Skip to content
THREATWIRE

Open Source Tools · Alternatives

Open-source alternatives to Tenable Nessus

Nessus is Tenable's commercial network vulnerability scanner. Its open-source counterparts are the Greenbone Community Edition (OpenVAS scanner) for authenticated and unauthenticated network checks, and template-based scanners such as Nuclei for targeted, fast checks.

Tenable Nessus is a commercial product by Tenable (official site). Category: Vulnerability scanning.

Comparison

ToolLicenceStarsLast commitBest for
NucleiMITOpen source32ktodayTemplate-based vulnerability scanner
OpenVAS (Greenbone)GPL-2.0-onlyOpen source4.9ktodayNetwork vulnerability scanner (Greenbone Community Edition)

Open-source options

  • Nuclei

    Template-based vulnerability scanner

    Fast vulnerability scanner driven by YAML templates, with thousands of community templates for CVEs, misconfigurations and exposures across many protocols.

    Stars
    32k
    Forks
    4k
    Last commit
    today
    MITOpen sourceVulnerability scanning
    Alternative toTenable NessusQualys VMDR+1

  • OpenVAS (Greenbone)

    Network vulnerability scanner (Greenbone Community Edition)

    Scanner engine of the Greenbone Community Edition, running network vulnerability tests from the Greenbone community feed against hosts and services.

    Stars
    4.9k
    Forks
    805
    Last commit
    today
    GPL-2.0-onlyOpen sourceVulnerability scanning
    Alternative toTenable NessusQualys VMDR

Product names are trademarks of their owners. ThreatWire is not affiliated with Tenable. The comparison covers what each tool is designed to do, not a feature-by-feature equivalence.