ranked #14 with an average rating of 8.6, while Qualys is ranked #2 with an average rating of 8.6. Orca Security holds a 3.9% mindshare in VM, compared to Qualys’s 6.7% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Orca Security users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 94% of Qualys users who would recommend it.

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jul 13, 2025

Qualys VMDR and Orca Security compete in the vulnerability management and cloud security market. Orca Security has an upper hand with its agentless deployment and comprehensive visibility.

Features: Qualys VMDR offers comprehensive vulnerability management, automated prioritization, and seamless cloud integration, which are valuable for complex environments. Its extensive scanning and asset management features enhance its usability. Orca Security uniquely provides agentless visibility across cloud properties and uses advanced prioritization with its SideScanning technology. This enhances its efficiency and security insights in multi-cloud environments without needing agents.

Room for Improvement: Qualys VMDR could improve its complex reporting, false positive rates, and integration with third-party tools. Users also suggest enhancements in user documentation and UI design. Orca Security could benefit from more alert management customization, improved real-time scanning, and dashboard intuitiveness. Expanding communication on new features and non-cloud integrations would also be beneficial.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Qualys VMDR supports on-premises, private, and hybrid cloud deployments but requires extensive setup knowledge. Its customer service reviews vary, with noted slow response times. Orca Security excels in its agentless, cloud-native integration, simplifying deployment. It receives generally positive customer service feedback, though proactive user education could enhance support.

Pricing and ROI: Qualys VMDR is often seen as expensive relative to competitors but offers value in reducing vulnerability exposure. It provides a significant ROI over time, suitable for larger enterprises benefiting from cost efficiencies. Orca Security's pricing, while perceived as high, offers a compelling price-to-value ratio with bundled features, appealing to businesses focused on cloud-native security insights. Its ROI is linked to improved security posture and operational efficiency.

To learn more, read our detailed Orca Security vs. Qualys VMDR Report (Updated: September 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Orca Security vs. Qualys VMDR

September 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

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Vulnerability Management category, the mindshare of Zafran Security is 1.1%, up from 0.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Orca Security is 3.9%, down from 5.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Qualys VMDR is 6.7%, down from 11.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Vulnerability Management Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Qualys VMDR	6.7%
Orca Security	3.9%
Zafran Security	1.1%
Other	88.3%

Vulnerability Management

Featured Reviews

Israel Cavazos Landini

Associate Director IT Security Operations at a pharma/biotech company with 10,001+ employees

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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CHINTAN MEHTA

Cloud Security Automation Engineer at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

Consolidating security tools with comprehensive cloud visibility

The documentation for Orca Security could be improved. The compliance framework also needs enhancements, especially concerning integrations with other tools like ServiceNow's vulnerability modules, which are not as mature as expected. It should also increase its capability to ingest data from other security tools like CloudSight for endpoint detection and provide real-time monitoring.

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Ankesh Raj

Information Security Analyst at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

Real-time responses and reporting streamline vulnerability management

Qualys VMDR provides a real-time response and reporting feature, which is excellent. It allows us to see real-time graphs and reports for every asset, server, and more, which is very user-friendly. Our clients have given good feedback, and they are satisfied with the tool. We use it daily to fix vulnerabilities by connecting with infrastructure to remediate. The feedback from the client side is very good.

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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

"We are able to see the real risk of a vulnerability on our environment with our security tools."

"Overall, we have seen about eighty-seven percent reduction of the number of vulnerabilities that require urgency to remediate, specifically the number of criticals."

"We saw benefits from Zafran Security almost immediately after deploying it."

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

"Zafran is an excellent tool."

"Another valuable feature with Orca, something that's not talked about enough, is its ability to rank your gaps and your tasks... You can get visibility with agents and there are a lot of ways to do that. But the ranking and the context across the entire environment, that is what is unique about Orca."

