Aqua Cloud Security Platform vs Qualys VMDR comparison

Aqua Security and Qualys are both solutions in the Container Security category. Aqua Security is ranked #25, while Qualys is ranked #9 with an average rating of 8.6. Aqua Security holds a 2.8% mindshare in Container Security, compared to Qualys’s 2.3% mindshare. Additionally, 93% of Aqua Security users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 94% of Qualys users who would recommend it.

Aqua Cloud Security Platform

Read 16 Aqua Cloud Security Platform reviews

4,620 Views
3,696 Comparison Views

93% willing to recommend

Qualys VMDR

Read 96 Qualys VMDR reviews

12,798 Views
2,432 Comparison Views

94% willing to recommend

Aqua Cloud Security Platform

Qualys VMDR

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 25, 2026

Qualys VMDR and Aqua Cloud Security Platform compete in the vulnerability management category. Aqua Cloud Security has the upper hand due to its focus on effective container security and runtime protection.

Features: Qualys VMDR is appreciated for seamless scanning capabilities, comprehensive vulnerability management, and automatic updates of vulnerability databases. It also supports policy compliance and asset management. Aqua Cloud Security excels in container security, image scanning, and runtime protection. It effectively secures Kubernetes workloads and Docker images and integrates seamlessly with cloud-native tools.

Room for Improvement: Qualys VMDR faces challenges with false positives, complicated reporting, and high costs of on-premise solutions for small firms. It also needs improvements in patch management for older systems. Aqua Cloud Security could enhance reporting intelligence, integration with CICD pipelines, and overall usability related to user roles and installation.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Qualys VMDR offers flexibility across different cloud environments, especially in public and hybrid clouds. Users report mixed experiences with customer service due to slow response times. Aqua Cloud Security is noted for its stable deployment in private clouds and prompt customer service and technical support.

Pricing and ROI: Qualys VMDR is more expensive, with pricing models based on asset numbers, providing positive ROI through enhanced vulnerability detection and risk reduction. Aqua Cloud Security is budget-friendly for large organizations, offering tailored pricing models and good ROI due to its container security focus and flexibility in meeting various requirements.

To learn more, read our detailed Aqua Cloud Security Platform vs. Qualys VMDR Report (Updated: February 2026).

Buyer's Guide

Aqua Cloud Security Platform vs. Qualys VMDR

February 2026

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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

Aqua Cloud Security Platform

Ranking in Container Security

25th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.8

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Cloud and Data Center Security (19th), Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) (21st), Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPP) (19th), Software Supply Chain Security (17th), DevSecOps (13th)

Qualys VMDR

Ranking in Container Security

9th

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

IT Asset Management (3rd), Vulnerability Management (3rd), Configuration Management Databases (3rd), Risk-Based Vulnerability Management (1st)

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2026, in the Container Security category, the mindshare of Aqua Cloud Security Platform is 2.8%, down from 3.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Qualys VMDR is 2.3%, down from 2.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Container Security Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Qualys VMDR	2.3%
Aqua Cloud Security Platform	2.8%
Other	94.9%

Container Security

Featured Reviews

Burak AKCAGUN

Business Development Manager at Axoft Ukraine

A robust and cost-effective solution, excelling in scalability, on-premises support, and responsive technical support, making it well-suited for enterprises navigating stringent regulatory environment

The most crucial aspect is runtime protection, specifically image scanning before preproduction and deployment. Customers find it invaluable to have the ability to check for vulnerabilities in an image before deployment, similar to a sandbox environment. This feature ensures that customers can identify any potential issues with the image, such as misconfigurations or vulnerabilities, before integrating it into their workloads and infrastructure. In their source pipeline, companies can identify issues before deploying changes. This is crucial because customers prefer resolving any problems or misconfigurations before the deployment process. Software change security, including GSPM Cloud, is a key feature customers seek in their infrastructure.

Read full review

Vaibhav Ghule

Soc Lead & Edr Administration at Persistent Systems

Continuous risk-based monitoring has strengthened incident response and vulnerability prioritization

I haven't explored Qualys VMDR's vulnerability lifecycle automation yet. One of my analysts mentioned that queries lack grouping operators in Qualys VMDR. From my experience, I would appreciate improvements in the query options in Qualys VMDR, specifically in the query-building process where I would need more features and operators. Additionally, we have been facing issues with Qualys on the cloud level. We cannot download the configuration profile from the cloud agent, and it is showing a pending action for download. During 2025, we noticed outages of Qualys a couple of times. I want to mention that there is an issue with receiving timely RCA deliveries. While this is not necessarily about the tool, it relates to support. The support has not been very responsive, and we are receiving RCAs a little delayed whenever we raise support cases or communicate with the TAMs. Additionally, the UI has a slight latency, which I and my team have experienced. They have also reported this latency issue when navigating through different pages.

