Akamai Guardicore Segmentation vs Qualys VMDR comparison

The compared Akamai and Qualys solutions aren't in the same category. Akamai is ranked #3 in MS , with an average rating of 7.8, and holds a 26.7% mindshare in the category. Qualys is ranked #3 in VM , with an average rating of 8.6, and holds a 6.4% mindshare. Additionally, 87% of Akamai users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 94% of Qualys users who would recommend it.

Akamai Guardicore Segmentation

Read 18 Akamai Guardicore Segmentation reviews

7,980 Views
5,187 Comparison Views

87% willing to recommend

Qualys VMDR

Read 95 Qualys VMDR reviews

13,079 Views
7,978 Comparison Views

94% willing to recommend

Akamai Guardicore Segmentation

Qualys VMDR

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Akamai Guardicore Segmentation and Qualys VMDR based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about Broadcom, Illumio, Akamai and others in Microsegmentation Software.

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Microsegmentation Software

October 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

Akamai Guardicore Segmentation

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Cloud and Data Center Security (1st), Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) (12th), Breach and Attack Simulation (BAS) (6th), Microsegmentation Software (3rd)

Qualys VMDR

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

IT Asset Management (4th), Vulnerability Management (3rd), Configuration Management Databases (2nd), Container Security (9th), Risk-Based Vulnerability Management (1st)

Mindshare comparison

While both are Security Software solutions, they serve different purposes. Akamai Guardicore Segmentation is designed for Microsegmentation Software and holds a mindshare of 26.7%, up 25.9% compared to last year.
Qualys VMDR, on the other hand, focuses on Vulnerability Management, holds 6.4% mindshare, down 10.8% since last year.

Microsegmentation Software Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Akamai Guardicore Segmentation	26.7%
Illumio	29.4%
VMware NSX	16.0%
Other	27.900000000000006%

Microsegmentation Software

Vulnerability Management Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Qualys VMDR	6.4%
Wiz	10.5%
Tenable Nessus	7.3%
Other	75.8%

Vulnerability Management

Featured Reviews

Uday Varma

Solution Architecht at Inspira Enterprise

Offers granular control and ease of policy creation with features like telemetry and micro-segmentation but incident tagging is missing

Our customers use the solution for micro-segmentation within the data center or cloud environments. One customer uses it for their on-premises infrastructure, deployed at the code level across their massive network. Another customer uses it in a data center to monitor microsegmentation for their 500-node workload. Moreover, Akamai Guardicore Segmentation has helped our customers manage and secure traffic between different applications or workloads. Earlier, they were using VMware NSX-v, which offered good logging for distributed services on an analytical level. However, Akamai Guardicore Segmentation provides them with better overall visibility and granular control over-segmentation, even for inter-application and inter-routing traffic.

Read full review

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.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The interface and dashboard are amazing."

"The solution is very scalable, especially when connected to the cloud resources."

"This tool greatly helps in understanding the footprint of the attacks."

"We like the centralized management of the firewalls. Until we installed Guardicore Centra, we managed all our firewalls individually, so making changes was complicated, difficult, and time-consuming."

"The tool's most valuable feature is its visibility."

"The real bonus is the fact that we can secure applications, all the way down to the individual services, on each host. It's actually more granular security than we can get out of a traditional firewall."

"From day one, you get threat intelligence. It will immediately block active threats, which has been useful."

"That is primarily because I've seen increased rules. It's kind of caught us a little off guard. With GuardiCore, I have had to deal with their technical support and engineering team in Israel. They are amazing. They are very quick to adapt."

More Akamai Guardicore Segmentation pros

"Continuous monitoring is a crucial feature that we use more frequently."

"The most valuable feature is the certificate management."

"I like Qualys because it is a very complete product, more so than Tenable."

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

"Qualys VM's best features are vulnerability management and customizable scoring."

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

"The most valuable features of Qualys VM are its ability to do proper vulnerability assessment. It has a lot of updates for all the vulnerability databases from all over the globe. It's an amazing solution when it comes to the versatility of the features it has. Additionally, the reports are very good. It generates very detailed reports about the vulnerabilities inside the environment"

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

More Qualys VMDR pros

Cons

"Supports become difficult when it's for a big organization. For a small organization, medium organization, it still makes sense, however, for a big organization, it makes life difficult."

"It would be very helpful for beginners if the solution had more windows to help with the terms inside instead of going to the documentation."

