Product comparison: Detectify vs. Qualys

Qualys

Pros

• Its unified platform provides a single pane of glass and powerful reporting capabilities that are ideal for satisfying broad compliance mandates and audit requests.
• With its Cloud Agents, Qualys provides unmatched, granular detail on the configuration, patch status, and software inventory of your known assets, both internal and external.
• For a mature security program, the platform’s immense feature set and configurability allow you to tune scanning and reporting to very specific GRC and technical requirements.

Cons

• Its signature-based scanning methodology generates a high volume of “potential” findings, creating a significant triage workload that can overwhelm a smaller team.
• The complex, feature-dense user interface requires a significant time investment to master, creating an operational burden and delaying your team’s time-to-value.
• Connecting technical vulnerabilities to business risk relies heavily on manual business application mapping or complex CMDB integrations, which can be difficult to maintain accurately at scale.

Detectify

Pros

• Its payload-based testing delivers high-confidence, exploitable findings, which means your lean team spends less time validating vulnerabilities and more time on remediation.
• The platform excels at continuous, outside-in discovery of your external attack surface, finding the forgotten subdomains and shadow IT that often pose the most immediate threat to your products.
• The intuitive, workflow-driven interface allows your team to get up and running almost immediately, ensuring rapid adoption and a quicker path to demonstrating risk reduction.

Cons

• Its primary focus is on the external attack surface, so it won’t provide the deep, host-level visibility into your internal servers and endpoints that is often required for comprehensive GRC audits.
• It lacks capabilities that make it a single source of truth for all enterprise-wide GRC and infrastructure reporting.
• While it finds application-level flaws effectively, it is not designed to be a comprehensive infrastructure scanner for tracking every potential CVE on internal network devices or servers.

In-depth comparison: Visibility and Context

Your team’s effectiveness hinges on two fundamental questions: “What assets do we have exposed?” and “Which of those assets actually matter?” A simple list of vulnerabilities is useless without the visibility to know you’re covering everything and the context to prioritize what to fix first. 

Both Qualys and Detectify offer solutions to this problem, but they approach it from different perspectives, each with distinct advantages for those leading or managing application security teams, including vulnerability management. 

So, how do Qualys and Detectify differ when it comes to giving me visibility into my attack surface and making sense of what I am exposing? 

Qualys is built to be the single source of truth for your entire IT estate. Its approach is to provide a deep, comprehensive inventory of all known assets and then enrich that data with technical context. The primary value is consolidating every server, workstation, and cloud instance into one unified view, which is powerful for compliance and audit reporting. This is ideal for a leader who needs a single pane of glass for broad GRC and infrastructure management responsibilities.

One aspect that Qualys excels at is allowing users to manually group individual technical assets (e.g., servers, databases) into a logical “Business Application.” This allows you to view risk through a business lens, but it requires an upfront and ongoing effort to create and maintain these mappings both in Qualys and whatever CMDB your organization is using. This becomes especially challenging when you don’t have visibility into your CMDB yet rely on it for speedy triaging.  

Detectify is purpose-built to solve the external attack surface problem from an attacker’s perspective. Its philosophy is that you can’t protect what you don’t know you’re exposing. The platform is designed to continuously discover your external assets and automatically provide the context needed to prioritize your team’s limited resources. This provides a near real-time map of your digital asset footprint, which is the primary concern for AppSec teams. Attack Surface Discovery is available in all product tiers and is updated every 24 hours. 

Instead of relying on CMDB integrations that are difficult to manage at scale, Detectify leverages automated classification, which means it automatically classifies the asset based on discovery data to provide insight into its purpose. It helps you understand if an exposed asset is a web app, what data it might use, or if it processes PII. This is how Detectify supports resource-constrained security teams, by helping them figure out what it is they are exposing, but if they should also vulnerability test that asset.

In-depth comparison: Assessment

The value of a vulnerability assessment tool is measured by the actionability of its findings. With a lean team you cannot afford to waste cycles triaging false positives or chasing vulnerabilities that pose no real risk. Your goal is to find what’s truly exploitable and fix it fast.

Qualys provides broad, compliance-driven coverage, while Detectify is engineered for high-confidence, AppSec-focused findings.