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 container security element of this product has been very valuable to our organization."

"From what I understand, the initial setup is simple."

"Support is very helpful."

"The most helpful feature of Aqua Security is Drift Prevention, which is a feature that allows images to be immutable. In addition, one of the main reasons we went with Aqua Security is because it provides strong protection when it comes to runtime security."

"The most valuable feature of Aqua Security is the scanner."

"Aqua Security allowed us to gain visibility into the vulnerabilities that were present in the container images, that were being rolled out, the amount of risk that we were introducing to the platform, and provided us a look into the container environment by introducing access control mechanisms. In addition, when it came to runtime-level policies, we could restrict container access to resources in our environment, such as network-level or other application-level access."

"The CSPM product is great at securing our cloud accounts and I really like the runtime protection for containers and functions too."

"The DTA, which stands for Dynamic Threat Analysis, allows me to analyze Docker images in a sandbox environment before deployment, helping me anticipate risks."

More Aqua Cloud Security Platform pros

"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 initial setup and onboarding process of Qualys VMDR was quite smooth, as we were able to draft the SOPs from the documentation portal itself and everything was available in the documentation, so it was not a hassle for us to get the integrations done on time."

"It is a stable solution."

"The most valuable feature is the certificate management."

"The most valuable feature of Qualys Container Security is the detailed information in the reports and the remediation. This is done to make sure there are no vulnerabilities."

"The best features of Qualys VMDR are its patch management capabilities and the ability to mitigate vulnerabilities automatically."

"The most valuable features of Qualys VMDR include patch management and the use of virtual scanners to scan appliances and devices, especially those provided by vendors where we cannot manage them ourselves."

"This is one of the best products I have worked with so far. I like the power of Qualys, and it's a better solution because you can scan a compact file, a BIT file, or batch files. The product already knows what's happening inside, and you don't need to expand the package. Tenable will do the same thing, but you need to have a package issuance claim. With Qualys, we can immediately understand the file, even a compact file. If there's some kind of discovery or incident, you will know what happened in the environment."

More Qualys VMDR pros

Cons

"The integrations on CICD could be improved. If Aqua had more plugins or container images to integrate and automate more easily on CICD, it would be better."

"The user interface could be improved, especially in terms of organization and clarity."

"We would like to see an improvement in the overview visibility that this solution offers."

"Aqua Security lacks a lot in reporting."

"Aqua Security could provide more open documentation so that their learning resources can be more easily accessed and searched through online. Right now, a lot of the documentation is closed and not available to the public."

"There's room for improvement, particularly in management capabilities as it may not be comprehensive enough for all customers, and it has been lacking in the realm of cloud security posture management."

"Sometimes I got stressed with the UI."

"They want to release improvements to their product to work with other servers because now there are more focused on the Kubernetes environment. They need to improve the normal servers. I would like to have more options."

More Aqua Cloud Security Platform cons

"Qualys VM's scanner doesn't pick up every vulnerability, so we have to use multiple scanners to cover that gap."

"Qualys does have an on-prem solution, but it is very expensive."

"It's quite complex on the way it is set up, so it takes a fair bit of time in order to get your head around it in order to deploy it. Once you've deployed it, then you're never confident on the versions of the browsers and the SSL certificates, etc. You have to always go back into Qualys and check."

"Some of the older features could be polished instead of focusing on releasing new features."

"Support could be improved since the response can be slow."

"The response time of technical support takes a while."

"There's a need to upgrade or fix the potential vulnerability rate. Around 20,000 potential vulnerabilities were showing in Qualys VMDR, but none of the other tools showed them. When we checked, it wasn't the case. Support explained that even small issues were being counted as vulnerabilities, causing issues in our audit. So, the security features could be improved to identify vulnerabilities accurately."

"The reporting section needs improvement as running reports can take several hours."

More Qualys VMDR cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Dealing with licensing costs isn't my responsibility, but I know that the licenses don't depend on the number of users, but instead are priced according to your workload."

"Aqua Security is not cheap, and it's not very expensive, such as Splunk, they are in the middle."

"The pricing of this solution could be improved."

"They were reasonable with their pricing. They were pretty down-to-earth about the way they pitched their product and the way they tried to close the deal. They were one of the rare companies that approached the whole valuation in a way that made sense for our company, for our needs, and for their own requirements as well... They will accommodate your needs if they are able to understand them and they're stated clearly."

"It comes at a reasonable cost."

"An annual license for a single scanner costs around $3,000."

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

"There is a license for the use of this solution. We pay annually instead of monthly to receive a better discount on the price."

"Qualys VM is quite expensive. It's a subscription-based license, and it's yearly. Right now, it's open for me, and I don't have any limitations or caps on the licenses. They are seeing if the product is viable for 4500 users. I can add as much as I want, and at the end of the subscription, they'll let me know how many licenses were actually used and bill me accordingly. On a scale from one to five, I would give their pricing a three. It's still expensive."

