Tenable Nessus vs XM Cyber comparison

Tenable and XM Cyber are both solutions in the Vulnerability Management category. Tenable is ranked #1 with an average rating of 8.6, while XM Cyber is ranked #30 with an average rating of 8.5. Tenable holds a 7.7% mindshare in VM, compared to XM Cyber’s 1.2% mindshare. Additionally, 98% of Tenable users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of XM Cyber users who would recommend it.

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 9, 2024

Tenable Nessus and XM Cyber are key players in cybersecurity, offering distinct features. Tenable Nessus leads with its user-friendly deployment and cost-effective vulnerability management, while XM Cyber shines in advanced threat simulations and comprehensive customer support.

Features: Tenable Nessus provides a comprehensive vulnerability assessment platform, efficient scanning and reporting capabilities, and it focuses on vulnerability management. XM Cyber offers advanced attack simulation, insights into potential attack paths, and prioritizes proactive threat simulations.

Room for Improvement: Tenable Nessus could enhance its threat simulation features, improve network visualization capabilities, and further integrate threat detection. XM Cyber could streamline its deployment process, expand support for diverse network environments, and offer more competitive pricing options.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Tenable Nessus is recognized for easy deployment with minimal complexity and appealing accessibility for businesses seeking efficiency. It offers efficient service for a faster setup. XM Cyber, although complex in deployment, provides robust support that enhances user satisfaction with responsive customer service.

Pricing and ROI: Tenable Nessus is known for cost-effectiveness, showing clear ROI through its efficient vulnerability management. XM Cyber might require a higher initial investment but offers significant ROI by providing advanced capabilities in threat detection and prevention through sophisticated threat analysis.

To learn more, read our detailed Tenable Nessus vs. XM Cyber Report (Updated: September 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Tenable Nessus vs. XM Cyber

September 2025

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Helped 868,787 peers since 2012

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

Zafran Security

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Vulnerability Management category, the mindshare of Zafran Security is 1.1%, up from 0.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Tenable Nessus is 7.7%, down from 11.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of XM Cyber is 1.2%, up from 0.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Vulnerability Management Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Tenable Nessus	7.7%
Zafran Security	1.1%
XM Cyber	1.2%
Other	90.0%

Vulnerability Management

Featured Reviews

Israel Cavazos Landini

Associate Director IT Security Operations at a pharma/biotech company with 10,001+ employees

Weekly insights and risk analysis facilitate informed security decisions

I appreciate the weekly insights Zafran provides, which include critical topics for networks and IT security, allowing us to evaluate which insights apply to our environment. The organization score feature is valuable to keep the leadership team updated on how our infrastructure fares security-wise. The applicable risk level versus base risk level feature is beneficial because prior to Zafran, we only used the base risk level, but now understand that risk depends on the asset itself. Zafran is an excellent tool.

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HarshBhardiya

SOC Engineer at Just Dial Limited

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.

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Stephen Owen

Group CISO at a insurance company with 51-200 employees

Has significantly improved risk visibility and optimized remediation efforts across dynamic environments

We tightly integrate with APIs, consuming feeds and open source data. We have integrated with XM Cyber, and we are elevating ourselves with AI and MCP tools as we view this as a forerunner to reducing the workload for our agents and IT staff. We're pushing all our security partners to provide AI and MCP tools. Our vision is for them to offer a chat interface where a junior IT or an experienced infrastructure engineer can ask for what needs to be patched next without using an interface. Their current interface is very usable and professional, ranking in the top tier of applications. Their reporting is good, offering custom reports, and their API integration is a new capability that serves us well. We have high expectations for the next generation, such as a chat interface to ask questions. However, everything has been very good. We push the boundaries with digital twins; I understand XM Cyber uses a similar concept of graph databases to map environments. I would like access to that and querying languages, enabling more informed business decisions. XM Cyber sees much of our estate, which is beneficial for making informed decisions, and we can harness those insights and data for business analytics. For instance, it could help us gain insights into change management—if a particular server impacts another and that server is supported by yet another server, we could glean significant insights for change management meetings.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"We are able to see the real risk of a vulnerability on our environment with our security tools."

