Evidence comparison
Tenable and Qualys VMDR: what the public record shows about each
Both products turn up on governance, risk and compliance shortlists, so this page puts their two evidence records next to each other: 70 items on Tenable and 11 on Qualys VMDR, each one linked to the source it came from. It does not name a winner, and the section below explains why the numbers cannot be subtracted from one another.
Read the counts correctly
More advisories does not mean less secure. A vulnerability register records what researchers found and what the vendor disclosed. A product deployed in thousands of organisations with a mature disclosure process accumulates far more entries than a product nobody audits. A low count can mean a small install base, a young product or a vendor that publishes little, and a high count often marks the opposite.
The two counts are not measured with equal precision. An advisory is only listed against a vendor when the register ties it to one of its products by name, and vendors differ enormously in how consistently their products are named. Here that gap is 0 unattributable entries for Tenable against 3 for Qualys VMDR, which moves the advisory row far more than the products do. Both numbers are in the table so the difference is visible rather than hidden.
Treat this page as two records shown together, never as one score minus another.
The two records side by side
| Measure | Tenable | Qualys VMDR |
|---|---|---|
| Evidence items in the recordSize of the record, not a quality signal. | 70 | 11 |
| Kinds of source | 5 | 2 |
| Advisories attributed to the vendor's productsCounts scrutiny and deployment breadth. See the caution above. | 56 | 0 |
| Register entries that could not be attributedEntries naming the vendor that could not be tied to one of its products, so they are excluded from the row above. Read the two rows together: where this number is high, the registers describe that vendor's products less consistently, and the advisory count above says more about naming than about the product. | 0 | 3 |
| Of those, in the CISA known-exploited catalogueExploitation observed in the wild. The one count worth reading closely. | 0 | 0 |
| Share from government registers | 80% | 27% |
| Share the vendor cannot edit | 100% | 100% |
| Public practitioner threadsReflects community size as much as product behaviour. | 1 | 0 |
| Most recent entry | Jul 18, 2026 | Jul 18, 2026 |
| Sources last re-queried | Jul 18, 2026 | Jul 18, 2026 |
Where each record comes from
The registers and platforms behind each column, with the body that operates each one. A record resting on government registers carries different weight from one resting on the vendor's own documentation, which is why this is shown per vendor rather than merged.
Tenable
| Source | Operated by | Classification | Items | Latest |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| European Vulnerability Database | ENISA, European Union | Authoritative | 29 | Jul 14, 2026 |
| CERT-Bund security advisories | BSI, Federal Republic of Germany | Authoritative | 27 | Jul 15, 2026 |
| Analyst, review and reference sources | Recognised analysts, review marketplaces and technology press | Independent | 7 | Jul 18, 2026 |
| Engineering discussions | Hacker News, public threads | Independent | 5 | Apr 22, 2026 |
| Practitioner discussions | Reddit, public threads | Independent | 2 | May 09, 2026 |
Qualys VMDR
| Source | Operated by | Classification | Items | Latest |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| CERT-Bund security advisories | BSI, Federal Republic of Germany | Authoritative | 3 | Nov 12, 2025 |
| Analyst, review and reference sources | Recognised analysts, review marketplaces and technology press | Independent | 8 | Jul 18, 2026 |
Documented vulnerabilities
Only entries tied to a product of the named vendor by a structural signal are listed: an advisory reference on the vendor's own domain, the vendor as the assigning authority, or the affected product list naming it. Entries that merely mention a vendor in passing are excluded from both columns.
Tenable
- WID-SEC-2026-2351highCVSS 9.1Jul 15, 2026
Affected products: Tenable Security Nessus
- CVE-2026-15265criticalCVSS 9.3Jul 14, 2026
A path traversal vulnerability in Tenable Agent 11.2.0 and 11.1.3 and lower allows a privileged attacker to write arbitrary files outside the intended plugin directory, potentially leading…
- WID-SEC-2026-2086mediumCVSS 5.3Jun 26, 2026
Affected products: Tenable Security Nessus
- CVE-2026-57587lowCVSS 2.1Jun 25, 2026
A SQL injection vulnerability in Nessus allows a remote, unauthenticated attacker who controls reverse DNS records for a scanned host to inject malicious SQL into the scan results database…
- CVE-2026-57588lowCVSS 1.6Jun 25, 2026
A SQL injection vulnerability in Nessus allows an attacker to craft a malicious scan result file that, when imported by a privileged user, injects malicious SQL into the scan results…
- CVE-2026-13007highCVSS 8.5Jun 23, 2026
Tenable Identity Exposure contains multiple unauthenticated API endpoints under /w/api/* that expose sensitive application configuration data including cleartext LDAP credentials, SAML…
Qualys VMDR
What practitioners report
Public threads naming each product in their own title. Not curated for sentiment, and not counted as a verdict: a loud thread is one team's experience, not a measurement.