"The license is on a yearly basis."

"It is more expensive than other products on the market."

"The pricing and licensing for Qualys could be improved."

"The solution is reasonably priced for the value it provides."

More Qualys VMDR pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

22%

Computer Software Company

10%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Government

Financial Services Firm

16%

Computer Software Company

Manufacturing Company

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	6
Midsize Enterprise	1
Large Enterprise	10

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	20
Midsize Enterprise	12
Large Enterprise	70

Questions from the Community

What do you think of Aqua Security vs Prisma Cloud?

Aqua Security is easy to use and very manageable. Its main focus is on Kubernetes and Docker. Security is a very valuable feature and their speed of integration is very good. The initial setup was ...

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?

See all answers

Comparisons

Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks vs Aqua Cloud Security Platform

Compared 12% of the time

Sysdig Secure vs Aqua Cloud Security Platform

Compared 9% of the time

Wiz vs Aqua Cloud Security Platform

Compared 9% of the time

Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security for Kubernetes vs Aqua Cloud Security Platform

Compared 5% of the time

More Aqua Cloud Security Platform Competitors

Rapid7 InsightVM vs Qualys VMDR

Compared 9% of the time

Tenable Nessus vs Qualys VMDR

Compared 8% of the time

Tenable Security Center vs Qualys VMDR

Compared 5% of the time

Microsoft Defender Vulnerability Management vs Qualys VMDR

Compared 5% of the time

Wiz vs Qualys VMDR

Compared 4% of the time

More Qualys VMDR Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Aqua Cloud Security Platform

February 2026

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Buyer's Guide

Qualys VMDR

February 2026

Download Qualys VMDR product report

Also Known As

Aqua Security Platform, CloudSploit, Argon

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

Overview

Aqua Security stops cloud native attacks, preventing them before they happen and stopping them when they happen. Dedicated cloud native threat research and the most loved cloud native security open source community in the world put innovation at your fingertips so you can transform your business. Born cloud native, The Aqua Platform is the most integrated Cloud Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP), securing from day one and protecting in real-time. Aqua has been stopping real cloud native attacks on hundreds of thousands of production nodes across the world since 2015.

Aqua Security Features

Aqua Security has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:

Vulnerability scanning
Dynamic threat analysis
Automates DevSecOps
CI/CD integrations
Cloud security posture management
Kubernetes security
Hybrid and multi-cloud
Container security
Serverless security
VM security
Cloud workloads protection

Aqua Security Benefits

There are many benefits to implementing Aqua Security. Some of the biggest advantages the solution offers include:

Designed for scale and performance: The Aqua Security platform was designed to scale to the largest environments in order to protect huge clusters and massive DevOps pipelines.

Empowers DevOps to detect issues early and fix them fast: The solution was designed to help you solve issues immediately - before they cause greater damage to your organization. It helps you gain insight into your vulnerability posture and prioritize remediation and mitigation according to contextual risk.

Automated compliance and security posture: Aqua Security checks your cloud services, Infrastructure-as-code templates, and Kubernetes setup against best practices and standards. This way, you can ensure the infrastructure you run your applications on is securely configured and in compliance.

Artifact scanning: The Aqua Security platform scans artifacts for vulnerabilities, malware, and other risks during development and staging. It allows you to set flexible and dynamic policies to control deployment into your runtime environments.

Minimizes false positives: Aqua Security relies on a variety of sources and proprietary research to curate and present vulnerabilities in the most accurate way, which helps to minimize false positives and unnecessary noise in the pipeline.

Automated security testing: The Aqua Security platform automates security testing in your CI/CD pipeline, and continuously scans registries and serverless function stores to detect emerging risks. By implementing the platform, you can get actionable feedback within your CI environments to empower your organization’s developers to fix issues rapidly.

Granular controls: The solution provides protection for your VM, container, and serverless workloads using granular controls with instant visibility and real-time detection and response.

Sandboxed environment: With Aqua Security, you can run images in a secure sandboxed environment that traces indicators of compromise (IOCs) such as container escapes, reverse shell backdoors, malware drops, code injection backdoors, and network anomalies.

Reviews from Real Users

Lizeth Z., Cloud Security Specialist at Telstra, says, “Aqua Security is the most advanced solution in the market for container security. Aqua Security allows us to check for vulnerabilities in the CI/CD pipeline, so application teams can remediate issues before going into production. Aqua Security helps us to check the vulnerability of image assurance and check for malware.”

Aqua Security

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

HPE Salesforce Telstra Ellie Mae Cathay Pacific HomeAway

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

Aqua Cloud Security Platform vs. Qualys VMDR

February 2026

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