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BMC Helix Automation Console vs Tenable Security Center comparison

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 8, 2026

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

Qualys TotalCloud
Sponsored
Ranking in Vulnerability Management
11th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
44
Ranking in other categories
Container Security (12th), Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) (8th), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (8th), SaaS Security Posture Management (SSPM) (2nd), Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPP) (7th)
BMC Helix Automation Console
Ranking in Vulnerability Management
56th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Tenable Security Center
Ranking in Vulnerability Management
15th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
56
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (23rd), Risk-Based Vulnerability Management (9th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the Vulnerability Management category, the mindshare of Qualys TotalCloud is 1.2%, up from 1.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of BMC Helix Automation Console is 0.9%, up from 0.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Tenable Security Center is 2.5%, down from 4.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Vulnerability Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Qualys TotalCloud1.2%
Tenable Security Center2.5%
BMC Helix Automation Console0.9%
Other95.4%
Vulnerability Management
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer2875785 - PeerSpot reviewer
Soc Analyst at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees
Risk-based visibility has transformed how I prioritize cloud vulnerabilities and protect key assets
The best features Qualys TotalCloud offers are cloud asset visibility, vulnerability assessment, and risk prioritization. This risk-based prioritization helped me quickly identify high-risk vulnerabilities and focus on remediation instead of going through every finding. TrueRisk-based prioritization is useful for understanding which vulnerabilities need attention first. It improved our workflow mainly by giving us a single view of cloud assets and their risk, so we could focus on the higher priority vulnerabilities instead of reviewing every finding manually. This helped us prioritize remediations more efficiently and reduce the time spent on vulnerability assessment and follow-up. Qualys TotalCloud helped us identify exposures that might otherwise have been missed, especially across cloud assets, vulnerabilities, and identities. With the SaaS configuration, the unified inventory and risk view made it easier to connect vulnerabilities with asset criticality, exposure, and access permissions, allowing us to investigate high-risk exposures first and address them before they could become bigger security issues.
ShashiGupta - PeerSpot reviewer
Soo at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees
Reasonably Priced
In terms of improvement, the product could benefit from streamlining the implementation process, particularly regarding customization. Currently, the process involves navigating through multiple layers of custom and staging forms, which can be cumbersome and time-consuming. Another aspect to consider is the foundation data provided out of the box, particularly regarding categorization and its associated values. This foundational data may only sometimes meet the mark, as organizations often require more flexibility to tailor it to their needs. Discovering hardware, for instance, can lead to different category processing needs, with certain layers providing minimal benefits. The challenge lies in the inability to directly specify servers, hardware, software, and their respective details, highlighting a need for improvement in this area. As per the current state of the Helix product, it has seen some resolution to issues but still faces challenges when adding more attributes. It can lead to restrictions, particularly with the progressive view page, limiting flexibility in certain cases. While benefits can be gained in other aspects, such drawbacks are common. Improvements are necessary to enhance flexibility in this regard. Exploring alternative solutions like containerization or cloud services may offer opportunities for optimization, requiring careful consideration due to the complexity involved. I'm still determining the current strategy. While there have been improvements in the latest version, there's still a need for further enhancements in an extended version. Additionally, stakeholders, including manufacturing companies, emphasize the importance of fine-tuning performance for the Helix product. The search functionality remains problematic, often taking more than 15 seconds, undermining reliability.
reviewer1534134 - PeerSpot reviewer
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The dashboards are particularly valuable as they offer a comprehensive view of the environment, highlighting any misconfigurations."
"I would rate Qualys TotalCloud ten out of ten."
"While automatic inventory detection upon connection is a helpful feature, a truly valuable capability would be assessing an environment's security posture against Azure and CIS best practices."
"One of Qualys' best features is its categorization, which allows us to see the types of assets, their security postures, and the AI-powered version of the tool."
"The best part I like is the on-demand scans."
"Qualys TotalCloud has significantly reduced our workload in terms of managing risks, helping us to be more efficient and save substantial resources."
"Qualys TotalCloud's most valuable features are its cloud security posture management, Kubernetes, and container security capabilities."
"I would recommend Qualys TotalCloud to other users because it is cost-efficient and has a good return on investment."
"In terms of scalability, I can only tell you my experience from our clients: I had Remedy installed, and then we installed Discovery, two months ago we installed Server Automation and we've now completed the installation with Vulnerability Management, and everything is inter-operational, it's all automated now, and our customers are happy."
"Takes reports from other vulnerabilities."
"It's reasonably priced."
"We really love the Security Center dashboard. It basically performs vulnerability scanning and then outputs a vulnerability data."
"The ROI is almost guaranteed because there is a lot of value in using the product and reporting that to our company."
"We use Tenable to scan all of our environments and plugins for vulnerabilities, and Tenable helps us discover network vulnerabilities to threats and piracy."
"The customer service and support team at Tenable were extremely helpful."
"Having Tenable is a requirement; it is money well-spent in that it focuses us to work on problems that are prioritized and it allows us to cut down on the manual integration of multiple reports from Microsoft and Linux, etc., so that running with a much smaller team of two people probably saves 80 percent of manpower."
"Their overall cost of service is pretty good."
"Tenable also helps us to focus resources on the vulnerabilities that are most likely to be exploited. And since it is continuously updated, it allows us to reevaluate quickly if there are new vulnerabilities found..."
"Tenable SC's most valuable features are the low number of false positives and the strong capability of providing prioritization for the vulnerabilities detected."
 

