Amazon Inspector vs Qualys TotalCloud comparison

Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Qualys are both solutions in the Vulnerability Management category. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is ranked #17 with an average rating of 8.3, while Qualys is ranked #12 with an average rating of 8.9. Amazon Web Services (AWS) holds a 2.9% mindshare in VM, compared to Qualys’s 1.1% mindshare. Additionally, 87% of Amazon Web Services (AWS) users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Qualys users who would recommend it.

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 9, 2024

Amazon Inspector and Qualys TotalCloud compete in the cloud security solutions category. Based on comparisons, Qualys TotalCloud seems to hold an upper hand with its feature-rich platform providing better value despite Amazon Inspector's favorable pricing.

Features: Amazon Inspector provides automated security assessments for AWS workloads, integration with AWS services, and prioritization of findings. Qualys TotalCloud offers vulnerability management, policy compliance, multi-cloud support, extensive asset discovery, and integration capabilities.

Room for Improvement: Amazon Inspector could enhance multi-cloud support, expand asset discovery capabilities, and improve customer support. Qualys TotalCloud may simplify deployment processes, optimize AWS integration, and improve cost management for smaller businesses.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Amazon Inspector benefits from seamless integration within AWS environments enabling quick deployment for AWS-centric businesses. Qualys TotalCloud, with its multi-cloud support, involves a more intricate deployment but offers robust customer service.

Pricing and ROI: Amazon Inspector is competitively priced for AWS-invested users offering attractive ROI with lower setup costs. Qualys TotalCloud might be costlier upfront but offers a broader feature set justifying its investment for long-term savings and benefits.

To learn more, read our detailed Amazon Inspector vs. Qualys TotalCloud Report (Updated: July 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Amazon Inspector vs. Qualys TotalCloud

July 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 August 2025, in the Vulnerability Management category, the mindshare of Zafran Security is 0.9%, up from 0.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Amazon Inspector is 2.9%, up from 2.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Qualys TotalCloud is 1.1%, up from 0.4% 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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John D'Arcy

Co-Founder, Professional AWS Cloud Architect at a tech services company with 1-10 employees

Automated vulnerability assessments continuously enhance security

The most valuable features probably are the ability to do automated vulnerability assessments, which it does with Amazon Inspector version two. It operates continuously, so as soon as resources are created, it scans them for vulnerabilities. This allows me to pinpoint potential security vulnerabilities and provide actionable recommendations relatively quickly. Larger enterprises usually use Inspector to gather all the vulnerabilities, the CVEs, across all accounts in an AWS organization. The enterprises I work for typically have many accounts in their organization, such as thousands of accounts where I am at the moment. It is a way to gather the vulnerabilities that are present on EC2 instances, container images, and Lambda functions.

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Sushant Samantara

IT Manager at Capgemini

Helps us minimize attack surfaces by identifying root accounts and encryption issues

TotalCloud provides written explanations to guide remediation and eliminate cyber risks. While all cloud platforms offer security features, it's challenging to consolidate them into a single dashboard. Qualys TotalCloud effectively addresses this by consolidating multiple cloud platforms and subscriptions onto one dashboard. This allows users to quickly identify and mitigate misconfigurations and risks, simplifying security management. Before implementing TotalCloud, our compliance rate was approximately 50 to 60 percent. However, after adopting the platform, it has increased to 80 to 90 percent. TotalCloud also helps us minimize attack surfaces by identifying root accounts and encryption issues, thereby enhancing our overall security by 40 percent. TotalCloud offers a unified platform for assessing vulnerabilities and threats across both IaaS and PaaS environments. This unified view has improved our cloud security posture management. We gain a single, prioritized view of risks through TotalCloud's TruRisk Insights feature. This feature considers not only the QDA score but also factors in cost and other relevant elements to provide a comprehensive risk assessment. From a potentially overwhelming list of findings, TruRisk Insights prioritizes the most critical risks, allowing us to focus our efforts and resources on addressing these high-priority tasks efficiently. A single, prioritized view of risk streamlines the risk assessment process by eliminating the need to consolidate multiple sources. This comprehensive view is instrumental in communicating with other business customers who may be unaware of potential risks or misconfigurations within their resources. By identifying and informing them of these issues, we can guide them towards compliance and ensure a more secure environment. TruRisk Insights provides valuable findings by identifying vulnerabilities and misconfigurations, displaying them on a dashboard, and offering deeper insights into the attack surface. It analyzes not only internet-facing devices but also those indirectly connected, providing a comprehensive understanding of potential risks. This is crucial because even devices not directly connected to the internet can be vulnerable if they have an attack surface. TruRisk Insights also offers mitigation strategies, making it a highly useful tool for managing security risks. With the VMDR feature enabled and the Qualys Agent installed on various assets, we can identify existing vulnerabilities. TruRisk Insights then calculates risk scores, prioritizes tasks, and presents the number of findings. This allows us to focus on mitigating high-priority vulnerabilities while deferring those with lower priority, ultimately reducing overall risk. TruRisk Insights provides device details, allowing for containerization of misconfigured devices. This process involves isolating problematic devices and rectifying misconfigurations, ultimately enhancing our security posture.