"Zafran is an excellent tool."

"Overall, we have seen about eighty-seven percent reduction of the number of vulnerabilities that require urgency to remediate, specifically the number of criticals."

"We saw benefits from Zafran Security almost immediately after deploying it."

"Zafran has become an indispensable tool in our cybersecurity arsenal."

"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."

"The scanning and reporting features are the most valuable aspects of Tenable Nessus."

"The vulnerability scanner is the most valuable feature."

"The most valuable feature of Tenable Nessus is the dashboard. They are convenient to use."

"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 support has been really cooperative."

"It provides multiple recommendations towards the remedy of vulnerabilities."

"The solution is easy to understand for users because instructions are included on the platform."

More Tenable Nessus pros

"Six weeks into using XM Cyber, we saw a compelling return on investment—primarily in risk reduction, with a specific issue our other security tooling did not pick up but XM Cyber did, reducing IT remediation time and saving over 60,000 US dollars per year while significantly lowering our loss exposure amount."

"Since implementing XM Cyber, we have improved the way we are doing patching, focusing on the choke points in our patching cycle, and it improves the way we assess the risk."

"The platform's most valuable feature is attack simulation."

"What I personally like very much, from my experience, is that it is very reliable."

"XM Cyber made it clear that browser vulnerabilities were the top priority because the platform was able to examine how vulnerabilities within our estate could be exploited and what the path would be from some bad actor in order to exploit those vulnerabilities."

Cons

"The dashboarding and reporting functionality of Zafran Security is an area that definitely could use some improvements."

"Initially, we were somewhat concerned about the scalability of Zafran due to our large asset count and the substantial amount of information we needed to process."

"I think the ability to have some enhanced reporting capabilities is something they can improve on, as they have good reports but we have asked for some specific reporting enhancements."

"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 professional version is not very scalable."

"There could be an integration between Tenable Nessus and other Tenable products. It will help us manage all the solutions using one dashboard."

"The problems I faced with Tenable Nessus were related to its dashboard's customization capabilities and its ability to provide data to third-party sources."

"There is room for improvement in finishing the transition to the cloud. We'd like to see them keep on improving the Tenable.io product, so that we can migrate to it entirely, instead of having to keep the Tenable.sc on-prem product."

"We have had some false positives in the past, which we hope can improve in the future."

"They should try to create an all-in-one solution."

"Sometimes, the categorization for clients was tricky at first, however, they eventually got used to it."

More Tenable Nessus cons

"XM Cyber could identify all areas of vulnerability. They could expand the identification span for different areas."

"We have not saved any time or effort, but we can prove that the effort involved around vulnerability management has been better spent to greater effect, and we've been able to demonstrate that vulnerabilities that do represent a high risk have been remediated more rapidly and more effectively."

"We have high expectations for the next generation, such as a chat interface to ask questions."

"There are many interesting things about XM Cyber, but the part that can be improved is the mobile exposure and the IBM i specific equipment."

"We'd like to see a cheaper price."

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available

"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."

"One problem with Tenable is its pricing policy. Optimal results can be achieved with Greenbone Solutions which has much more friendly pricing policies."

"The price of Tenable Nessus could improve, it is expensive."

"Nessus is affordable, but its licensing model could be improved with more flexibility for adding assets."

"Its pricing is great and can't be improved. It is very cheap. It is less than 2,000 pounds a license, and you can't really ask for more. It has unlimited IPs and unlimited scans. There are no particular pricing constraints. The only additional cost is the inherent cost of the people to actually review the actual scans."

"The price is reasonable."

"The price is okay. I would give it a seven out of ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive."

