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Pentera vs Tenable Nessus comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Apr 20, 2025

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

Pentera
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
9
Ranking in other categories
Penetration Testing Services (2nd), Breach and Attack Simulation (BAS) (1st)
Tenable Nessus
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
81
Ranking in other categories
Vulnerability Management (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

Pentera and Tenable Nessus aren’t in the same category and serve different purposes. Pentera is designed for Breach and Attack Simulation (BAS) and holds a mindshare of 29.8%, up 27.9% compared to last year.
Tenable Nessus, on the other hand, focuses on Vulnerability Management, holds 9.4% mindshare, down 13.1% since last year.
Breach and Attack Simulation (BAS)
Vulnerability Management
 

Featured Reviews

Richard Marlow - PeerSpot reviewer
Provides good features and helps monitor the status of ransomware protection in an organization
The tool is quite scalable. There's a one-to-one relationship between the engine and how many scans we can do. We can only do one scan with one engine. We had some issues around the password assessments because we added a lot of users. It took a long time. I rate the scalability a seven out of ten. We have three users in our organization.
HarshBhardiya - PeerSpot reviewer
Provided increased visibility across the organization's servers
The user interface of Tenable Nessus feels outdated and could be more user-friendly. Additionally, the documentation is not well-organized, which can be confusing when searching for solutions or specific information related to Tenable Nessus Professional. The reporting feature could be improved by allowing users to create their own templates instead of relying on predefined ones.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The vulnerability scanner, exploit achievements, and remediation actions are all great."
"What I like the most about Pentera is its solution-oriented approach."
"Pentera has many authentic features."
"Pentera has many authentic features."
"Maybe there are some remediation steps on the website, we can mask sensitive information on the website better."
"The tool showed us that our ransomware protection wasn’t working on some machines."
"The platform's most valuable features are credential management and vulnerability management."
"The solution is SaaS-based. From a cloud perspective, it has Pentera Surface and Pentera Core. The Core is the on-prem deployed solution, while the Surface is the cloud-hosted solution that scans your public infrastructure. From the Surface perspective, the most valuable feature so far has been the attack surface mapping."
"The most valuable feature of Tenable Nessus is vulnerability detection."
"The most valuable feature is the installation of Tenable which is incredibly easy."
"The ease of use is the primary valuable feature. This specific version is very straightforward. I like the ability to modify it and configure it based on the different policies."
"Nessus gives me a good preview of vulnerabilities and good suggestions for remediation. It's easy to find a description of a given vulnerability and solutions for it."
"The most valuable features of Tenable Nessus include its ease of access and quick usability."
"You can then direct your team to create a report on the discovered vulnerabilities."
"The most valuable aspect of this solution is that you receive the entire report, which details the breakdown, especially in terms of critical, high, low, and mediums."
"The stability is very good."
 

Cons

"The licensing and IP management need improvement. When the IP is imported into a system, we cannot withdraw or revoke the license."
"One area for product improvement could be the inclusion of a dashboard to cover multiple branches and subsidiaries, allowing for centralized monitoring."
"Pentera's general dashboards could be improved and made more specific in terms of vulnerabilities that I'm discovering."
"Maybe scalability. I know that the Pentera right now is high level in order to scan big deals over 500 IPs and not less, and not less. That can be more granular. This will be useful."
"The price could be improved."
"The automated penetration testing features must be improved."
"The vulnerability scanner, exploit achievements, and remediation actions are all great."
"There is room for improvement in virtualization compatibility."
"The tool needs to upgrade asset tracking."
"EQA's and dashboards should be addressed in the next release."
"The reporting feature needs to be improved."
"The solution could improve by having better integration with different vendors' IPS solutions. The ACLs and IPS policies signatures should be enabled based on the results of Tenable Nessus automatically, we currently have to do it manually which is very time-consuming. It has done a good job integrating with Fortinet but we would like it to be better integrated with other solutions that we have."
"Sometimes, the categorization for clients was tricky at first, however, they eventually got used to it."
"The inventory management function in this solution needs improvement."
"The product could have unique features similar to one of its competitors."
"The user interface of Tenable Nessus feels outdated and could be more user-friendly."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We have to pay a yearly licensing cost for Pentera."
"The tool is relatively cheap."
"The product's cost is reasonable. I rate the pricing a three out of ten."
"It's not that expensive, but it could be more cost-effective."
"The price of the solution is reasonable."
"There is an annual license required to use this solution."
"When comparing the price of Tenable Nessus to other similar solutions, such as Acunetix, Tenable Nessus is not as expensive. It is averagely priced in the market. We pay for the solution annually."
"Tenable Nessus needs to be licensed. We own a license for the security center and that license is charged by the number of IP addresses that you can scan. You're allowed to have as many scanners as you want and there's no license for the number of scanners. We have a bunch of Nessus scanners out there, and as long as we're comfortable with staying under that IP address limit, that's really all we have to be concerned about."
"Tenable Nessus is affordable."
"We paid about six thousand dollars per license."
"It has a fair cost and very good cost-benefit ratio."
"Our organization is huge so our license costs $30,000."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
13%
Computer Software Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Educational Organization
6%
Educational Organization
26%
Computer Software Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Government
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Pentera?
What I like the most about Pentera is its solution-oriented approach.
What needs improvement with Pentera?
The licensing and IP management need improvement. When the IP is imported into a system, we cannot withdraw or revoke the license.
What is your primary use case for Pentera?
I am using the OpenIntra solution for pentesting and managing candidates in my environment. I also use this solution for house customers.
How would you choose between Rapid7 InsightVM and Tenable Nessus?
You have full visibility across cloud, network, virtual, and containerized infrastructures with Rapid7 Insight VM. You can easily prioritize vulnerabilities using attacker analytics. Overall, Rapid...
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 do you like most about Tenable Nessus?
We have around 500 virtual machines. Therefore, we conduct monthly scans and open tickets for our developers to address identified vulnerabilities. These scans cover the servers, other network equi...
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Blackstone Group Caterpillar Apria Healthcare Taylor Vinters Sandler Capital Management Drawbridge BNP Paribas British Red Cross
Bitbrains, Tesla, Just Eat, Crosskey Banking Solutions, Covenant Health, Youngstown State University
Find out what your peers are saying about Pentera vs. Tenable Nessus and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.
856,873 professionals have used our research since 2012.