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Acunetix vs Defensics Protocol Fuzzing comparison

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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
36
Ranking in other categories
Application Security Tools (16th), Static Application Security Testing (SAST) (11th), Vulnerability Management (30th), DevSecOps (8th)
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 2.5% compared to last year.
Defensics Protocol Fuzzing, on the other hand, focuses on Fuzz Testing Tools, holds 13.9% mindshare, down 22.1% since last year.
Application Security Tools Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Acunetix2.4%
SonarQube10.8%
Checkmarx One7.3%
Other79.5%
Application Security Tools
Fuzz Testing Tools Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Defensics Protocol Fuzzing13.9%
PortSwigger Burp Suite Professional35.3%
GitLab31.8%
Other19.0%
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 Acunetix positively impacts my organization by helping identify outdated libraries and applications, including legacy applications vulnerable to old attacks based on OWASP Top 10, thus aiding in compliance checks for PCI DSS and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

"The automated approach to these repetitive discovery attempts would take days to do manually and therefore it helps reduce the time needed to do an assessment."
"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."
"Acunetix has an awesome crawler. It gives a referral site map of near targets and also goes really deep to find all the inputs without issues. This was valuable because it helped me find some files or directories, like web admin panels without authentication, which were hidden."
"Overall, I believe Acunetix to be one of the best products on the market."
"The tool's most valuable feature is scan configurations. We use it for external physical applications. The scanning time depends on the application's code."
"For us, the most valuable aspect of the solution is the log-sequence feature."
"Overall, it's a very good tool and a very good engine."
"Overall, the tool is efficient enough to identify and track your vulnerabilities and it's good for intelligence scanning purposes."
"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 stability of this product is great; we tested it under multiple constraints and even on cloud services it is absolutely stable."
"The product is related to US usage with TLS contact fees, i.e. how more data center connections will help lower networking costs."
"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."
"We have found multiple issues in our embedded system network protocols, related to buffer overflow. We have reduced some of these issues."
"Simple and straightforward GUI."
 

Cons

"The solution is generally stable, however, there might be room for improvement regarding glitches or bugs."
"The solution should work on dealing with the number of false positives it delivers."
"There is room for improvement in the pricing."
"There was an issue related to updates from the internet."
"I believe Acunetix can improve customer support, as the dedicated support staff are often unfamiliar with problems and troubleshooting, leading to communication gaps that delay issue resolution."
"The solution limits the number of scans. It would be much better if we could have unlimited scans."
"In terms of what needs improvement, the way the licensing model is currently is not very convenient for us because initially, when we bought it, the licensing model was very flexible, but now it restricts us."
"When monitoring the traffic we always have issues with the bandwidth consumption and the throttling of traffic."
"It does not support the complete protocol stack. There are some IoT protocols that are not supported and new protocols that are not supported."
"Codenomicon Defensics should be more advanced for the testing sector. It should be somewhat easy and flexible to install."
"It requires understanding the Defensics protocol."
"You can't implement proprietary ciphering algorithms, nor can you modify protocol models if you need to test customized public protocols."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"All things considered, I think it has a good price/value ratio."
"When we looked at all other vendors and what they were asking for, to provide a third of what Acunetix was capable of doing, it was an easy decision... But now that it's coming to a cost where it's line with market value, it becomes more of a competition... Acunetix is raising the cost of licensing. It's 3.5 times what we were initially quoted."
"Acunetix was around the same price as all the other vendors we looked at, nothing special."
"I would say that Acunetix is expensive because there are products on the market with similar features that are equally or better-priced."
"The solution is expensive."
"The cost is based on two types of licenses, ConsultLite, and ConsultPlus, as well as the number of domains that are scanned."
"The price is exceptionally high."
"The pricing and licensing are reasonable to a point. In order to run multiple scans at a time, we are going to have to purchase a 100 count license, which is an overkill. Though, compared to what we were paying for, the cost seems reasonable."
"Licensing is a bit expensive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Computer Software Company
9%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Computer Software Company
8%
Construction Company
7%
 

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.
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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: September 2026.
912,818 professionals have used our research since 2012.