Qualys VMDR vs Vicarius vRx comparison

Qualys and Vicarius are both solutions in the Vulnerability Management category. Qualys is ranked #1 with an average rating of 8.3, while Vicarius is ranked #15 with an average rating of 7.9. Qualys holds a 7.4% mindshare in VM, compared to Vicarius’s 0.9% mindshare. Additionally, 94% of Qualys users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 92% of Vicarius users who would recommend it.

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Apr 6, 2025

Qualys VMDR and Vicarius vRx are two competing products in the vulnerability management category, offering unique strengths and features. Qualys VMDR appears to have the upper hand in cloud-based scalability and continuous monitoring, while Vicarius vRx shines in patchless protection and automation capabilities.

Features:Qualys VMDR offers continuous monitoring, cloud-based scalability, and a robust knowledge base for a complete view of assets and vulnerabilities. It integrates seamlessly with regular updates. Vicarius vRx stands out with its patchless protection and automation capabilities, excelling in third-party software patching and prioritizing vulnerabilities effectively. It offers a comprehensive approach to vulnerability discovery and remediation.

Room for Improvement:Qualys VMDR needs enhancements in its web application security model and could benefit from a more intuitive user interface, particularly for IoT and industrial systems integration. Vicarius vRx could improve its user interface and simplify the configuration process, enhancing automation for patchless applications and developing more scripting and filtering capabilities.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service:Qualys VMDR supports multiple deployment models, including private, public, hybrid clouds, and on-premises solutions, offering flexibility, but has a mixed reputation for customer service. Vicarius vRx focuses on a public cloud deployment model with satisfactory support but less deployment versatility compared to Qualys.

Pricing and ROI:Qualys is often more expensive with a complex pricing model, but it offers substantial capabilities justifying its cost, particularly for larger enterprises. It shows significant ROI in reducing cybersecurity risks. Vicarius vRx is competitively priced with a straightforward model, offering good ROI through efficient vulnerability management and operational savings.

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

Buyer's Guide

Qualys VMDR vs. Vicarius vRx

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 Qualys VMDR is 7.4%, down from 12.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Vicarius vRx is 0.9%, up from 0.2% 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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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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OrenBen Shalom

Information Security Manager at Pango

Consolidates vulnerability discovery, prioritization, and remediation in a single platform

Vicarius vRx offers several advantages, especially for organizations with diverse operating systems and applications requiring frequent patching. The platform helps prioritize patch installation by identifying high-risk vulnerabilities, allowing IT teams to focus on critical threats first. This prioritization is crucial because it prevents IT teams from being overwhelmed by the constant influx of patches, enabling them to create a manageable plan and allocate resources effectively. By distinguishing between critical, high-risk, and medium-risk vulnerabilities, Vicarius vRx empowers IT teams to address the most urgent threats promptly and schedule less critical patches for later. Both native operating system updates and Vicarius vRx offer vulnerability remediation. Native OS updates allow for the patching of system vulnerabilities on Windows, macOS, and Linux. However, Vicarius vRx provides a single solution for installing both operating system and application updates by also discovering application vulnerabilities. Another valuable feature is virtual patching, which allows us to protect an asset from a specific vulnerability without installing a patch. Sometimes, installing a patch alone is insufficient and requires restarting the asset. However, production servers often cannot be restarted during the day, restricting restarts to specific timeslots. Virtual patching creates a network-based protection layer that prevents exploitation of a vulnerability, offering a temporary safeguard. While not a foolproof solution for long-term use, it's a valuable tool that reduces tension between IT and security teams by providing time to properly install patches.

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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."

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

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

"Zafran is an excellent tool."

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

"It gives you a lot of options, and it integrates with our ServiceNow for ticketing and all."

"Detects new hosts along with vulnerabilities."

"Vulnerability management is the most valuable one and it’s a must in every organization."

