Product comparison: Detectify vs. Tenable

Tenable

Pros

• Holistic view of the entire IT estate, from external web servers to internal workstations and cloud infrastructure.
• Through purchasing its VPR and Attack Path Analysis, it excels at showing how an application vulnerability fits into the organization’s broader risk profile.,
• Scans internal assets to find a wider range of issues beyond the application layer, including patch status and configuration compliance, providing complete security audits.

Cons

• The sheer volume of data from all asset types can create significant noise for an AppSec team whose focus is strictly on the application layer, requiring more effort to triage and isolate relevant findings.
• A full deployment requires a considerable upfront investment in configuration, scanner deployment, and credential management, resulting in a steeper learning curve and a longer time-to-value.
• Its reliance on a mix of assessment techniques (like version checking) can produce findings that require more interpretation and validation by the AppSec team before being sent to developers, compared to a purely payload-based approach.

Detectify

Pros

• Its primary advantage is the low-noise nature of its results. By using payload-based testing from elite ethical hackers, it delivers findings that are demonstrably exploitable and immediately actionable, reducing validation time for the AppSec team.
• The high credibility of the findings streamlines the remediation workflow. Handing developers a vulnerability that is proven to be exploitable reduces friction and debate, leading to faster fixes.
• The platform is designed for speed and simplicity. AppSec teams can get started quickly by providing their domains, achieving value almost immediately without needing a significant investment in complex configuration or training.

Cons

• It cannot perform deep scans of internal networks or provide context on how an external flaw might be chained with an internal vulnerability.
• It is a best-of-breed AppSec tool, not a comprehensive platform for managing the full spectrum of cyber risk, which can be a requirement for compliance programs.

In-depth comparison: Visibility and Context

For an Application Security Engineer, the primary goal is to find actionable, high-fidelity vulnerabilities in web applications and their related infrastructure. The choice between a specialized tool like Detectify and a platform like Tenable comes down to the scope of your team’s responsibility and the type of security context you find most valuable for driving remediation.

The core scope of the two platforms is fundamentally different. Detectify operates with an “outside-in,” attacker-centric point of view. It is a purpose-built platform designed to discover and test the external, internet-facing attack surface with a deep focus on web applications and APIs. Its mission is to find currently exploitable vulnerabilities as a real-world attacker would. In contrast, Tenable follows an “inside-out and outside-in” philosophy. It aims to provide a holistic map of the entire organization’s cyber exposure, from internal servers and cloud infrastructure to the external perimeter, positioning itself as the single source of truth for all technology risk.

Visibility: Mapping the Attack Surface

When it comes to visibility, the key question for an AppSec buyer is, “What web assets do I have, and are they exposed?” Detectify’s “Surface Monitoring” provides external visibility, operating as a specialized attack surface tool. It continuously scans public sources to discover internet-facing domains and web applications, excelling at uncovering forgotten assets like unknown marketing sites that fall outside of central IT’s purview. But it’s not just a discovery tool, Surface Monitoring also tests each and every asset for vulnerabilities, making it possible for AppSec teams to select a root domain and enable continuous testing on their entire attack surface. Surface Monitoring also recommends assets to scan deeper with their other product, Application Scanning. This means that a user can regularly update their testing even if they don’t have visibility of what is being released into production, something that is increasing with AI agents.

Tenable provides a much broader scope of visibility. It combines an external ASM module, similar in function to Detectify’s, with a suite of internal discovery tools, including active network scanners, passive monitors, and endpoint agents. This allows Tenable to create an asset inventory that includes everything from web servers and APIs to firewalls, workstations, and OT devices. While this visibility is incredibly powerful for a CISO or a large security organization, it can introduce significant noise for an AppSec team whose charter is limited to the application layer. The critical difference lies in the depth: Tenable can perform deep, credentialed scans on internal hosts for a complete software and configuration audit, whereas Detectify’s visibility stops at the external perimeter.

In-depth comparison: Assessment

While both Detectify and Tenable are designed to find security flaws, their fundamental methodologies for assessment are vastly different, leading to distinct outcomes that cater to different needs within a security program.