Cons

"From a downside perspective, the UI is not user-friendly and feels dated compared to other tools like Prisma Cloud."
"There is room for improvement in the support."
"An area for improvement would be to focus on risks related to AI, such as large language models and potential data leakage."
"Their customer support needs improvement."
"To be honest, I would move out from this tool because it does not give a full view of vulnerability."
"Their support could be improved."
"Although TotalCloud is a helpful tool, some of its advanced features are still under development."
"Some major banks and insurance companies require an on-premises solution for comprehensive vulnerability management, which TotalCloud does not offer."
"No third-party applications or integrations with additional software solutions."
"With BMC I'd like to see the ability to integrate with other software."
"In terms of improvement, the product could benefit from streamlining the implementation process, particularly regarding customization."
"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. I think these menus and clicks can be minimized."
"It could be more user-friendly for creating custom reports."
"The vulnerability scan does not work correctly until the access privileges are set by the system administrator."
"The product should provide risk-based vulnerability management."
"It's important for Tenable to catch up on testing capabilities that are present in solutions like Qualys."
"The reports and plugins for reports and scans could benefit from enhancements."
"If I want to have a very low-managed scan policy, it's a lot of work to create something which is very basic. If I use a tool like Nmap, all I have to do is download it, install it, type in the command, and it's good to go. In Security Center, I have to go through a lot of work to create a policy that's very basic."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing for TotalCloud is attractive and competitive in the market. Given the features, especially the dashboard, I have no concerns regarding pricing."
"Qualys TotalCloud offers competitive pricing given its comprehensive suite of features, including integration, assessment, remediation, and detection capabilities, all within a single platform."
"Qualys TotalCloud offers cost-effective licensing flexibility."
"While Qualys TotalCloud's pricing is currently acceptable, it is becoming increasingly expensive and may soon be considered overpriced."
"TotalCloud's price is about right where I would expect it to be."
"Qualys TotalCloud is expensive, but it offers a premier solution with no headaches."
"I am not sure about the pricing. From what I understand, it is a bit on the higher side, but I do not have the exact numbers."
"As a middle management member, I do not have direct pricing knowledge, but based on the knowledge from our meetings, its pricing is competitive."
Information not available
"Tenable.sc is more expensive than its competitors."
"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."
"We pay around 60,000 on a yearly basis."
"Tenable SC is priced per asset, with the basic solution starting around US$12,000 for 500 assets."
"The tool costs around 15,000 Saudi riyals monthly."
"We're able to save because we don't have to employ more staff members to help wit ht he scheduling of the scans, running the reports or sending them out to the systems owners. That alone is a big ROI for us."
"The tool provides competitive pricing."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Comms Service Provider
12%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Outsourcing Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Construction Company
22%
Financial Services Firm
18%
Comms Service Provider
13%
Insurance Company
6%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Government
8%
Outsourcing Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business12
Midsize Enterprise5
Large Enterprise32
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business22
Midsize Enterprise12
Large Enterprise27
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Qualys TotalCloud?
To be totally honest, I do not have any best features because I have had a bad experience using this tool, especially...
What is your primary use case for Qualys TotalCloud?
My main use case for Qualys TotalCloud is vulnerability management and exposure management. I use this tool to evalua...
Ask a question
Earn 20 points
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.
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 ...
What is your primary use case for Tenable SC?
The typical use case for Tenable Security Center is that it is an on-premise solution, and it can use the agent and a...
 

Also Known As

Qualys TotalCloud with FlexScan
TrueSight Vulnerability Management, SecOps Response Service, BladeLogic Threat Director, BMC Helix Remediate
Tenable.sc, Tenable Unified Security, Tenable SecurityCenter
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
Online Business Systems
IBM, Sempra Energy, Microsoft, Apple, Adidas, Union Pacific
Find out what your peers are saying about BMC Helix Automation Console vs. Tenable Security Center and other solutions. Updated: August 2026.
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