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RiskIQ Illuminate vs Tenable Nessus 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

RiskIQ Illuminate
Average Rating
0.0
Number of Reviews
1
Ranking in other categories
Attack Surface Management (ASM) (36th)
Tenable Nessus
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.0
Number of Reviews
86
Ranking in other categories
Vulnerability Management (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

While both are Security Software solutions, they serve different purposes. RiskIQ Illuminate is designed for Attack Surface Management (ASM) and holds a mindshare of 0.2%, down 0.4% compared to last year.
Tenable Nessus, on the other hand, focuses on Vulnerability Management, holds 7.3% mindshare, down 11.3% since last year.
Attack Surface Management (ASM) Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
RiskIQ Illuminate0.2%
CrowdStrike Falcon11.4%
Darktrace7.7%
Other80.7%
Attack Surface Management (ASM)
Vulnerability Management Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Tenable Nessus7.3%
Wiz10.5%
Qualys VMDR6.4%
Other75.8%
Vulnerability Management
 

Featured Reviews

SimonClark - PeerSpot reviewer
Able to discover unpatched servers, offers good stability, and scales very well
A low-cost service to evaluate the risk score of a supply chain would be very helpful. This could be useful for insurance companies offering cyber insurance to enterprise customers, providing the insurer with a valuable way to unobtrusively, quickly, and frequently assess their customers and apply appropriate premiums for the level of risk. This would also be useful for enterprises. They could, for example, assess companies prior to a merger or acquisition. What would also be useful for any enterprise would be if their supply chain has some kind of direct digital access to parts of their network.
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The user interface of Tenable Nessus feels outdated and could be more user-friendly.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 solution is stable with 12 years of established historical data."
"The most valuable feature of Tenable Nessus is vulnerability detection."
"Nessus' most valuable feature is vulnerability management because it helps to discover vulnerabilities proactively and integrates with patch management solutions so you can push patches."
"Its initial setup was simple and straightforward."
"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 solution is easy to understand for users because instructions are included on the platform."
"Makes ransomware checking and OS auditing and implementation relatively easy."
"You can then direct your team to create a report on the discovered vulnerabilities."
"The most valuable features of Tenable Nessus are the scanning option. Advanced scanning is highly useful. The offline config audits and application assessments are useful."
 

Cons

"A low-cost service to evaluate the risk score of a supply chain would be very helpful."
"EQA's and dashboards should be addressed in the next release."
"Vulnerability recommendations are outdated and not in line with industry standards."
"They could make their reporting a little better."
"You can scale Nessus to the extent that you can afford it. You need to have a license for every device you scan. As long as you can afford the increased costs, you won't have a problem scaling it."
"Tenable Nessus application device assessment is one of the top tools. However, in the application security assessment, there are other tools that provide better, and more accurate findings."
"The integration part is not good because five years ago, Tenable Nessus had more integration capability. After that, Tenable changed their policies and strategy."
"There should be a possibility to install agents on scanned machines. Tenable IO provides the capability of using local agents to check local problems, but this feature is not there in Tenable Nessus Professional. It would be nice to have something similar in Tenable Nessus Professional. We should have the capability to use local agents installed on the machines to locally check a problem."
"Tenable Nessus could improve the price."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"Our organization is huge so our license costs $30,000."
"The solution is expensive."
"The solution has free options."
"The solution has a single price for unlimited assets."
"Nessus Manager is not an expensive product. It has its limitations, but the pricing reflects that. We have a yearly subscription."
"I rate the product's price seven or eight on a scale of one to ten, where one is low price and ten is high price."
"The price is reasonable."
"The price is high for the solution. There are free tools with similar functionality available. The solution cost approximately $3,500."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Computer Software Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Government
10%
Manufacturing Company
10%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business38
Midsize Enterprise19
Large Enterprise35
 

Questions from the Community

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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...
 

Also Known As

RiskIQ Digital Threat Management
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

DocuSign, Outbrain, The Economist Group, Rackspace, The Citizen Lab
Bitbrains, Tesla, Just Eat, Crosskey Banking Solutions, Covenant Health, Youngstown State University
Find out what your peers are saying about CrowdStrike, Trend Micro, Qualys and others in Attack Surface Management (ASM). Updated: September 2025.
870,697 professionals have used our research since 2012.