"I would rate the stability a six out of ten, where one is low and ten is high stability."

"It doesn't support a PAAC solution (Platforma as a service) in the cloud."

"The dashboard needs improvement. It should be more flexible so that I can easily see what I want or need to see."

"Sometimes, the speed needs improvement, especially when it comes to the generation of maps, where it can be a bit slow."

"Kubernetes is not installed in the way we need it."

"The long-term management of the security policies could be improved with some kind of automation platform, something like Chef or Puppet or Ansible, to help you manage the policies after day-one... to then manage the policies and changes to those policies, going forward, through some type of automation process is not turning out to be really easy."

More Akamai Guardicore Segmentation cons

"The IoT scan is not great."

"Qualys could improve the inbuilt dashboards."

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

"We face issues while scanning multiple assets."

"Qualys should improve their customer experience. They need to improve the tech support experience and the turnaround time."

"Qualys VM's machine learning and artificial intelligence features could be improved."

"I do not like that all of the data is stored on the cloud."

"In terms of improvement for the web application console, in the older version, things were more segregated and presented in a brief format."

More Qualys VMDR cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Guardicore Centra provides better value for money than NSX, was the other solution that we looked at, which was too expensive for what it does."

"Compared to the pricing we were seeing from both Illumio and Edgewise, Guardicore was very competitive."

"GuardiCore has made some new changes to the license now. We've seen monthly and annual licenses based on a subscription. We have a few clients that pay anywhere from $25,000 a year."

"The solution is reasonably priced and I would rate it a six out of ten. The tool's licensing costs are yearly."

"The pricing is too high."

"The customer would complain about the cost."

"This is not a cheap solution but you have to consider the bigger picture, which is what it is giving you."

"Akamai Guardicore Segmentation is expensive."

More Akamai Guardicore Segmentation pricing and cost advice

"The pricing is very competitive."

"It's very expensive, especially if you want to use multiple modules of Qualys."

"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 license is on a yearly basis."

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

"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."

"It is a high cost product. Compared to the other solutions, it is around 15 to 20% higher in cost."

More Qualys VMDR pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

18%

Computer Software Company

15%

Manufacturing Company

Insurance Company

Financial Services Firm

17%

Computer Software Company

11%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	6
Midsize Enterprise	3
Large Enterprise	9

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 Guardicore Centra?

I would rate the pricing a six out of ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive. I know other micro-segmentation tools like Cisco or Illumio, and so I think they are in the middle.

See all answers

What do you like most about Guardicore Infection Monkey?

Initially, I liked the telemetry part. But later, we used the microsegmentation features that we were able to deploy and found that they really stood out from other vendors. It allows us to see mi...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Guardicore Infection Monkey?

When we have more than one interface, we can only have one policy for both interfaces. Normally, you have assets with a production interface and a server interface that are only for management. But...

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 tagging system is good for tagging. We can still use QualysAgent task ID tools even ...

See all answers

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 need to do it manually. Qualys doesn't have its own tool to deploy the agents all...

See all answers

Comparisons

Illumio vs Akamai Guardicore Segmentation

Compared 45% of the time

VMware NSX vs Akamai Guardicore Segmentation

Compared 10% of the time

Cisco Secure Workload vs Akamai Guardicore Segmentation

Compared 9% of the time

Zero Networks vs Akamai Guardicore Segmentation

Compared 3% of the time

Trend Micro Deep Security vs Akamai Guardicore Segmentation

Compared 3% of the time

More Akamai Guardicore Segmentation Competitors

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 7% 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

Akamai Guardicore Segmentation

October 2025

Download Akamai Guardicore Segmentation product report

Buyer's Guide

Qualys VMDR

September 2025

Download Qualys VMDR product report

Also Known As

Guardicore Centra, GuardiCore

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

Overview

Akamai Guardicore Segmentation is a software-based microsegmentation solution that provides the simplest, fastest, and most intuitive way to enforce Zero Trust principles. It enables you to prevent malicious lateral movement in your network through precise segmentation policies, visuals of activity within your IT environment, and network security alerts. Akamai Guardicore Segmentation works across your data centers, multicloud environments, and endpoints. It is faster to deploy than infrastructure segmentation approaches and provides you with unparalleled visibility and control of your network.

Akamai

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

Santander, Frontier Airlines, OpenLink, Intermountain Healthcare, Cellcom, BancoBASE

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

Microsegmentation Software

October 2025

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