Microsoft Defender for Business vs. Tenable Nessus

Microsoft Defender for Business is well suited for any size organization using the Microsoft 365 Suite. As an included feature in the mid and upper tiers of the 365 suites, it can quickly address antivirus protection for any sized company. It's compliance and security dashboards can help guide sole proprietorship owners in better understanding their security standing. The software also scales to give mid-sized and enterprise originations the in-depth information needed for compliance.

Incentivized

Nessus is perfectly suitable for performing comprehensive vulnerability assessment scans being a vulnerability scanner. It is less appropriate for performing penetration testing since it is not a penetration testing tool, it does not have the ability and modules to exploit the vulnerabilities of the system.

Incentivized

• Monitors the health of endpoints
• Protects endpoints with antivirus
• Allows for policy configurations that can be deployed to endpoints

Incentivized

• Shows you how to fix certain vulnerabilities and the commands to run.
• Gives you the CVEs that the vulnerabilities are matched to.
• Easy to understand the vulnerabilities list, giving reasons why the issues need to be patched or fixed.

• Finding blocked programs in the UI is not intuitive if the alert message is dismissed.
• The admin portal changes often with features coming and going.
• Admin portal interface is cluttered and sometimes not intuitive.

Incentivized

• Could use an upgrade within reports.
• Scans can take a long time to complete. Have to break them down in small sections.

Incentivized

So far we have found no alternative that would overall offer us more than we are getting from Microsoft Defender for Business!

Incentivized

Nessus is best and easy to use application for Vulnerabilities finding and reporting, it has multiple platforms and wide scope covering almost all devices for security improvement so far, thus we are very likely to continue its services.

Incentivized

Microsoft Defender for Business is user friendly but requires some IT knowledge to adapt to its full potential. Microsoft 365 business will likely be more adaptable and have less of a learning curve than new users when configuring settings or security policies. Overall, I would say that strengths outweigh weaknesses and the unknowns can be learned

Incentivized

Tenable Nessus is a great product and provides a lot of value, but it is difficult to set up and use and the amount of data it generates can be overwhelming. It does help us prioritize based on the severity of the detection, however there are sometimes mitigating factors that we have implemented that Nessus does not account for, which causes lots of noise in the reports.

Incentivized

I haven't needed to contact support yet. But issues are easily solved with a quick internet search which means support and by extension, the larger community are involved and knowledgeable.

Incentivized

Microsoft Defender for Business, I believe, is a "light" version of Microsoft Defender for Endpoint. While they both have some of the same features, Microsoft Defender for Business has far less, and the more complex you want to get with your configurations, you may need to dip your toe into the InTune Admin Center to deploy certain policies.

Incentivized

Ease of deployment and use even for junior analysts, strong plugin support, and up-to-date CVE coverage, cost-effective licensing, especially for mid-size companies, and seamless integration with the SIEM tool. Overall, Nessus hit the right balance between functionality, performance, and total cost of ownership for our needs and usability.

• Improved cybersecurity
• Learning curve
• Resource consumption

Incentivized

• It has helped identify security flaws in our infrastructure that has helped better secure our client's data. It did so quickly and efficiently so I was able to move on to other tasks.

Incentivized