SentriKat vs. Tenable Nessus

Tenable Nessus is the most widely deployed vulnerability scanner in the world, with over 80,000 plugins tracking more than 250,000 CVEs. It is a comprehensive tool designed for organizations that need to catalogue every potential vulnerability across their infrastructure. For large SOC teams with dedicated triage analysts, this breadth is valuable.

SentriKat was built on a different premise. Only about ~1,500 CVEs, roughly 0.6% of all published vulnerabilities, are confirmed to be actively exploited by threat actors in the wild. Those are the ones that appear in the public catalogues of exploited vulnerabilities, and they represent the most immediate, real-world risk to any organization.

By focusing exclusively on exploited vulnerabilities, SentriKat leaves under one percent of the noise that buries security teams using traditional scanners. Every vulnerability SentriKat surfaces is one that attackers are actively using right now, not a theoretical risk from a decade-old CVE that may never be exploited.

Tenable splits its product line between Nessus (on-premises scanner), Tenable.io (cloud platform), and Tenable.cs (container security). With SentriKat, you get a single product that works both as a Cloud platform and as a fully on-premise deployment , with container scanning, SIEM integration, and compliance reporting included in every plan.

For European organizations, SentriKat offers native European vulnerability database, the EU's own vulnerability database mandated under NIS2. Tenable does not integrate with European vulnerability databases. SentriKat also includes built-in NIS2 and DORA compliance reporting, while Tenable requires paid compliance modules.

On price, be precise about what is being compared. Nessus Professional is a scanner for one user. SentriKat Pro is a platform for five, with agents, NIS2 and DORA reporting, SIEM and ticketing integration and SSO. On the annual plan Pro is roughly the same money as Nessus Professional, and Starter is about a quarter of it, but the honest reason to choose SentriKat is not the invoice: it is that a scanner tells you what is wrong and stops there. It does not write the report your auditor asks for, and it does not tell you which of its own findings a vendor patch has already closed.

Where the money does decide it is against the enterprise platforms. Qualys starts around $10,000 a year, and an annual assessment from a consultant costs an SME about the same as a year of SentriKat and goes stale the week it is delivered.

Who should choose Tenable. If you need credentialed network scanning across switches, firewalls and databases, or web application scanning, or cloud posture, or OT, Tenable does those and we do not. If you have a security team with the hours to work a large finding list, their breadth is worth paying for. We are a specialist, not a suite, and a comparison that pretended otherwise would not survive your first technical call.

Who should choose SentriKat. An organisation in scope for NIS2 or DORA, without a security team, that needs to know which of its exposures are actually being exploited, which are already closed by a vendor patch, and needs the evidence in a report an auditor accepts. Neither product installs the patch for you; both hand the work to your ticket system.