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BigFix vs Tenable Vulnerability Management 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

BigFix
Ranking in Patch Management
3rd
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
97
Ranking in other categories
Configuration Management (6th), Endpoint Protection Platform (EPP) (26th), Unified Endpoint Management (UEM) (4th)
Tenable Vulnerability Manag...
Ranking in Patch Management
11th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
43
Ranking in other categories
Vulnerability Management (6th), Risk-Based Vulnerability Management (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the Patch Management category, the mindshare of BigFix is 7.5%, down from 12.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Tenable Vulnerability Management is 0.5%, up from 0.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Patch Management
 

Featured Reviews

Bella Yakoby - PeerSpot reviewer
Offers third-party patching feature, good scalability, and enhance endpoint management capabilities
From the perspective of the team that's handling the environment, it's not so user-friendly compared to other solutions, the competitors. We hire new teams from time to time, and they are complaining, look, although BigFix is very robust and cross-platform, it's not so fun to work with. The user interface for the technical teams is not so advanced. It's not so intuitive compared to SCCM, compared to ManageEngine. And this is the fact that they have, with the teams, because they have the rejection. The look and feel of the system are old-fashioned. For new employees, it's less easy to find someone I don't need to educate on how to work with BigFix. Although it's easy, it's not as intuitive as the other solutions, and the functionality of the other solutions is less advanced. Let's summarize: The user interface has to be changed from the perspective of the teams that are managing the product. It's old school.
Mani Bommisetty - PeerSpot reviewer
Streamlines vulnerability management with excellent reporting and potential AI integration
Tenable is user-friendly and excels in reporting. It allows me to easily fetch and schedule reports. The software's discovery feature aids in strengthening our security posture. The single-sensor installation process on various operating systems is smooth, unlike Rapid7, which requires different versions for separate systems. Furthermore, Tenable enables vulnerability management through potential AI integration that consolidates efforts and resolves multiple vulnerabilities simultaneously.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It allows for visibility into the OT, the industrial environments, that didn't exist before which is a big piece and has benefited my organization. Second, the speed at which people can patch is night and day versus SCCM scan or another similar solution."
"I think BigFix is a very good solution, and I rate it ten out of ten."
"One of the biggest benefits BigFix has had for our organization is the ease and efficiency to perform many different tasks, across pillars and platforms, all from one pane of glass."
"Having higher visibility on patching level, on patching successful, and non-successful has been a way that BigFix has improved my organization. Also, the ability to customize the content to do what we need it to do is very powerful and very flexible for us. Finally, in the area of custom interfaces like REST API really gives us the ability to provide for our external customers."
"BigFix has always been easier to use when managing servers, especially when you deal with so many servers. We have 7,000. That's a lot of services to manage, and it's convenient to patch them all at once."
"BigFix has drastically reduced the maintenance window period to patch and reboot servers."
"All the vendor patches are synchronized automatically."
"It's very straightforward."
"The integration of Tenable into our security ecosystem was very good."
"The solution can integrate with third parties and meets standard compliance."
"They are on a good trajectory as a company and investing in R&D in the right ways."
"It is quite straightforward to set up."
"There is no burden of updating or upgrading this solution."
"The price of Tenable.io Vulnerability Management is reasonable as it is ten times cheaper than other options."
"The vulnerability management itself is the most valuable feature as well as references to the mitigation techniques."
"The solution creates vulnerability tickets within the VM profile but should also include them under the Remediation tab so the fixes can be viewed in the ticketing queue."
 