"With its Cloud Security Posture Management capability, we have the ability to read across all of our cloud-based environments, which includes AWS and Azure. We have visibility into those environments. Seeing all vulnerabilities and configurations is really powerful for us, but ultimately, the ability to use the API to query across the fleet to understand what is the current state, what is the patch level, which ones are potentially exposed for a new CVE that just came out is even more valuable. It allows us to gather really specific intelligence through simple queries."

"The most valuable feature of Orca Security is the automated scanning tool, user-friendliness, and ease of use."

"It's for protection. It's an agentless tool. We don't need to install anything at a customer's premises. We can just scan the entire assets in the cloud."

"Orca Security has updated its interface, making it more user-friendly. I find it particularly useful as it allows me to easily navigate the dashboard and prioritize actions based on severity and criticality."

"The initial setup is very easy."

"Orca's SideScanning is the biggest feature. It's the 'wow' factor... With Orca's SideScanning, they just need permissions for your account and that makes it so simple."

"The best features of Orca Security include its ability to perform a lot of security controls without requiring any installation of agents, making it very easy to set up."

More Orca Security pros

"The most valuable features are vulnerability detection and the scanning capability to enable identification of vulnerabilities across our network."

"The biggest benefit is from a security operations perspective, where we are able to drive our security posture upwards by remediating any discovered vulnerabilities."

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

"It is a simple solution that makes scanning easy. You just give it a scheduled task, and it will do everything for you."

"The most recent is VMDR, which provides a comprehensive overview of how to detect, patch, and remediate specific vulnerabilities."

"The most valuable features of Qualys VMDR include patch management and the use of virtual scanners to scan appliances and devices, especially those provided by vendors where we cannot manage them ourselves."

"Monitors workstations and servers for vulnerabilities and creates reports."

"There are many features. Its reliability, ease of installation, ease of use, and the richness of the information provided are the most valuable features."

More Qualys VMDR pros

Cons

"I think the ability to have some enhanced reporting capabilities is something they can improve on, as they have good reports but we have asked for some specific reporting enhancements."

"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."

"The dashboarding and reporting functionality of Zafran Security is an area that definitely could use some improvements."

"Orca Security can be improved as there should be some kind of central pane of glass. Similar to how cloud management works, Orca Security should have something comparable."

"Orca needs improvement in snoozing or dismissing specific alarms."

"It's not all clouds that they are currently onboarded with. For instance, they are not yet with public cloud and many other private clouds."

"There were a couple of times when Orca was down when I was trying to access it. I work strange hours because all of my team is in the UK right now. It was 2 a.m. on a Saturday and I was trying to log in but it wasn't working. But relative to my other security tools, Orca is definitely the most stable that I've seen."

"Orca Security can be improved as there should be some kind of central pane of glass. Similar to how cloud management works, Orca Security should have something comparable."

"Another improvement would be that, in addition to focusing on endpoint compliance, they would focus on general compliance."

"The interface can be a bit cranky and sometimes takes a lot of time to load."

"They can expand a little bit in anti-malware detection. While we have pretty good confidence that it's going to detect some of the static malware, some of the detections are heuristics. There could be a growth in the library from where they're pulling their information, but we don't get a lot of those alerts based on the design of our products. In general, that might be an area that needs to be filled since they offer it as a service within it."

More Orca Security cons

"The only improvement I can think of is on the implementation side. At times it is a bit slow."

"Endpoint stability and fault resolution could be improved."

"The tool needs to improve the adding assets and report generation features. I would like to see the policy scan of offline appliances in the product's future releases."

"Qualys VMDR should improve authenticated scanning capabilities."

"Qualys VMDR could improve in reducing the occurrences of false positive vulnerabilities."

"There seems to be a lack of easy onboarding into Qualys."

"Qualys could be improved in its overall performance compared to other vulnerability management or scanning tools."

"Qualys doesn't have its own tool to deploy the agents all at once, so we need to use third-party tools such as BigFix or something else to deploy the agents, which is my main concern and should be fixed by the Qualys team."

More Qualys VMDR cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available

"Its license is a bit expensive."

