Amazon Inspector vs Tenable Security Center comparison

Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Tenable are both solutions in the Vulnerability Management category. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is ranked #20 with an average rating of 8.6, while Tenable is ranked #6 with an average rating of 9.1. Amazon Web Services (AWS) holds a 1.6% mindshare in VM, compared to Tenable’s 3.1% mindshare. Additionally, 90% of Amazon Web Services (AWS) users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 96% of Tenable users who would recommend it.

Amazon Inspector

Read 9 Amazon Inspector reviews

2,840 Views
2,528 Comparison Views

90% willing to recommend

Tenable Security Center

Read 56 Tenable Security Center reviews

7,756 Views
5,662 Comparison Views

96% willing to recommend

Amazon Inspector

Tenable Security Center

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 9, 2024

Tenable Security Center and Amazon Inspector compete in cybersecurity. Tenable holds an edge in pricing and user support, whereas Amazon Inspector is favored for advanced features and integration.

Features: Tenable Security Center includes comprehensive vulnerability assessment, real-time analytics capabilities, and threat prioritization aids. Amazon Inspector features automated security assessments, AWS service integration, and optimization for cloud-centric operations.

Room for Improvement: Tenable Security Center could enhance cloud integration, simplify deployment processes, and reduce setup costs. Amazon Inspector could improve personalized customer support, expand non-AWS integration options, and provide more detailed manual assessment tools.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Tenable Security Center requires on-premises deployment with strong support services for smooth implementation. Amazon Inspector, designed for the cloud, offers easy AWS deployment but tends to lack the personalized customer service of Tenable.

Pricing and ROI: Tenable Security Center involves higher initial costs but offers long-term ROI through extensive insights. Amazon Inspector is cost-effective within AWS, providing significant ROI for cloud-native businesses.

To learn more, read our detailed Amazon Inspector vs. Tenable Security Center Report (Updated: March 2026).

Buyer's Guide

Amazon Inspector vs. Tenable Security Center

March 2026

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Helped 885,264 peers since 2012

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

Amazon Inspector

Ranking in Vulnerability Management

20th

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

6.3

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

IT Vendor Risk Management (6th)

Tenable Security Center

Ranking in Vulnerability Management

6th

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

7.2

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (14th), Risk-Based Vulnerability Management (3rd)

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2026, in the Vulnerability Management category, the mindshare of Amazon Inspector is 1.6%, down from 2.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Tenable Security Center is 3.1%, down from 6.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Vulnerability Management Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
Tenable Security Center	3.1%
Amazon Inspector	1.6%
Other	95.3%

Vulnerability Management

Featured Reviews

Abdalla Kenawy

AWS DevOps SRE/Infrastructure Engineer at Capgemini

Automated insights streamline data security assessment

For Amazon Inspector, we have many EC2 or virtual machines deployed inside our AWS environment, and the problem is that the existing package deployed inside this EC2 instance has already outdated packages. As we progress with time, this package needs to be updated for security enhancement, which requires us to uninstall the package, install the new version, and then we should be fine. However, the challenge comes with how to scan all our EC2 instances for security vulnerabilities, which is currently managed by Amazon Inspector. Amazon Inspector can scan EC2 instances or ECR, which is the ECR registry where we can save artifacts Docker images. Amazon Inspector can also scan Docker images uploaded to ECR for Elastic Registry service, and it can scan databases and S3 based on the latest updates. I noticed this from a couple of months ago, and it provides huge benefits for security. Regarding the best features of Amazon Inspector, it gives us a list of all existing outdated packages as part of a deployed package on EC2 instances or specific Python packages that are part of the Docker file and the Docker image itself, which are causing security concerns. Amazon Inspector can list these security concerns and offer guidance on how we can remediate it by updating the package to a specific upper version or something similar.

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reviewer1534134

Head of Information Security at a consultancy with 1,001-5,000 employees

Centralized analytics have strengthened patch visibility and support efficient regulatory reporting

From my experience, I assess the product's analytics capabilities as successful. It helped us significantly with patching and managing the risk of the patching process across all our environments, including network devices with Windows and Unix systems. The product covered several environments and gave us exactly what we needed in our environment. Tenable Security Center's centralized platform helped with risk assessment and management across our IT environments. It covered the patching process, and we previously faced many issues regarding how to patch different environments, how to monitor the patching process, and whether it was successful or not. We obtained good reports showing when patches were closed and the details of each patch, including who executed it and everything related to the patching process until it was closed. This gave us good details about the process which helped us significantly in our reporting and even in audits, whether internal or external. We learned how to close audit issues safely and successfully. We used the dashboards for real-time threat insights and extracted several dashboards from Tenable Security Center. We use these dashboards in our cybersecurity dashboard and committees that we have. These dashboards are part of our committees, especially the cybersecurity committee and other committees that we attend.

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 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 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."

"It is scanning the whole repository for any sort of vulnerabilities, so it allows us to be more confident in our DevSecOps and not put a lot of folks or attention to it."

"It operates continuously, so as soon as resources are created, it scans them for vulnerabilities."

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

"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 scalability of the solution itself is unparalleled."

More Amazon Inspector pros

"It is a much better solution than other competitors and provides almost everything that is required in terms of vulnerability management."

"Tenable's most valuable features are the credential scan, vulnerability reports, and vulnerability ratings (VPR)."

