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Acunetix vs Defensics Protocol Fuzzing comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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

Acunetix
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
37
Ranking in other categories
Application Security Tools (13th), Static Application Security Testing (SAST) (8th), Vulnerability Management (28th), DevSecOps (6th)
Defensics Protocol Fuzzing
Average Rating
8.6
Number of Reviews
4
Ranking in other categories
Fuzz Testing Tools (4th)
 

Mindshare comparison

While both are Quality Assurance solutions, they serve different purposes. Acunetix is designed for Application Security Tools and holds a mindshare of 2.4%, down 2.8% compared to last year.
Defensics Protocol Fuzzing, on the other hand, focuses on Fuzz Testing Tools, holds 15.1% mindshare, down 22.1% since last year.
Application Security Tools Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Acunetix2.4%
SonarQube12.4%
Checkmarx One8.2%
Other77.0%
Application Security Tools
Fuzz Testing Tools Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Defensics Protocol Fuzzing15.1%
PortSwigger Burp Suite Professional34.4%
GitLab30.3%
Other20.200000000000003%
Fuzz Testing Tools
 

Featured Reviews

Rahul Kumar - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Engineer - Penetration Tester at a government with 10,001+ employees
Identifies vulnerabilities across bulk web applications but needs better support and cleaner reports
The best feature Acunetix offers is the centralized dashboard and the quality of reports it generates, which includes various options for selecting reports and developer options for directly sharing the reports with developers. The centralized dashboard of Acunetix gives visibility into the security aspects of mass applications; for instance, with more than 200 applications, it provides a valuable overview of findings and necessary fixes, along with a high-level summary that helps us achieve compliance through monthly and sometimes weekly scanning. In terms of reporting, Acunetix is excellent because it can generate different types of reports, such as an executive summary report, detailed reports, and developer reports that can be shared directly with developers. Acunetix positively impacts my organization by helping identify outdated libraries and applications, including legacy applications vulnerable to old attacks based on OWASP Top 10, thus aiding in compliance checks for PCI DSS and OWASP. Acunetix provides a centralized report with compliance-related aspects and a vulnerability timeline, effectively helping reduce vulnerabilities and save time.
SK
Senior Technical Lead at HCL Technologies
Product security tests for switches and router sections
Codenomicon Defensics should be more advanced for the testing sector. It should be somewhat easy and flexible to install. What I see in the documentation isn't that. Even if something doesn't malfunction, sometimes it is hard to install and execute. The product needs video documentation. This would help a lot more.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It's very user-friendly for the testing teams. It's very easy for them to understand things and to fix vulnerabilities."
"Their technical support has been very active. If I have an issue, I can reach out to them and get an answer pretty quick."
"It comes equipped with an internal applicator, which automatically identifies and addresses vulnerabilities within the program."
"As a team, it's helped us to deliver better security assessments."
"The usability and overall scan results are good."
"If an organization has 100 plus applications and wants to use an automated scanner, they should definitely go ahead with Acunetix because it is very cost-effective and will save time compared to focusing on other solutions and performing manual security assessments."
"The solution is highly stable."
"I find it to be one of the most comprehensive tools, with support for manual intervention."
"Simple and straightforward GUI."
"Whatever the test suit they give, it is intelligent; it will understand the protocol and it will generate the test cases based on the protocol: protocol, message sequence, protocol, message structure, and because of that, we can eliminate a lot of unwanted test cases so we can execute the tests and complete them very quickly."
"The product is related to US usage with TLS contact fees, i.e. how more data center connections will help lower networking costs."
"We have found multiple issues in our embedded system network protocols, related to buffer overflow. We have reduced some of these issues."
"ROI was 100%. Since there are no product suites available that provide the level of testing available with Codenomicon, the development, quality and security assurance departments know that the investment was correct."
"The stability of this product is great; we tested it under multiple constraints and even on cloud services it is absolutely stable."
 

Cons

"The pricing is a bit on the higher side."
"In terms of additional features, we are currently missing some tools that would allow us to work more efficiently with the mobile environment, with Android and iOS."
"There was an issue related to updates from the internet."
"The solution should work on dealing with the number of false positives it delivers."
"Better handling of complex modern authentication flows would be an improvement."
"We have had issues during upgrades where their scans worked on some apps better with previous versions. Then, we had to work with their tech support, who were great, to get it fixed for the next version."
"Integration into other tools is very limited for Acunetix. While we're trying to incorporate a CI/CD process where we're integrating with JIRA and we're integrating with Jenkins and Chef, it becomes problematic. Other tools give you a high integration capability to connect into different solutions that you may already have, like JIRA."
"It is difficult to create a proxy connection."
"It does not support the complete protocol stack. There are some IoT protocols that are not supported and new protocols that are not supported."
"It requires understanding the Defensics protocol."
"Sometimes, when we are testing embedded devices, when we trigger the test cases, the target will crash immediately. It is very difficult for us to identify the root cause of the crash because they do not provide sophisticated tools on the target side. They cover only the client-side application... They do not have diagnostic tools for the target side. Rather, they have them but they are very minimal and not very helpful."
"Codenomicon Defensics should be more advanced for the testing sector. It should be somewhat easy and flexible to install."
"You can't implement proprietary ciphering algorithms, nor can you modify protocol models if you need to test customized public protocols."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price is exceptionally high."
"All things considered, I think it has a good price/value ratio."
"The pricing is a little high, and moreover, it's kind of domain-based."
"Implementing Acunetix needs a medium or larger business agency, because you need some money to get Acunetix. It is costly, but if you care about your agency's security, then maybe it's a cost that might help you in the future."
"Acunetix was around the same price as all the other vendors we looked at, nothing special."
"The costs aren't very expensive. It costs around $3000 or $4000."
"The solution is expensive."
"I would say that Acunetix is expensive because there are products on the market with similar features that are equally or better-priced."
"Licensing is a bit expensive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Computer Software Company
9%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Computer Software Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Retailer
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business18
Midsize Enterprise7
Large Enterprise19
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What is your primary use case for Acunetix Vulnerability Scanner?
In a typical enterprise environment, Acunetix is mainly used for visibility, detection, and investigation across network traffic. The main use cases usually fall into a few core areas, with primary...
What advice do you have for others considering Acunetix Vulnerability Scanner?
I advise that Acunetix is the best option. Invest time in proper initial configuration and scope definitions. The tool is powerful, but its effectiveness depends heavily on how the authenticated ar...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Acunetix?
Everything is perfect and good, including the pricing and all related aspects.
Ask a question
Earn 20 points
 

Also Known As

AcuSensor
Codenomicon Defensics
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Joomla!, Digicure, Team Random, Credit Suisse, Samsung, Air New Zealand
Coriant, CERT-FI, Next Generation Networks
Find out what your peers are saying about SonarSource Sàrl, Checkmarx, Veracode and others in Application Security Tools. Updated: July 2026.
906,852 professionals have used our research since 2012.