"The most expensive solution is Palo Alto. They claim to be very robust. The next most expensive is Wiz, followed by Orca and all the rest."

"Orca Security charges are based on cloud workloads. So, it's based on workloads. If we look at one feature, it might be expensive."

"Orca Security is cheaper compared to other solutions in the same space."

"Orca is very competitive when compared to the alternatives and is not the most expensive in the market, that's for sure."

"The pricing depends on how many assets you have running in your cloud and how many environments you have. If you have a dev environment, test environment, and a production environment then it's really important that you have coverage for all of them."

"The price is a bit expensive for smaller organizations."

"While it's competitive with Palo Alto Prisma, I think Orca's list price is very high. I would advise Orca to lower it because, at that price, I might consider alternatives like Wiz, which also offers agentless services."

More Orca Security pricing and cost advice

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

"When you want to cover yourself for scalability, you will be charged for the number you place on the scan itself."

"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."

"Qualys is cheaper and more affordable than other solutions."

"The solution is expensive."

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

"Qualys is a pay-as-you-go model, so there's flexibility to the pricing."

"Qualys Virtual Scanner Appliance isn't expensive right now. But the price for their product bundles could be better."

More Qualys VMDR pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

11%

Computer Software Company

Manufacturing Company

Government

Computer Software Company

15%

Financial Services Firm

13%

Manufacturing Company

10%

University

Financial Services Firm

17%

Computer Software Company

11%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	9
Midsize Enterprise	7
Large Enterprise	5

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	20
Midsize Enterprise	12
Large Enterprise	69

Questions from the Community

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

Since we stood Zafran Security up in our private cloud, we handle the maintenance on our side. As we opted not to use...

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What needs improvement with Zafran Security?

In terms of areas for improvement, Zafran Security is doing a really great job as a new and emerging company. Oftenti...

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What is your primary use case for Zafran Security?

My use cases for Zafran Security revolve around two primary areas. One is around vulnerability management and priorit...

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What do you like most about Orca Security?

It's for protection. It's an agentless tool. We don't need to install anything at a customer's premises. We can just ...

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What needs improvement with Orca Security?

I really love the way Orca Security worked. A potential improvement could be additional security features for the two...

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What is your primary use case for Orca Security?

We used Orca Security ( /products/orca-security-reviews ) for about two to three months until I left the company. The...

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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 tagg...

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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?

One area where Qualys VMDR can be improved is the missing feature for deploying agents for over 1,000 assets, as we n...

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Comparisons

Wiz Code vs Zafran Security

Compared 34% of the time

Vulcan Cyber vs Zafran Security

Compared 14% of the time

Tenable Vulnerability Management vs Zafran Security

Compared 8% of the time

Nucleus vs Zafran Security

Compared 6% of the time

HackerOne vs Zafran Security

Compared 6% of the time

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Wiz vs Orca Security

Compared 28% of the time

Microsoft Defender for Cloud vs Orca Security

Compared 9% of the time

Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks vs Orca Security

Compared 5% of the time

Upwind vs Orca Security

Compared 5% of the time

Aqua Cloud Security Platform vs Orca Security

Compared 2% of the time

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Tenable Nessus vs Qualys VMDR

Compared 9% of the time

Rapid7 InsightVM vs Qualys VMDR

Compared 9% of the time

Microsoft Defender Vulnerability Management vs Qualys VMDR

Compared 8% of the time

Tenable Security Center vs Qualys VMDR

Compared 5% of the time

Wiz vs Qualys VMDR

Compared 5% of the time

More Qualys VMDR Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Zafran Security

September 2025

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Buyer's Guide

Orca Security

September 2025

Download Orca Security product report

Buyer's Guide

Qualys VMDR

September 2025

Download Qualys VMDR product report

Also Known As

No data available

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

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

Orca Security is the pioneer of agentless cloud security that is trusted by hundreds of enterprises globally. Orca makes cloud security possible for enterprises moving to and scaling in the cloud with its patented SideScanning™ technology and Unified Data Model. The Orca Cloud Security Platform delivers the world's most comprehensive coverage and visibility of risks across AWS, Azure, Google Cloud and Kubernetes.

