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Tenable Security Center pros and cons

Vendor: Tenable

4.1 out of 5

54 reviews
96% willing to recommend

1,539 followers

Pros & Cons summary

Tenable Security Center delivers comprehensive vulnerability scanning and accurate data outputs. It excels in integration with multiple vendors, optimizing resources with predictive prioritization. Assurance Report Card offers a valued security posture overview. However, initial setup is cumbersome, web application features need enhancement, and reports lack customization. The pricing is high compared to Rapid7. Recent support issues, including longer response times, hinder its reputation despite its robust distributed scanning capability.

Buyer's Guide

Get pricing advice, tips, use cases and valuable features from real users of this product.

Prominent pros & cons

PROS

Assurance Report Card provides an overview of the security posture at a glance.

Customization of scanning policies allows minimal impact on clinical networks.

Distributed scan model efficiently handles multiple scans across environments.

Lowest rate of false positives and negatives compared to competitors.

Integration with SIEM and PAM solutions enhances security capabilities.

CONS

Tenable Security Center has some issues with flexibility in configuration, requiring significant manual effort for creating basic scan policies compared to tools like Nmap.

Web application scanning and feature support could be improved, with some users finding the web application functions lacking in functionality.

The reporting engine and templates in Tenable Security Center could be enhanced to allow for easier generation and customization of reports, and exporting reports requires unnecessary steps.

Pricing for Tenable Security Center is considered high compared to competitors like Rapid7, and additional costs occur when using more scanners for various endpoints.

The technical support for Tenable Security Center has reportedly declined over time, taking longer to respond and providing less thorough assistance.

Tenable Security Center Pros review quotes

reviewer1230882

Sr. Principal IT Architect at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees

Nov 14, 2019

The predictive prioritization features are pretty good. They do a lot of research and we trust the research that they do internally. They have knowledge of what's going on with many companies, where we only get a view into what's going on here. So the ability to get best practices out of them as part of this solution, is valuable to us.

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JS

Medical Device Cybersecurity Analyst at a healthcare company with 5,001-10,000 employees

May 30, 2019

What is useful to me is being able to fulfill very customized scanning policies. In the clinical environment, because of vendor control, we can't perform credential-vulnerability scanning. And network scans, which I've done before, can cause a lot of impact. Being able to create very customized policies to be able to routinely scan and audit our clinical networks, while simultaneously not causing impact, is important to us.

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JA

Chief Information Security Officer at BIGBANK AS

Aug 16, 2023

The scanning part, the agent part – that's the valuable aspect.

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Tenable Security Center

Free Report: Tenable Security Center Reviews and More

Learn what your peers think about Tenable Security Center. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: April 2025.

850,671 professionals have used our research since 2012.

JK

IT Security Specialist at a consultancy with 1,001-5,000 employees

Jun 30, 2019

One of the most valuable features is their distributed scan model for allotting engines to work together as a pool and handle multiple scans at once, across multiple environments. Automatic scanning distribution is a distinguishing feature of their toolset.

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Technical Consultant at a tech consulting company with 51-200 employees

May 8, 2024

Support is knowledgeable.

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CIO / IT Consultant at RedShift

Jun 4, 2020

This product has the best results in terms of the lowest number of false-positives and false-negatives.

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Program Manager at a tech services company with 201-500 employees

Jan 6, 2021

The feature we've liked most recently was being able to take the YARA rules from FireEye and put them into Tenable's scan for the most recent SolarWinds exploit. That was really useful.

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BJ

Information Security Expert at a comms service provider with 5,001-10,000 employees

Dec 13, 2018

We really love the Security Center dashboard. It basically performs vulnerability scanning and then outputs a vulnerability data.

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Md. Shahriar Hussain

Information Security Analyst at Banglalink

Feb 23, 2024

The most important features are the dashboard and reporting. The dashboard provides statistics with graphs and bar charts for our management.

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reviewer1498950

Information Security Analyst at a retailer with 1,001-5,000 employees

Mar 19, 2021

Their overall cost of service is pretty good.

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Tenable Security Center Cons review quotes

reviewer1230882

Sr. Principal IT Architect at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees

Nov 14, 2019

There's a lot of information being streamed out of the reports. What would be nice, and maybe we just haven't found it, would be more of an executive-type view. We still expect it to collect all this information, but we would like a feature that would allow us to show it to an executive or a director or someone like that and give them some type of high-level overview but not get into the nitty-gritty.

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JS

Medical Device Cybersecurity Analyst at a healthcare company with 5,001-10,000 employees

May 30, 2019

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.

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JA

Chief Information Security Officer at BIGBANK AS

Aug 16, 2023

Certain aspects require manual effort, such as exporting and analyzing data for our dashboards. The built-in components of the Tenable solution are somewhat clumsy that require external tools. So, this is an area of improvement.

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Tenable Security Center

Free Report: Tenable Security Center Reviews and More

Learn what your peers think about Tenable Security Center. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: April 2025.

850,671 professionals have used our research since 2012.

JK

IT Security Specialist at a consultancy with 1,001-5,000 employees

Jun 30, 2019

It's good at creating information, it's good creating dashboards, it's good at creating reports, but if you want to take that reporting metadata and put it into another tool, that is a little bit lacking.

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Technical Consultant at a tech consulting company with 51-200 employees

May 8, 2024

Support could be faster.

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CIO / IT Consultant at RedShift

Jun 4, 2020

The integration is very good, although it still needs to improve.

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Program Manager at a tech services company with 201-500 employees

Jan 6, 2021

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.

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BJ

Information Security Expert at a comms service provider with 5,001-10,000 employees

Dec 13, 2018

A good plugin editor would be a good additional option for the Security Center.

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Md. Shahriar Hussain

Information Security Analyst at Banglalink

Feb 23, 2024

Additional costs are associated with using the solution, as additional scanners are required for different endpoints connected to the Tenable Security Center. If Tenable Security Center could extract information from these scanners automatically rather than manually, it would enhance user-friendliness for customers.

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reviewer1498950

Information Security Analyst at a retailer with 1,001-5,000 employees

Mar 19, 2021

The biggest issue I have with the solution is when I'm using the scanning it picks up the original DNS of that device. That means, before we image it and actually change the DNS to something within our company structure, it'll just be random numbers and letters and Tenable will stick to that DNS for a long time.

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Show 10 more reviews (out of 52)

Product Categories

Product Categories

Risk-Based Vulnerability Management

Vulnerability Management

Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM)

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Product Categories

Product Categories

Risk-Based Vulnerability Management

Vulnerability Management

Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM)

Popular Comparisons

Popular Comparisons

Cloudflare vs Tenable Security Center

Wiz vs Tenable Security Center

Microsoft Defender for Cloud vs Tenable Security Center

Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks vs Tenable Security Center

Darktrace vs Tenable Security Center

SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security vs Tenable Security Center

Qualys VMDR vs Tenable Security Center

Tenable Nessus vs Tenable Security Center

Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange Platform vs Tenable Security Center

Tanium vs Tenable Security Center

AWS Security Hub vs Tenable Security Center

Tenable Vulnerability Management vs Tenable Security Center

Rapid7 InsightVM vs Tenable Security Center

CrowdStrike Falcon Cloud Security vs Tenable Security Center

Orca Security vs Tenable Security Center

See all alternatives

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