Qualys has its roots in traditional infrastructure scanning, and its assessment methodology reflects this. It is built to provide comprehensive coverage of known vulnerabilities across a vast landscape, which is a key requirement for GRC and compliance functions. Therefore, Qualys excels at identifying known CVEs. Its process typically involves fingerprinting the technology and version on a given asset (e.g., “Apache v2.4.53”) and reporting all publicly known vulnerabilities associated with that version. For GRC, this is ideal as it provides a comprehensive list of all potential risks for audit and compliance checks. The major operation consequence of Qualys is that its approach creates noise, resulting in teams spending hours to validate a ‘potential’ vulnerability finding. 

Detectify, on the other hand, is engineered to solve the operational challenges faced by modern AppSec teams: triage overhead and the emergence of novel threats. Its methodology prioritizes the exploitability and accuracy of findings.

Payload-based testing is Detectify’s core technical differentiator. Instead of just matching signatures, Detectify attempts to confirm a vulnerability’s presence by executing a non-destructive payload that emulates a real-world exploit. A finding is only created when the payload resolves, indicating the vulnerability is not just theoretically present but actively exploitable. For a team lead, this is a critical advantage: it provides high-confidence findings that significantly reduce the triage workload and allow your engineers to focus directly on remediation. 

But it goes beyond known CVEs, too. Detectify does not rely solely on public CVEs. Detectify’s system is designed to find novel, 0-day, and non-CVE vulnerabilities that traditional signature-based scanners will miss. Its assessment capabilities are powered by a multi-source model that combines:

• An internal security research team that builds its own tests.
• A private, crowdsourced community of elite ethical hackers who submit real-world, exploitable vulnerabilities.
• An AI researcher, Alfred, that parses newly disclosed CVEs and auto-generates payload-based tests from public proofs-of-concept.

But what about API scanning? It’s becoming a clear requirement for my organization to do business. 

Detectify’s API scanner is built on a proprietary engine designed for dynamic fuzzing, not just static checks. It probes the API with randomized and rotated payloads with every single scan, ensuring each assessment is unique. With a massive library of variations (e.g., over 330,000 payloads for command injection), it’s designed to discover vulnerabilities that static, schema-based checks would miss, even on an unchanged target.

Qualys’s API scanning capabilities are effective for identifying known issues in APIs defined by a specification like OpenAPI. It runs a set of checks for common vulnerabilities, which provides a solid baseline for compliance. However, it’s not clear what innovation Qualys is leading to secure its customer’s APIs.

In-depth comparison: Usability

“Usability” is not just a preference; it’s a direct measure of your team’s efficiency. With a lean team responsible for several domains in security, the right tool must act as a force multiplier, not an operational burden. A tool with poor usability consumes your most valuable resource—your engineers’ time—with a steep learning curve, complex configuration, and lengthy triage cycles.

Based on user feedback from platforms like G2 and Gartner, Qualys and Detectify present two starkly different usability paradigms.

The most common theme in user reviews is that Qualys is powerful but complex. The user interface is dense with features, modules, and configuration options. For a new user, this can be overwhelming. The platform’s strength lies in its high degree of configurability, which allows mature security programs to tune it precisely to their needs. However, this flexibility comes at the cost of a steep learning curve.

On the other hand, Detectify is engineered for efficiency. The platform is built around a clean, intuitive interface that guides users through the process of discovering assets, scanning them, and understanding the results. The workflow is logical and requires minimal training to grasp. This focus on simplicity is a core part of its value proposition.

Conclusion: Which product should I choose?

The choice between Qualys and Detectify is a choice between two distinct operational philosophies, each tailored to solve a different primary problem for a security leader.

Qualys stands as a comprehensive platform designed for broad visibility and compliance. Its strength lies in providing a single, auditable inventory for your entire IT estate, making it a powerful ally for GRC and infrastructure-focused vulnerability management programs. However, this comes with the operational cost of complexity, a significant triage burden for the AppSec team, and a reliance on manual processes to connect technical findings to business risk.

Detectify, in contrast, is the purpose-built solution for the modern, external-facing AppSec program. It is engineered for speed, efficiency, and actionability. By focusing on the attacker’s perspective, it provides a real-time map of your true external attack surface and delivers high-confidence, exploitable findings that minimize false positives. For the leader of a lean security team, Detectify acts as a force multiplier. Its intuitive usability and payload-based testing methodology reduce the operational drag of discovery and triage, allowing your engineers to focus their limited time on remediation.

Ultimately, your decision should be guided by your team’s primary objective. If your mandate is broad, compliance-driven coverage across a vast internal and external estate, and you have the resources to manage its complexity, Qualys is a proven choice. But if your mission is to efficiently reduce risk on your fast-moving external perimeter with a team that values speed and signal over noise, Detectify is engineered to help you succeed.