At Orca Security, we’re on a mission to make it fast, easy, and cost effective for organizations to address critical cloud security issues so they can operate in the cloud with confidence.

Key Platform Features:

Agentless: Complete, centralized coverage of the entire cloud estate, without the need for installing and configuring agents or layering together multiple siloed tools. Full visibility of cloud misconfigurations, vulnerabilities, workload protection, malware scanning, image scanning, file integrity monitoring and more.
Asset Inventory: Get a complete inventory of all your public cloud assets, including detailed information on installed OSes, software, and applications, as well as data and network assets such as storage buckets, Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs), and Security Groups.

Attack Path Analysis: Visualize attack vectors to critical assets or crown jewels. See which assets are susceptible to lateral movement, assume roles, privilege escalation, and more.

Risk Prioritization: Prioritize the 1% of risks that matter the most, based on impact scores. Secure the vulnerabilities and misconfigured targets (critical assets) and eliminate the potential risks residing on the attack paths to those targets.
Cloud Threat Detection: Monitor for malicious activity within your entire cloud estate. Be aware of detected threats, user behavior anomalies and more.

Breach Forensics: Log every change and all activity into a central repository for investigation procedures to confirm or deny entry and compromises within the cloud estate.
Cloud To Dev (Shift Left): Orca’s built-in shift left capabilities enables DevOps to focus more security attention earlier in the CI/CD pipelines. Security teams are able to trace a production risk (misconfiguration or vulnerability) directly to the original source code repository from which it came, even down to the exact line of code that is at the root of the identified risk.
Compliance: Choose from over 60 preconfigured compliance frameworks, cloud security best practices, CIS Benchmarks, or design and build your own compliance framework for fast and continuous reporting.
Security Score: The Orca Security Score is found on Orca’s Risk Dashboard and is updated daily. The overall score is calculated based on performance in the following five categories - Suspicious Activity, IAM, Data at Risk, Vulnerable Assets, and Responsiveness. Since the scores are percentage based and not raw numbers, you can objectively make comparisons to other organizations within your industry or business units of different sizes. In addition to reporting to senior management, the Orca Security Score can help with internal self-monitoring, as a way of measuring risk mitigation efforts, to know where to focus efforts, and track progress.

Orca Security Benefits

Consolidate technologies to reduce costs and complexity:

“The more I can get out of this one solution, the better. I see Orca as the tool where we get all cloud-related security data.” - Joshua Scott, Head of Security and IT | Postman

Avoid costly breaches:

"I look at proactive asset discovery, configuration management, and vulnerability management as being able to find a vulnerability before the bad guys do and being able to deal with it before something exploits it. This is what Orca does for us." - Doug Graham, CSO & CPO | Lionbridge

Increase team productivity and efficiency by focusing on high-value activities and solving the 1% of risks that matter most:

"Orca is unique in that it locates vulnerabilities with precision and delivers tangible, actionable results – without having to sift through all the noise." - Aaron Brown, Senior Cloud Security Engineer | Sisense

Quick Time-to-Value with Immediate ROI:

"Orca told us we could have some visibility within 5 or 10 minutes, and I thought, ‘There’s no way.’ Well, I was wrong. They really did it." - Thomas Hill, CISO | Live Oak Bank

Reduce MTTR and remove operational friction:

“We can’t ask developers things like ‘Did you think about security? When you start a new VM on AWS, can you please let me know so I’m able to scan it? Can you please deploy an agent on that machine for me?’ We need a better way to work. Orca provides that better way by eliminating organizational friction.” - Erwin Geirnaert, Cloud Security Architect | NG Data

Orca Security

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

Information Not Available

BeyondTrust, Postman, Digital Turbine, Solarisbank, Lemonade, C6 Bank, Docebo, Vercel, and Vivino

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

Orca Security vs. Qualys VMDR

September 2025

Free Report: Orca Security vs. Qualys VMDR

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