"I find Qualys VM very robust, and it's very useful for vulnerability management and patch management. The value that it brings to my environment is economies of scale. There is no limitation on adding any endpoints. You go by the rule, and it's added once another endpoint is added to our environment. It's automatically installed, and it's less work from our end. It frees up my license automatically if I don't need an endpoint or if my machine is decommissioned. I like the dashboard displays because I don't see any duplication. The most important part is vulnerability management and prioritization. Unlike Symantec, it shows the kind of vulnerability I would want to patch first. It provides a holistic view of the kind of vulnerabilities and the ones I should remediate first. I don't have to do a scan; it just brings up those critical kinds of vulnerabilities like zero-day vulnerabilities and tells me to prioritize them. You have to prioritize these vulnerabilities first and go on with the rest. The dashboard shows me the ones that have been fixed, so I don't have to complete an aging report. The user experience and the graphical interface are good. As it's user-friendly and understandable on an executive level, it brings real value. We also use this solution because it's robust and flexibile."

"It is a stable solution."

"There are fewer false positives when using this solution."

"The features that are most valuable are the identification, scan features, and the identification of vulnerabilities."

"The solution shows us classic categories, including high, medium, and low risks. It also shows critical items, and that gives us the advantage of prioritizing things."

More Qualys VMDR pros

"Patchless Protection helps protect us from vulnerabilities that may not yet have patches from the manufacturer. I've used it for a piece of software that we don't have a patch for. It monitors that software, analyzes it, and makes sure nothing nefarious is going on when it's vulnerable."

"While other vulnerability scanners overwhelm us with a huge list of problems after a scan, Vicarius vRx goes beyond that."

"Vicarius vRx offers several advantages, especially for organizations with diverse operating systems and applications requiring frequent patching."

"The most valuable features of vRx would be virtualized patching and severity prioritization."

"vRx seemed to be user-friendly and very easy to use."

"The other products we looked at had patching tagged on another product, whereas this solely looked after the patching and vulnerabilities, which is good. We did not see any other products with such capability."

"The system prioritizes vulnerabilities, identifying high, medium, and low risks, allowing us to focus on high-risk applications. It allows us to focus on high-risk applications and do the updates."

"Agent-based scanning is the most valuable feature."

More Vicarius vRx 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."

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

"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."

"I would like to have CSPM, a continuous scan-like cloud added to the solution."

"The user interface (UI) is quite complicated."

"One area for improvement is the simplification of the process to ignore certain vulnerabilities on specific devices."

"I would like to see more accuracy in detections, better reporting capabilities, and better dashboard download capabilities."

"The IoT scan is not great."

"The solution is a bit expensive if you do not have access to discounts."

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

"Qualys currently does not have any features for scanning SCADA, IoT, and Industrial Control Systems."

More Qualys VMDR cons

"It would be good if there were more login options. At the moment, it sends you an email to verify your email address, and then you can log in. It would be beneficial to have other options for signing in, like MFA or maybe security keys, especially since it is a security product."

"The user interface for deploying patches can be improved, as it appears complicated when launching patches."

"The multi-tenant portal has room for improvement."

"I don't like logging in. The portal could be a better process. You could use some third-party push notification rather than sending an email, waiting for the link to generate, and clicking on it. That would be good. It's somewhat frustrating when I need to log in."

"The network device vulnerability scans can be improved. It would be helpful to be able to mitigate those vulnerabilities using SSH or SNMP to get those those updates out to those devices. I don't know if that is possible because it doesn't run an agent. But at the very least, having that CPE information relative to network devices would be incredibly helpful."

"Based on the request from our clients, it would be great to have an MDM solution. If they can manage vulnerabilities on mobile devices too, that would be great. Having scripting capabilities on mobile devices would be very useful. That was the request we had from lots of clients."

"We are now in the process of trying to get our money back because the tool does not work."

"The patchless protection feature is currently difficult to understand and could be made more user-friendly."

More Vicarius vRx cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available

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

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

"An annual license for a single scanner costs around $3,000."

"They have recently changed the pricing model, which is now better than it was before."

"Qualys VM is better suited for medium to large companies because the price can be too much for smaller customers."

"We have an annual contract for Qualys VMDR. I believe it's for either two years or five years."

"The solution is expensive."

"The pricing and licensing for Qualys could be improved."

More Qualys VMDR pricing and cost advice

"I am not sure how much it costs, but it would have saved us some costs."

"Vicarius vRx's per-asset pricing makes it easy for me to market to clients as it scales with their needs."

"I do not use other solutions, so I cannot compare its pricing to others, but its price seems okay."