Tenable’s vulnerability assessment is built on the foundation of its Nessus engine. This engine employs a broad-spectrum approach, utilizing a massive library of plugins – or vulnerability tests – to assess a wide variety of assets. Its methodology is a mix of techniques: it performs version checking by comparing service banners against a database of known vulnerable software; it conducts deep configuration auditing via authenticated scans to check for compliance with security benchmarks; and for certain vulnerabilities, it uses “safe” payloads to confirm a flaw’s existence. 

Detectify, on the other hand, employs a much more focused and specialized assessment methodology. Its engine is entirely payload-based. This means that for every test it runs, it sends a carefully crafted payload designed to actively exploit a potential vulnerability, rather than relying on version checking. If Detectify reports a vulnerability, it’s because it successfully executed a payload and received a response that confirmed the flaw. This attacker-centric approach simulates how a real threat actor would probe a target, focusing exclusively on the application layer.

The intelligence that powers these assessment engines comes from two very different sources. Tenable maintains a large portfolio of tests for the Nessus engine. This results in incredibly broad and timely coverage for publicly disclosed vulnerabilities across a vast landscape of technologies.

Detectify’s intelligence model is one of its core value propositions. It relies on the Detectify Crowdsource network, a private, invite-only community of elite, vetted ethical hackers. These researchers submit vulnerability modules for novel and often unknown attack techniques that they are successfully using in real-world engagements. This provides Detectify with a highly curated and cutting-edge library of tests that often go beyond standard CVEs, focusing on complex business logic flaws and creative exploit chains that traditional scanners might miss. 

Detectify also leverages its internal security research team, and Alfred, their AI Security Research Agent who can find POCs for CVEs online and build them into their assessment engine. 

API Security Testing

Detectify approaches API testing with its dynamic, payload-based DAST engine. Our dynamic approach allows for a massive scale of test variations. For certain tests like prompt injection, the number of potential payload permutations is theoretically over 9.2 quintillion. For command injections, we utilize a library of over 330,000 payloads. This method is highly effective for finding exploitable vulnerabilities in both known and “shadow” APIs that may have been discovered by its EASM but are not formally documented.

Tenable’s Web App Scanning (WAS) product provides a “white-box” DAST approach to API security. Its primary method for API testing involves importing formal API definitions, such as OpenAPI (Swagger) or Postman collections. By ingesting the API schema, the scanner gains a complete map of all documented endpoints, parameters, and expected data formats. It can then methodically test each part of the defined API for vulnerabilities. 

These differing methodologies lead to different types of findings. Tenable provides a clear risk picture, which often includes a wide spectrum of issues that must be triaged using the VPR score to identify the truly risky items. Detectify’s payload-based approach is optimized for high signal and low noise. The goal is to reduce the time security teams spend validating findings. Because every reported vulnerability has been confirmed with an exploit payload, the rate of false positives is exceptionally low, and the results can be sent to developers with a high degree of confidence.

In-depth comparison: Usability

Detectify vs. Tenable: A Usability Comparison

Detectify is built for speed and simplicity. It is regularly cited as “easy to set up and manage.” For an AppSec team, the onboarding process is streamlined: you provide your organization’s top-level domains, and Detectify’s Surface Monitoring begins discovering the external attack surface automatically. Configuring an application scan is similarly straightforward, with a clear focus on getting the DAST engine running against these discovered assets quickly. This low-friction setup allows a team to achieve value almost immediately, without a significant investment in training or complex configuration.

Tenable, by contrast, offers a significantly more complex onboarding experience. The usability here is split between its SaaS platform, Tenable.io and its on-premises solution, Tenable.sc, which is frequently described as dated and having a steep learning curve. Regardless of the platform, a full deployment requires a considerable upfront investment in configuration: deploying various scanner types, securely managing credentials for authenticated scanning across diverse systems, and fine-tuning granular scan policies to balance performance with thoroughness. This complexity is the necessary trade-off for the platform’s comprehensive visibility.

Conclusion: Which product should I choose?

Your choice depends on your team’s primary mission and biggest challenge.

Choose Detectify if your team is primarily focused on securing your external applications and APIs. It is a best-of-breed tool optimized for the AppSec team, delivering high-fidelity, exploitable findings that minimize validation overhead and reduce friction with developers.

Choose Tenable if your primary challenge is a lack of visibility and risk prioritization across a complex, hybrid enterprise. It is a massive and complex platform whose discovery, VPR, and Attack Path Analysis capabilities are necessary for managing a broad spectrum of cyber risk.