Tenable
- Hacker NewsJan 05, 2025Independent
Cybersecurity firm Tenable's CEO Amit Yoran dies after battle with cancer
Qualys VMDR
What neither record can tell you
The two lists below are the honest holes in each record. Everything a choice between these two actually turns on sits outside both of them.
Tenable
- Pricing, contract terms, notice periods and support commitments are not part of any public register. They come from the vendor and belong in a negotiation record.
- Certification status such as ISO 27001, SOC 2 or BSI C5 has to be checked against the current certificate and its stated scope. A valid certificate can still exclude the product being bought.
Qualys VMDR
- 3 register entries mention Qualys VMDR, but none of them could be attributed to a product of Qualys VMDR. They describe other vendors' software and are not shown here.
- No public practitioner discussion naming Qualys VMDR was found in the indexed threads. Operational experience with this product is not represented in this record.
- Pricing, contract terms, notice periods and support commitments are not part of any public register. They come from the vendor and belong in a negotiation record.
- Certification status such as ISO 27001, SOC 2 or BSI C5 has to be checked against the current certificate and its stated scope. A valid certificate can still exclude the product being bought.
Whether Tenable is the right choice is not on this page
A record of what is true about a vendor is one half of a decision. The other half is your context: which criteria matter, how heavily each one weighs, what is a hard no, and who has to sign the result off. No public page can know that, and any page that claims to rank vendors for you is guessing at it.
Typical criteria for this category
Needs your case- NIS2 Readinessweight
- DORA Complianceweight
- GDPR Data Protectionweight
- Audit Trail & Evidence Collectionweight
- Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)weight
Criteria shown as examples for governance, risk and compliance. Weighting and fit are properties of your decision, not of the vendor, so they are not published here.
What DecisionOS adds on top of this record
- The vendor scored against your criteria with your weighting, not against a generic ranking
- A dealbreaker check against your hard constraints: data residency, contract terms, existing stack
- A side-by-side view of the alternatives on your shortlist, built from this same evidence pool
- This evidence mapped onto your compliance scope: NIS2, DORA, ISO 27001, SOC 2
- A decision memo your board can read, with the trade-offs and the reasoning on the record
Questions this page answers
Which is better, Tenable or Qualys VMDR?
This page does not answer that, and no public page can. Better exists only relative to a decision: which criteria matter, how heavily each weighs, what counts as a dealbreaker and which systems the product has to live next to. What this page gives you is the evidence on both, 70 items on Tenable and 11 on Qualys VMDR, each with its source, so the judgement rests on the record rather than on marketing.
Does Tenable or Qualys VMDR have more vulnerabilities?
Tenable currently has 56 attributed advisories in this record and Qualys VMDR has 0. That comparison is easy to misread. A vulnerability register records what researchers found and what the vendor disclosed, so a widely deployed product with an active disclosure process accumulates more entries than one nobody audits. A low count can equally mean a small install base or a vendor that publishes little. The two figures are also not measured with equal precision: an advisory only counts here when a register ties it to a named product, and 0 entries naming Tenable and 3 naming Qualys VMDR could not be tied to one. The count worth reading closely is how many entries appear in the CISA catalogue of known exploited vulnerabilities, which is 0 for Tenable and 0 for Qualys VMDR.
How independent is the evidence on Tenable and Qualys VMDR?
100 percent of the Tenable record and 100 percent of the Qualys VMDR record come from sources the vendor does not control: government vulnerability registers, public practitioner threads and a fixed list of recognised analysts and technology press. Material either vendor publishes about itself stays in the record and is labelled as a claim.
What does this comparison of Tenable and Qualys VMDR leave out?
Pricing, contract terms, notice periods, support commitments and the current scope of any certificate. None of those appear in a public register; they come from the vendor and belong in a negotiation record. Fit with your existing stack and your compliance scope is also absent, because it is a property of your organisation rather than of a governance, risk and compliance product.
Why does nexalign publish this instead of ranking Tenable and Qualys VMDR?
Because a ranking would have to invent the buyer. Every quadrant and score sheet silently assumes a weighting that belongs to someone else's decision. nexalign publishes the record and keeps the weighting where it belongs, in DecisionOS, where it is set by the people who have to defend the outcome.
The full records
Tenable: the full evidence record
70 items from 5 kinds of source
Qualys VMDR: the full evidence record
11 items from 2 kinds of source
Two records do not make a decision
Choosing between Tenable and Qualys VMDR depends on which criteria matter to you, how heavily each one weighs, what your hard constraints are and who has to sign the result off. DecisionOS takes this same evidence pool, scores it against the criteria of your actual decision and produces a memo that holds up in front of a board and an auditor.