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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."

"The most valuable feature of Amazon Inspector is the categorization of findings, which filters vulnerabilities by instance, container image, container repository, and Lambda function."

"The automated vulnerability detection aspect is most valuable."

"The findings dashboards are neat and easy to understand, offering clear demarcations for different types of findings and detailed insights into specific vulnerabilities and their associated instances. It is not a place where everything is dumped together. It offers an easy-to-understand layout."

"The vulnerability discovery is valuable, and they also rank those vulnerabilities for you. So, you could rapidly attack some of the higher, severe vulnerabilities as they pop up, if they do pop up."

"The scalability of the solution itself is unparalleled."

"Amazon Inspector is highly stable, rated ten out of ten, and this stability impacts business security and administration positively."

"The integration of Amazon Inspector with other AWS services has enhanced our security. Security Hub is a major asset because it allows us to centralize data from various AWS services. We can integrate third-party tools as well. It is just a single-click option."

"I recommend Amazon Inspector because it allows the automation of processes and requires less manual monitoring."

More Amazon Inspector pros

"Qualys TotalCloud's most valuable feature is its ability to link clusters of assets, providing a clear model of deployments, vulnerabilities, and statuses."

"I appreciate TotalCloud's real-time protection and remediation features. The remediation options include automated one-click remedies and custom changes that help manage vulnerabilities efficiently."

"TotalCloud's best feature is the integration of cloud accounts. It helps with the risk and security posture management of our cloud infrastructure."

"The vulnerability management feature is the one I like the most because it provides a clear picture of all vulnerabilities."

"The dashboards are particularly valuable as they offer a comprehensive view of the environment, highlighting any misconfigurations."

"I like the web API security and IoT scanning features the most. The user-friendly design of TotalCloud's interface enables customers to navigate it and use its full potential easily"

"Its dashboards are brilliant. It provides in-depth insights."

"Qualys TotalCloud's most valuable feature is its agent versatility."

More Qualys TotalCloud 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."

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

"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."

"There are challenges associated with the interdependencies in AWS services, like requiring an Active Directory for other services, resulting in additional charges."

"It has a limited scope. So, AWS Inspector primarily focuses on the security of the EC2 instance. So, if your architecture includes other AWS services, then you may need to use additional tools for your comprehensive security assessment. So that is one con. Another is, like, we have a dependency on agents."

"One area for improvement in Amazon Inspector is the automation aspect."

"One major area for improvement is remediation. My team works on remediating findings over time, likely using available patches. However, easier integration with Amazon's patching services would be very helpful."

"There is room for improvement in the scanning capabilities. I'd like to see broader coverage in terms of the vulnerabilities detected."

"The other point is that the reporting features of Inspector need improvement. For example, I am in an organization with millions of CVEs, and getting an overview of all this is challenging."

"There isn't too much to improve right now. Scanning on demand or as a part of the pipeline versus a post pipeline solution would be good, but it is not a deal breaker by any means."

"It has automated vulnerability assessment, yet I seek more flexibility in defining custom vulnerability checks tailored to my needs, which is more difficult."

"There is room for improvement in the support."

"The cost of Qualys TotalCloud is high and could be more competitive."

"Qualys TotalCloud's increasing complexity, due to the development and deployment of multiple solutions, is making the GUI difficult to navigate."

"An area for improvement would be to focus on risks related to AI, such as large language models and potential data leakage."

"With the growing integration of AI, I would like Qualys to enhance its service offerings to better accommodate AI-related risks."

"The support process is inefficient due to the excessive number of replies required when submitting tickets."

"The patching process with Qualys Patch Management, which is part of TotalCloud, does not cover installing certain prerequisites on the servers or workstations. This shortcoming means we must rely on SCCM when any service stack updates or additional prerequisites are needed."

"We would like to see Windows-based sensors available in Qualys, as this would make the platform more versatile and support a broader range of environments."

More Qualys TotalCloud cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available

"It is scaled as you go. There are probably a certain number of scans per month, and there are tiers. If you're under a certain tier, it is free. The second level is pennies, and then all the way up to like a million. So, it has a tiered pricing program. They're pretty good with your initial scanning, and there is room to scale based on being affordable, but it is fairly cheap. There are no additional costs. They pretty much think about it as a pay-per-scan type model."

"The lowest cost would be around $10 for a few small accounts, however, for thousands of accounts, it could be around $5000 to $6000 dollars per month."

"It's priced according to market standards for its services."

"The pricing is very transparent and clear."

"Qualys TotalCloud offers good pricing that is affordable and competitive with the market. Our partnership also provides us with additional benefits."

"Qualys TotalCloud is expensive, but it offers a premier solution with no headaches."

"Qualys TotalCloud offers competitive pricing given its comprehensive suite of features, including integration, assessment, remediation, and detection capabilities, all within a single platform."

"The pricing for TotalCloud is attractive and competitive in the market. Given the features, especially the dashboard, I have no concerns regarding pricing."