"Tenable SecurityCenter has absolutely improved our organization, by making everything more secure and helping ensure solid vulnerability management."

"Has a great advanced scanning feature."

"My advice for those considering Tenable Security Center is to note the benefit of upgrading vulnerable devices."

"The most valuable features in Tenable SC are scanning and analysis."

"This solution has a much lower rate of false positives compared to competing products."

"The ROI is almost guaranteed because there is a lot of value in using the product and reporting that to our company."

More Tenable Security Center pros

Cons

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

"The false positive rate of Amazon Inspector is a little high, and it is not covering all different applications and scanning."

"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."

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

"The most challenging aspect I faced with Amazon Inspector during integration was automating the remediation process."

"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."

"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 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."

More Amazon Inspector cons

"The solution is expensive."

"The GUI could be improved to have all concerns and priorities use the same GUI, allowing them to see all tickets, assign vulnerabilities, and assign variation failures to each member of their team."

"The vulnerability scan does not work correctly until the access privileges are set by the system administrator."

"For downloading reports, we have to go to the scan and then we have to go to the reports and download the Excel or CSV or PDF."

"There is not much room for improvement. However, there should be a guide that describes the step-by-step procedures for doing tasks. Otherwise, training is required from a senior guy to a junior guy."

"Current web page needs improvement, slows down processes."

"The reporting side can be improved. The dashboards are nice, but exporting things out for reports for management was a little tough."

"I will say it's a lot slower compared to an MS scan. It takes so much longer, so the performance could definitely be worked on."

More Tenable Security Center cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

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

"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."

"The pricing is very transparent and clear."

"Costing is pretty reasonable compared to the competition."

"I use a local license to perform penetration testing and I'm pretty happy with everything when it comes to pricing and licensing."

"I rate the solution's price as seven on a scale of one to ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive. The tool is quite expensive."

"Tenable SC is priced per asset, with the basic solution starting around US$12,000 for 500 assets."

"Compared to other companies or other products it could maybe be a little bit less, but the price is okay. I would say it's not very expensive."

"The pricing is more than Nexpose."

"The licensing costs for this solution are approximately $100,000 US, and I think that covers everything."

"The price can start at €10,000 ($13,000 USD) for between 500 and 1,000 assets, and the price can climb into the millions as more assets are added."

More Tenable Security Center pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

14%

Computer Software Company

Manufacturing Company

Government

Financial Services Firm

11%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Government

Computer Software Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	2
Midsize Enterprise	2
Large Enterprise	6

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	22
Midsize Enterprise	10
Large Enterprise	27

Questions from the Community

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 because it allows us to centralize data from various AWS services. We can integ...

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

I am not honestly sure about the pricing side of Amazon Inspector, but that is taken care of by a separate team. I believe it's cheaper than the other third-party solutions.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Amazon Inspector?

They might launch support for third-party environments in the next version regarding the best features in Amazon Inspector from my perspective. The false positive rate of Amazon Inspector is a litt...

See all answers

What do you like most about Tenable SC?

The tool's dashboard and reporting capabilities match our company's needs since we are able to modify the basic view to create a new dashboard, and it works out very well for our needs.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Tenable SC?

The price of Tenable Security Center is not so high; it's relatively a cheaper solution.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Tenable SC?

We did conduct a long implementation which relates to what I think can be improved about Tenable Security Center. In some cases, we needed to refer back to Tenable itself, and in other cases, we ne...

See all answers

Comparisons

Tenable Nessus vs Amazon Inspector

Compared 12% of the time

Microsoft Defender for Cloud vs Amazon Inspector

Compared 9% of the time

Tenable Vulnerability Management vs Amazon Inspector

Compared 9% of the time

Qualys CyberSecurity Asset Management vs Amazon Inspector

Compared 6% of the time

Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks vs Amazon Inspector

Compared 6% of the time

More Amazon Inspector Competitors

Rapid7 InsightVM vs Tenable Security Center

Compared 10% of the time

Qualys VMDR vs Tenable Security Center

Compared 9% of the time

Tenable Nessus vs Tenable Security Center

Compared 7% of the time

Tenable Vulnerability Management vs Tenable Security Center

Compared 5% of the time

The NodeZero Platform by Horizon3.ai vs Tenable Security Center

Compared 4% of the time

More Tenable Security Center Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Amazon Inspector

March 2026

Download Amazon Inspector product report

Buyer's Guide

Tenable Security Center

March 2026

Download Tenable Security Center product report

Also Known As

No data available

Tenable.sc, Tenable Unified Security, Tenable SecurityCenter

Overview

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)

Get a risk-based view of your IT, security and compliance posture so you can quickly identify, investigate and prioritize your most critical assets and vulnerabilities.

Managed on-premises and powered by Nessus technology, the Tenable Security Center (formerly Tenable.sc) suite of products provides the industry’s most comprehensive vulnerability coverage with real-time continuous assessment of your network. It’s your complete end-to-end vulnerability management solution.

Tenable

Sample Customers

betterment, caplinked, flatiron, university of nutri dame

IBM, Sempra Energy, Microsoft, Apple, Adidas, Union Pacific

Buyer's Guide

Amazon Inspector vs. Tenable Security Center

March 2026

Free Report: Amazon Inspector vs. Tenable Security Center

Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon Inspector vs. Tenable Security Center and other solutions. Updated: March 2026.

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