On Wed, Jun 11, 2008 at 12:50 PM, Paul Mansfield
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> now none-free for any commercial usage, I was wondering if anyone's looked
> at the alternatives?
>
I've been a Nessus user since its very early days, been roughly 7
years now I believe. I've had a Nessus Direct Feed subscription for
about a year, and I'll maintain it. The plugins are what makes the
scanner, and the additional audit checks they used to offer
subscribers only were adequate to justify the relatively small cost
for my purposes.
I won't speak specifically to any of the open source alternatives as I
haven't tried them. I do believe Nessus provides significantly better
coverage with its plugins, and the cost is 5% or less of what most
competitive vendors charge. It takes a significant amount of resources
to develop the thousands of plugins Nessus has, and they typically add
100-200 plugins every week (I follow their plugin RSS feed). I very
seriously doubt if any of the competitive open source offerings are
adding even remotely that much just because of the time involved in
putting out that amount of work. Given that Nessus went closed source
because the community and numerous companies selling Nessus-based
appliances were contributing virtually nothing, I don't see any
similar projects getting the vast community support that would be
required to put together a truly competitive plugin set.
Given the price and the value, and my lack of any free time, I
personally don't have any interest in looking at alternatives. I am
also very curious of the experiences of others though.