"Nowadays, your vulnerability applications are going to be kind of pricey because lots of them, including Rapid7, are based upon a base price, but then they add in the nodes. That's where they get you. If you're a big network, obviously, you need to scan everything. Therefore, it's going to be costly. The risk and insurance money associated with having ransomware on my networks is going to cost me more money, time, and marketing than the price of the tool. That's why I'm speaking only as an information security officer to security operations. This is the tool that is there in my toolbox to say whether we vulnerable or not. At this point, I don't care about how much it costs my company to have it because if I wasn't able to report it and we got ransomware, then who cares? I'm probably going to be out of business because it happened. That's why I don't care about the price. I have it, and I could use it effectively and do my report. At the end of the day, even if we get ransomware, as long as I reported it, followed my protocol, and put in the change, irrespective of whether it was ignored or denied, I did my job."

More Tenable Nessus pricing and cost advice

"We have to pay standard licensing fees."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

11%

Computer Software Company

Manufacturing Company

Government

Computer Software Company

12%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Government

10%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Computer Software Company

14%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Retailer

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	38
Midsize Enterprise	19
Large Enterprise	35

No data available

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Zafran Security?

Since we stood Zafran Security up in our private cloud, we handle the maintenance on our side. As we opted not to use...

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What needs improvement with Zafran Security?

In terms of areas for improvement, Zafran Security is doing a really great job as a new and emerging company. Oftenti...

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What is your primary use case for Zafran Security?

My use cases for Zafran Security revolve around two primary areas. One is around vulnerability management and priorit...

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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. Yo...

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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 ...

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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 addre...

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What do you like most about XM Cyber?

The platform's most valuable feature is attack simulation.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for XM Cyber?

We have to pay standard licensing fees. There are no additional costs. It is an expensive product. I rate the pricing...

See all answers

What needs improvement with XM Cyber?

XM Cyber could identify all areas of vulnerability. They could expand the identification span for different areas.

See all answers

Comparisons

Wiz Code vs Zafran Security

Compared 34% of the time

Vulcan Cyber vs Zafran Security

Compared 14% of the time

Tenable Vulnerability Management vs Zafran Security

Compared 8% of the time

Qualys VMDR vs Zafran Security

Compared 6% of the time

More Zafran Security Competitors

Qualys VMDR vs Tenable Nessus

Compared 11% of the time

Rapid7 InsightVM vs Tenable Nessus

Compared 11% of the time

Microsoft Defender Vulnerability Management vs Tenable Nessus

Compared 8% of the time

Tenable Vulnerability Management vs Tenable Nessus

Compared 7% of the time

Amazon Inspector vs Tenable Nessus

Compared 6% of the time

More Tenable Nessus Competitors

Pentera vs XM Cyber

Compared 20% of the time

Cymulate vs XM Cyber

Compared 18% of the time

Wiz vs XM Cyber

Compared 14% of the time

SafeBreach vs XM Cyber

Compared 5% of the time

Qualys VMDR vs XM Cyber

Compared 5% of the time

More XM Cyber Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Zafran Security

September 2025

Download Zafran Security product report

Buyer's Guide

Tenable Nessus

September 2025

Download Tenable Nessus product report

Buyer's Guide

XM Cyber

September 2025

Download XM Cyber product report

Overview

Zafran Security integrates with existing security tools to identify and mitigate vulnerabilities effectively, proving that most critical vulnerabilities are not exploitable, optimizing threat management.

Zafran Security introduces an innovative operating model for managing security threats and vulnerabilities. By leveraging the threat exposure management platform, it pinpoints and prioritizes exploitable vulnerabilities, reducing risk through immediate remediation. This platform enhances your hybrid cloud security by normalizing vulnerability signals and integrating specific IT context data, such as CVE runtime presence and internet asset reachability, into its analysis. No longer reliant on patch windows, Zafran Security allows you to manage risks actively.

What are the key features of Zafran Security?

