Nexpose vs Nessus - Which one is better?
Nexpose and Nessus both are commercial vulnerability scanning tools. Both are able to identify more than 20,000 CVEs in the IT infrastructure. Nexpose is owned by Rapid7 while Nessus is owned by Tenable Inc.
This blog helps you to compare and identify which tool is better.
Nexpose
Free trial available at https://www.rapid7.com/products/nexpose/download/
Nessus Professional
Free trial available at https://www.tenable.com/products/nessus/nessus-professional
Comparison
| Parameter | Nexpose | Nessus Professional |
| Trial | Available for 30 days | Available for 7 days |
| Authenticated Scan | Available - SSH public key authentication, password-based, Kerberos authenticated scan, LDAP authentication etc. | Available - SSH public key authentication, password-based, etc. |
| Supported Operating System | Can be installed on Ubuntu Linux 20.04 LTS Ubuntu Linux 18.04 LTS, Ubuntu Linux 16.04 LTS, Microsoft Windows Server 2019, Microsoft Windows Server 2016, Microsoft Windows Server 2012 R2, Microsoft Windows 8.1, Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server 8, Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server 7, Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server 6, CentOS 7, Oracle Linux 7, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 | Can be installed on Debian / Kali Linux, Red Hat / CentOS / Oracle Linux, Fedora, FreeBSD, Ubuntu, Mac OS X, Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2012, SUSE Linux, Windows 7, 8 and 10 |
| Compliance Checks | Support SOC 2 Type II, Amazon Web Services (AWS) Security Competency, Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX), EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) etc. | Best practice guidance and security policies, such as CIS benchmarks, SOX, FISMA, HIPAA, etc. |
| Offsite scan | Available | The remote scan option is available |
| IPv6 | support IPv6 scanning | support IPv6 scanning |
| Cost (approximate) | up to 128 IPs cost about $2,000 | 1 Year - $2,990 2 Years - $5,830 3 Years - $8,520 |
| Hardware Solution | Available | Not Available |
| Known Web Application Vulnerabilities | Desktop Attack Vectors (Adobe Reader, Acrobat, Quicktime, Browsers, Flash, Java), Identify Vendor vulnerabilities (Adobe, Apple, Microsoft), Web (Apache, IIS, OWASP Top 10, PHP, XSS, SQL Injection, Browsers), Operating Systems (Microsoft Windows, Linux, Mac OS X), Databases (Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL), | Identify known web application vulnerabilities |
| SCADA system | Support SCADA scanning | Support SCADA scanning |
| Audit Report | Priority issues report available | Compliance results in Nessus - Pass, Fail, and Warning |
| Support | Available | Available |
Conclusion
Nexpose and Nessus Professional both are great tools and can be used to scan IT infrastructure. Nessus is more popular used by security analysts to audit IT systems. Nessus is easily configurable for scan configurations of servers, routers, firewalls, cloud, etc. While Nexpose is a vulnerability management solution suitable for maintaining and identifying security issues in IT infrastructure.
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Disclaimer: This tutorial is for educational purpose only. Individual is solely responsible for any illegal act.