Cons

"I would like to see much better web reporting because as it is now, it's convoluted, basic, it's not modern, and there are limitations to it."
"I'd definitely like to see additional feature parody in the web UI versus the console. There are certain things that you can only do in the console and they're very cumbersome to do, like secure parameters, for example. That's definitely something that has a wide degree of utility but it needs to be easier to surface. At this particular juncture between the transition, between the legacy console and the web UI, it's hard to justify dealing with the cumbersome aspects of the legacy console when theoretically everything's been through the web UI."
"Sometimes the workstations communicate back to the BigFix server two or three days in a week or something similar. Sometimes there can be a delay reporting back to the server for a variety of reasons, such as users turning their computer off when they go home. When the user comes back and turns the computer back on BigFix needs to synchronize and sometimes it can take some time, approximately one week. The communication between the agent and the server should be faster, there is room for improvement in this area."
"The look and feel of the system are old-fashioned."
"The sub-capacity licensing was a challenge for some of it. We had trouble getting it to calculate right."
"Its pricing should be improved. It is too costly."
"We need a much better multi-tenant option."
"It could use better integration with Hypervisor products like VMware."
"I'm not satisfied with the reporting structure."
"The initial setup is complex and has room for improvement."
"I would rate it four out of ten. For startups, freelancers, or companies between startup and midsize, Tenable is recommended. However, for midsize or enterprise-level companies, I would not prefer it."
"They've been able to think about everything in terms of where the world is going and the type of assets that you've got. They've everything sorted out in that aspect, but you have to pay for most of the other components that they've got to give you complete visibility across your tech surface. If it already had those capabilities in-built, without having to add them on to take advantage of them, it would be a very compelling value proposition."
"The stability has room for improvement."
"Tenable could improve visibility into assets, including automated asset tagging. You should be able to automatically tag assets based on location, function, ownership, etc. That would help us because we spend a lot of time identifying and tagging assets by hand."
"More flexibility is required compared to other solutions."
"The one drawback that we have found is the reports."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The product is less costly when compared to other solutions, and this is a good solid solution for what we have paid."
"On a scale from one to ten, where one is expensive and ten is cheap, I rate the solution's pricing one out of ten."
"You get what we call the Platform Edition, which you get for free. The patch service is maybe $0.50 per workstation per month. Then there's the basic server cost, which is about $1.50 per server per month. You also get into Lifecycle which does power management, OSD remote control, and those types of things, and that might be about 10 times the price - which works out to about $13 per server and, maybe $5 per workstation per month."
"The price of the solution is high. There are not any additional fees from the standard license."
"The price of BigFix could be lower. However, I am always seeking a lower price."
"The cost is slightly high."
"The price is reasonable, but our customers find it expensive."
"Compliance, inventory, and licensing are really pricey. They should lower the price. It discourages users from getting onboard."
"Tenable charges around $40 per device."
"A yearly payment has to be made toward the solution's licensing costs."
"There are additional features that can be licensed for an additional cost."
"Compared to other VM solutions, Tenable.io Vulnerability Management is expensive."
"Yearly payments are to be made toward the licensing cost of the product. It is neither a cheap nor an expensive product."
"The cost is determined by the number of endpoints, which is approximately one dollar per endpoint."
"On a scale of one to ten, where one is low, and ten is high price, I rate the pricing an eight. So, it is a pretty expensive solution."
"Tenable.io Vulnerability Management's pricing solution model isn't great."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Government
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
9%
Computer Software Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about BigFix?
The most valuable features of the solution are Windows patching and the hardware and software inventory.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for BigFix?
The pricing is competitive, but not the most competitive.
What needs improvement with BigFix?
While performing integration, we face many issues with IBM solution. We need detailed information about those issues that can help users to mitigate them. The problem was related to the hardware co...
What's the difference between Tenable Nessus and Tenable.io Vulnerability Management?
Tenable Nessus is a vulnerability assessment solution that is both easy to deploy and easy to manage. The design of the program is such that if a company should desire to handle the installation t...
What needs improvement with Tenable.io Vulnerability Management?
I don't think I have any additional features to add for improvement, as Tenable Vulnerability Management does a pretty good job of what it does. My pain points would have been on the internal side ...
 

Also Known As

Tivoli Endpoint Manager
Tenable.io
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

US Foods, Penn State, St Vincent's Health US Foods, Sabadell Bank, SunTrust, Australia Sydney, Stemac, Capgemini, WNS Global Services, Jebsen & Jessen, CenterBeam, Strauss, Christian Hospital Centre, Brit Insurance, Career Education Corporation
Global Payments AU/NZ
Find out what your peers are saying about BigFix vs. Tenable Vulnerability Management and other solutions. Updated: August 2025.
865,384 professionals have used our research since 2012.