"TotalCloud's price is about right where I would expect it to be."

"The cost is high, but it meets our organizational needs."

"Qualys TotalCloud is cost-efficient and was selected for its value compared to other products."

"It isn't cheap, but it's reasonable. It helps us to manage things with very few resources."

More Qualys TotalCloud 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

13%

Financial Services Firm

12%

Government

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

16%

Financial Services Firm

16%

Government

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?

Since we stood Zafran Security up in our private cloud, we handle the maintenance on our side. As we opted not to use...

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What needs improvement with Zafran Security?

In terms of areas for improvement, Zafran Security is doing a really great job as a new and emerging company. Oftenti...

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What is your primary use case for Zafran Security?

My use cases for Zafran Security revolve around two primary areas. One is around vulnerability management and priorit...

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What do you like most about Amazon Inspector?

The integration of Amazon Inspector with other AWS services has enhanced our security. Security Hub is a major asset...

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Amazon Inspector?

I manage pricing and purchase reserved instances, yet face challenges due to dependencies and lack of options for res...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Amazon Inspector?

There are challenges associated with the interdependencies in AWS services, like requiring an Active Directory for ot...

See all answers

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

It isn't cheap, but it's reasonable. It helps us to manage things with very few resources.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Qualys TotalCloud?

The onboarding process is a bit difficult. In the initial phase, it is very difficult to understand the features, wha...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Qualys TotalCloud?

We are managing AWS, Azure, as well as Google Cloud services in the cloud. We have different applications using those...

See all answers

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Compared 10% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Zafran Security

July 2025

Download Zafran Security product report

Buyer's Guide

Amazon Inspector

August 2025

Download Amazon Inspector product report

Buyer's Guide

Qualys TotalCloud

July 2025

Download Qualys TotalCloud product report

Also Known As

No data available

Qualys TotalCloud with FlexScan

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

Amazon Inspector is an automated security assessment service that helps improve the security and compliance of applications deployed on AWS. Amazon Inspector automatically assesses applications for exposure, vulnerabilities, and deviations from best practices. After performing an assessment, Amazon Inspector produces a detailed list of security findings prioritized by level of severity. These findings can be reviewed directly or as part of detailed assessment reports which are available via the Amazon Inspector console or API.

Amazon Inspector security assessments help you check for unintended network accessibility of your Amazon EC2 instances and for vulnerabilities on those EC2 instances. Amazon Inspector assessments are offered to you as pre-defined rules packages mapped to common security best practices and vulnerability definitions. Examples of built-in rules include checking for access to your EC2 instances from the internet, remote root login being enabled, or vulnerable software versions installed. These rules are regularly updated by AWS security researchers.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

TotalCloud is the Qualys approach to Cloud Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP) for cloud infrastructure and SaaS environments. With TotalCloud, customers extend TruRisk insights (transparent cyber risk scoring methodology) from the Qualys Enterprise TruRisk Platform to their cloud environments allowing for a seamless unified view of cyber risk across on-prem, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments.

Features and capabilities of Qualys TotalCloud include, but are not limited to:

Discover: Complete visibility and insights into cyber-risk exposure across multi-cloud. Continuously discover and monitor all your workloads across a multi-cloud environment for a 360-degree view of your cloud footprint. Identify known and previously unknown internet-facing assets for 100% visibility and tracking of risks.

Assess: Comprehensive cloud-native assessments with FlexScanTM. Extensive scanning capabilities with Qualys FlexScan, including no-touch, agentless, API- and snapshot-based scanning, along with agent- and network-based scanning for in-depth assessment. Use these multiple scanning methods to scan a workload to get a unified and comprehensive view of vulnerabilities and misconfigurations.

Prioritize: Unified security view to prioritize cloud risk with TruRiskTM. Experience a unified risk-based view of cloud security with insights across workloads, services, and resources. Qualys TruRisk quantifies security risk by workload criticality and vulnerabilities; it correlates with ransomware, malware, and exploitation threat intelligence to prioritize, trace, and reduce risk.

Defend: Real-time protection against evolving and unknown threats with InstaProtectTM. Qualys enables continuous monitoring of all cloud assets to ensure they are protected against threats and attacks at runtime. Qualys keeps your cloud runtime safe by detecting known and unknown threats across the entire kill chain in near real-time across a multi-cloud environment.

Remediate: Fast remediation with QFlow – no code, drag-and-drop workflows. The integration of QFlow technology into Qualys TotalCloud saves security and DevOps teams valuable time and resources. Automation and no-code, drag-and-drop workflows help simplify the time-consuming operational tasks of assessing vulnerabilities on ephemeral cloud assets, alerting on high-priority threats, remediating misconfigurations, and quarantining high-risk assets.

Qualys

Sample Customers

Information Not Available

betterment, caplinked, flatiron, university of nutri dame

Information Not Available

Buyer's Guide

Amazon Inspector vs. Qualys TotalCloud

July 2025

Free Report: Amazon Inspector vs. Qualys TotalCloud

Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon Inspector vs. Qualys TotalCloud and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.

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