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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) (27th)
Tenable Nessus
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
83
Ranking in other categories
Vulnerability Management (3rd)
 

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 0.5% compared to last year.
Tenable Nessus, on the other hand, focuses on Vulnerability Management, holds 8.8% mindshare, down 13.0% since last year.
Attack Surface Management (ASM)
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The user interface of Tenable Nessus feels outdated and could be more user-friendly.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 results are not that bad, but the key selling point is that it is an affordable tool set."
"The solution can scale well."
"The vulnerability scanner is the most valuable feature."
"Nessus is effortless to integrate."
"The initial setup of Tenable Nessus is very easy."
"Tenable integrates well with other solutions such as SIEM and batch management."
"Tenable Nessus is one of the best vulnerability assessment tools, that I know."
"The features I personally like include host discovery."
 

Cons

"A low-cost service to evaluate the risk score of a supply chain would be very helpful."
"In terms of what could be improved, I would say its reporting portion."
"The reporting could be improved. The reporting in Rapid7 is much better."
"They should improve the I/O reporting and the customized spreadsheet export feature."
"They have added a new Tenable Nessus Expert. That is their new product, which caters to the cloud and everything else. I am assuming that the new features and product enhancements are based on that tool set, but we haven't reviewed it yet."
"One significant drawback we encounter is the tool's tendency to flag patched packages incorrectly. For instance, if a package is patched by Debian maintainers but not updated to a major or minor version, Nessus may still flag it as vulnerable based on its database. This discrepancy leads to false alarms and requires our developers, system admins, and DevOps teams to address them."
"The interface is a little bit clunky, and the reporting is not marvelous. There should be better integration of reporting between instances. Currently, the instance stands alone, and it produces a report. Being able to amalgamate those reports with another instance will be useful."
"They should try to create an all-in-one solution."
"We use credentialed scans. They need more permissions and more changes or settings on Windows and Linux."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"Our organization is huge so our license costs $30,000."
"Tenable Nessus is affordable."
"The product is free."
"One problem with Tenable is its pricing policy. Optimal results can be achieved with Greenbone Solutions which has much more friendly pricing policies."
"We pay approximately $2,500 on a yearly basis."
"The solution has a single price for unlimited assets."
"The cost is around $4,300 per year. Use is unlimited. You don't pay more if you want to use it for another IP."
"The price of the solution is reasonable."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
22%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Real Estate/Law Firm
10%
Healthcare Company
8%
Computer Software Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Educational Organization
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

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: July 2025.
861,803 professionals have used our research since 2012.