"The pricing was very reasonable and fair compared to other products. I liked that there was no tiered system. One price gave access to everything, which is nice. It is not something you get too often with enterprise IT."

"The pricing is fair."

"In the past, Vicarius vRx was cheap, but now they have adjusted their pricing policy, resulting in higher renewal costs. We have had some conversations with them regarding a smaller jump in the renewal cost."

"Vicarius vRx offers a competitive price point for the features it provides."

"I know we got it for a very cheap price, and I now see why. It was very cheap. It was maybe 12,000 or 14,000 dollars."

More Vicarius vRx 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

Financial Services Firm

15%

Educational Organization

12%

Computer Software Company

12%

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

15%

Media Company

11%

Non Profit

11%

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...

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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...

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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?

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

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What needs improvement with Qualys VMDR?

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

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Vicarius vRx?

I do not use other solutions, so I cannot compare its pricing to others, but its price seems okay.

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What needs improvement with Vicarius vRx?

I would be happy if the patch update could be downloaded to the Vicarius server and then implemented on the client. C...

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What is your primary use case for Vicarius vRx?

We use Vicarius vRx to manage all third-party software updates. Previously, we could manage Windows updates, but thir...

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Microsoft Defender Vulnerability Management vs Qualys VMDR

Compared 9% of the time

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Compared 6% of the time

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Compared 5% of the time

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Compared 21% of the time

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Compared 14% of the time

Microsoft Configuration Manager vs Vicarius vRx

Compared 11% of the time

Qualys Patch Management vs Vicarius vRx

Compared 8% of the time

Microsoft Windows Server Update Services vs Vicarius vRx

Compared 8% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM)

June 2025

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Buyer's Guide

Qualys VMDR

June 2025

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Buyer's Guide

Vicarius vRx

June 2025

Download Vicarius vRx product report

Also Known As

No data available

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

No data available

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

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

Vicarius vRx supports managed service providers and partners with compliance packages, vulnerability management, and patching for PCI, HIPAA, and cybersecurity needs, focusing on third-party and OS patching, especially on Microsoft Windows.

Vicarius vRx automates patching, virtualized patching, and severity prioritization through its cloud-based, agent-based approach which enhances consistency and flexibility. It includes patchless protection to block malware in unpatched software and features simplified dashboards for integrated vulnerability discovery and remediation. Users appreciate the user-friendly scripting engine, efficient third-party software patching, and real-time cybersecurity updates. Community support and customizable deployment options further add value. However, users find name changes and login difficulties confusing and report tediousness when configuring multiple reports. Desired improvements include virtual environment for patch testing, enhanced network device vulnerability scans, and better Microsoft Endpoint Manager interactions.

What are the key features of Vicarius vRx?

Automated patching: Streamlines the process of patching applications and operating systems.
Virtualized patching: Enables patching in a virtual environment to prevent disruptions.
Severity prioritization: Helps prioritize vulnerabilities to address the most critical issues first.
Patchless protection: Blocks malware in software that hasn't been patched yet.
User-friendly scripting engine: Simplifies the creation and execution of scripts for automation.
Integrated vulnerability discovery: Combines detection and remediation in a single dashboard.
Real-time updates: Provides immediate cybersecurity updates and notifications.
Community support: Offers robust support from the user community.
Customizable deployment options: Allows tailoring to fit specific requirements.

What benefits and ROI can users expect?

Time-saving: Reduces the time required for software patching and management.
Vulnerability reduction: Decreases the number of vulnerabilities through automated processes.
Enhanced security: Provides patchless protection and real-time updates to improve security postures.
Flexibility: The cloud-based, agent-based approach adapts to various environments and needs.
Simplified management: User-friendly interfaces and streamlined processes offer easier administration.
Improved compliance: Helps meet PCI, HIPAA, and cybersecurity regulatory requirements.

Among managed service providers, Vicarius vRx is implemented for updating systems, showing capabilities to customers in lab environments, and securing endpoints through agent-based patching. These providers use vRx to efficiently manage third-party software patching and to maintain cybersecurity standards across industries.

Vicarius

Sample Customers

Information Not Available

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

Information Not Available

Buyer's Guide

Qualys VMDR vs. Vicarius vRx

May 2025

Free Report: Qualys VMDR vs. Vicarius vRx

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