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 #1 with an average rating of 8.3. Orca Security holds a 4.5% mindshare in VM, compared to Qualys’s 7.4% 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 Apr 6, 2025

Qualys VMDR and Orca Security are key competitors in the vulnerability management and security assessment market. Orca Security appears to have an edge due to its agentless deployment and enhanced cloud security capabilities.

Features: Qualys VMDR provides a comprehensive vulnerability management tool offering real-time inventory, detection, compliance monitoring, and robust reporting. Orca Security features an agentless approach using SideScanning technology for deep cloud visibility, precise vulnerability ranking for effective remediation, and strong container security for cloud-native environments.

Room for Improvement: Qualys VMDR users note its complexity, precision in reporting, and integration with third-party tools as areas for improvement, alongside challenges in managing large asset inventories. Orca Security could improve by offering more frequent scans, detailed alert customization, and expanding support to private clouds.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Qualys VMDR is versatile but demands specialized knowledge for full utilization. Its support varies in responsiveness. Orca Security is appreciated for its straightforward SaaS deployment model and ease of use, though enhancements in support communication are sought after.

Pricing and ROI: Qualys VMDR is viewed as expensive, especially for smaller companies, though its comprehensive features justify this cost. Orca Security has competitive pricing considering its cloud visibility and agentless functions. Both solutions are noted for substantial ROI through reduced risk and improved security post-implementation.

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

Buyer's Guide

Orca Security vs. Qualys VMDR

May 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 July 2025, in the Vulnerability Management category, the mindshare of Zafran Security is 0.8%, up from 0.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Orca Security is 4.5%, down from 5.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Qualys VMDR is 7.4%, down from 12.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

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

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

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

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

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

"Zafran is an excellent tool."

"There are so many valuable features that I could list, but one that I appreciate is the PCI DSS compliance report."

"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."

"I find Orca Security's CIEM feature invaluable, as it focuses on entitlement and posture management, identifying assets with older OS versions, and asset misconfiguration."

"Orca's platform provides an agentless data collection facility that collects information directly from the cloud using APIs, with zero impact on performance."

"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."

"The GUI features are very good. Threat intelligence is also very good."

"Orca gives you great visibility into your assets. It shows you the issues and the things that you need to attend to first, by prioritizing things. You can see a lot of information that is not always visible, even to DevOps, to help you know about the machines and their status. It's very easy to see everything in a single dashboard. That makes it a very useful tool."

"One of the valuable features of Orca Security is its design and options that allow flexible filtering and user-friendly visualization."

More Orca Security pros

"Provides great functionality."

"Qualys VM is very stable."

"Performs automated, regular scans in the network."

"It gives a very good overview of the inventory assessment process, and it can be accessed across our company because it's a global tool."

"Qualys VMDR provides a real-time response and reporting feature, which is excellent."

"The most valuable feature of Qualys Container Security is the detailed information in the reports and the remediation. This is done to make sure there are no vulnerabilities."

"The process of defining and discovering scans is organized efficiently."

"It's also highly customizable, allowing us to tailor it to our needs."

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."

"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."

"I would like to see better customization options for security frameworks and better integration with reporting tools like Power BI or Grafana dashboards."

"We are PCI DSS compliant, so we need to scan our environment externally with tools vetted by the PCI DSS organization. Orca doesn't scan the environment externally. It only scans what's currently in the cloud."

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

"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."

"The automatic scan only runs every 24 hours, and if an alert is remediated within an hour, it still remains until the next scheduled scan."

More Orca Security cons

"The response time of technical support takes a while."

"Qualys VMDR is basically susceptible to false positives, and false negatives."

"The ability to manage user accounts and give rights to the operator to know about abnormalities of applications is something that needs improvement."

"The IoT scan is not great."

"It would be helpful to have features for better tracking, including options for adding relevant owners or supporting groups for each asset."

"It would be nice to have an all-in-one solution that was automated and could handle the scanning and reports as well as the patching and updating."

"One of the biggest issues from the clients' perspective is that all Qualys computing is on the cloud."

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

More Qualys VMDR cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available

"Its license is a bit expensive."

"It is the cost of the visibility that you get. When you really sit down and think about what do you need to do to secure an environment with a low impact on the business, and you take a look out into the world, I think this tool is well justified around cost."

"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."

"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."

"I think their pricing model is aligned with market demand. Of course, Orca could probably better align their pricing model with the needs of smaller businesses as well as some larger-scale enterprises with millions of assets. But in all fairness, I think the Orca sales team has been accommodating and ensured that we're happy with the pricing."

"We have a total of 25 licenses for this solution. The solution is on a pay-and-you-use model."

More Orca Security pricing and cost advice

"Usually every implementation is different and the quote is in function of number of assets."

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

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

"The price is very reasonable."

"The solution is costly."

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

"Qualys VM is quite expensive. It's a subscription-based license, and it's yearly. Right now, it's open for me, and I don't have any limitations or caps on the licenses. They are seeing if the product is viable for 4500 users. I can add as much as I want, and at the end of the subscription, they'll let me know how many licenses were actually used and bill me accordingly. On a scale from one to five, I would give their pricing a three. It's still expensive."

"The solution is reasonably priced for the value it provides."

More Qualys VMDR pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

11%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Manufacturing Company

Healthcare Company

Computer Software Company

16%

Financial Services Firm

12%

Manufacturing Company

University

Financial Services Firm

15%

Educational Organization

12%

Computer Software Company

12%

Manufacturing Company

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?

The current pricing of Zafran Security is fair overall. They were good to work with to accommodate our organization w...

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What needs improvement with Zafran Security?

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

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Zafran Security?

Zafran Security is helping reduce the amount of critical vulnerabilities in our environments that require prompt reme...

See all answers

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 ...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Orca Security?

Orca Security can be improved as there should be some kind of central pane of glass. Similar to how cloud management ...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Orca Security?

Our clients use Orca Security for various reasons. We implement it for the clients.

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 tagg...

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

Qualys offers better pricing and is feature-packed compared to other tools.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Qualys VMDR?

There were some issues later with Qualys VMDR regarding security, specifically with numerous false positive reports.

See all answers

Comparisons

Wiz Code vs Zafran Security

Compared 42% of the time

Vulcan Cyber vs Zafran Security

Compared 16% of the time

ServiceNow Security Operations vs Zafran Security

Compared 9% of the time

Tenable Vulnerability Management vs Zafran Security

Compared 9% of the time

Armis vs Zafran Security

Compared 6% of the time

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Wiz vs Orca Security

Compared 32% of the time

Microsoft Defender for Cloud vs Orca Security

Compared 8% of the time

Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks vs Orca Security

Compared 5% of the time

AWS Security Hub vs Orca Security

Compared 4% of the time

Aqua Cloud Security Platform vs Orca Security

Compared 2% of the time

More Orca Security Competitors

Tenable Nessus vs Qualys VMDR

Compared 11% of the time

Rapid7 InsightVM vs Qualys VMDR

Compared 9% of the time

Microsoft Defender Vulnerability Management vs Qualys VMDR

Compared 9% of the time

Tenable Security Center vs Qualys VMDR

Compared 6% of the time

More Qualys VMDR Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM)

June 2025

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Buyer's Guide

Orca Security

March 2025

Download Orca Security product report

Buyer's Guide

Qualys VMDR

June 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

May 2025

Free Report: Orca Security vs. Qualys VMDR

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