Threat Exposure Management: Utilizes existing tools to prioritize vulnerabilities and manage threats.
Integrative Analysis: Combines security data with IT context for precise vulnerability management.
Real-time Risk Reduction: Enables immediate risk management without waiting for patches.
Hybrid Cloud Compatibility: Functions across diverse cloud environments for comprehensive security.

What benefits can users expect from Zafran Security?

Improved Security: Enhances protection by efficiently identifying and mitigating risks.
Cost Efficiency: Reduces unnecessary patching expenses by confirming non-exploitable vulnerabilities.
Time Savings: Frees developers to focus on root causes by handling immediate threats.
Comprehensive Insight: Offers a holistic view of security threats and vulnerabilities.

In industries where security is paramount, such as finance and healthcare, Zafran Security provides invaluable protection by ensuring that only exploitable vulnerabilities are addressed. It allows entities to maintain robust security measures while allocating resources efficiently, fitting seamlessly into existing security strategies.

Zafran Security

Tenable Nessus provides an efficient vulnerability management system with swift deployment and comprehensive scanning capabilities, making it an ideal choice for organizations seeking to enhance their security posture through effective threat detection and mitigation strategies.

Renowned for its top-tier vulnerability detection, Tenable Nessus offers a robust platform that integrates effortlessly across systems, enhancing threat management through automation, real-time monitoring, and customizable scanning options. Its broad asset coverage, including network devices and applications, coupled with ease of deployment, positions it as a go-to option for risk assessment and compliance. Organizations value its extensive reporting features and database, although they suggest enhancements in reporting formats and false positive detection. A more intuitive interface, improved cloud support, and competitive pricing models are sought after to cater to evolving enterprise needs.

What are the key features of Tenable Nessus?

Comprehensive Vulnerability Detection: Identifies security gaps across systems and platforms.
Remedy Recommendations: Provides actionable insights for vulnerability fixes.
Predictive Prioritization: Helps in focusing on critical vulnerabilities first.
Seamless Integration: Compatible with diverse platforms for cohesive threat management.
Automation Capabilities: Streamlines routine scans and reports.

What benefits and ROI should users look for?

Fast Setup: Quick deployment that saves time and resources.
Cost-Effective: Affordable pricing supports budget-conscious cyber strategies.
Real-Time Monitoring: Offers continuous oversight of system health.
Extensive Reports: Detailed insights enhance decision-making processes.

In industries such as finance, healthcare, and tech, Tenable Nessus is implemented for scanning internal and external networks, identifying risks, and ensuring data protection compliance. Organizations conduct regular scans to detect security vulnerabilities in servers and databases, leveraging its capabilities to strengthen their security frameworks while managing cloud infrastructures and enterprise networks efficiently.

Tenable

XM Cyber is a leading hybrid cloud security company that’s changing the way innovative organizations approach cyber risk. Our attack path management platform continuously uncovers hidden attack paths to your critical assets across cloud and on-prem environments, so you can cut them off at key junctures and eradicate risk with a fraction of the effort. This overcomes the big disconnect that security teams experience when they’re presented with endless alerts, yet can’t see which exposures impact risk the most, how they come together to be exploited by an attacker, or how to efficiently eliminate them. This approach is a complete game-changer, which is why some of the world’s largest, most complex organizations choose XM Cyber to help eradicate risk. Founded by top executives from the Israeli cyber intelligence community, XM Cyber has offices in North America, Europe, and Israel.

XM Cyber

Sample Customers

Information Not Available

Bitbrains, Tesla, Just Eat, Crosskey Banking Solutions, Covenant Health, Youngstown State University

Hamburg Port Authority, Plymouth Rock Corporation

Buyer's Guide

Tenable Nessus vs. XM Cyber

September 2025

Free Report: Tenable Nessus vs. XM Cyber

Find out what your peers are saying about Tenable Nessus vs. XM Cyber and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.

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