Escape vs Nuclei
Escape
escape.tech
Nuclei
nuclei.projectdiscovery.ioSide by side
| Figure | Escape | Nuclei |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | — | Free |
| Free plan | — | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | — |
| Windows | — | Yes |
| macOS | — | Yes |
| Linux | — | Yes |
| API | Yes | — |
| Self-hosted | — | Yes |
| Plans published | 1 | 1 |
| Spec score · Web Application Security Scanners | 7.3 (#17) | 8.3 (#5) |
| Integrations | The homepage names Wiz for asset and risk context, and Cursor, Claude Code, and Gemini for AI-assisted remediation. | The project README lists Jira, Splunk, GitHub, Elastic, and GitLab integrations. |
| Who it is for | Escape describes its audience as security teams that are outnumbered by engineering teams and need continuous offensive security workflows. | The maker names security engineers and analysts, red teams, DevOps teams, bug bounty hunters, and penetration testers as Nuclei users. |
Plans
In their own words
Nuclei
Nuclei is a free, open-source vulnerability scanner for applications, infrastructure, cloud platforms, and networks. It uses YAML templates to define checks, drawing on more than 6,500 community-contributed templates; users can also create custom templates. Bulk and parallel scans, multiple target formats, and inclusion and exclusion filters are supported. Modules cover HTTP, DNS, TCP, headless, JavaScript, code, and file scanning, and authentication options include HTTP basic authentication and JWT. Nuclei can run in CI/CD pipelines, including through GitHub Actions, and export SARIF results to GitHub Code Scanning. It is distributed under the MIT License and is primarily a standalone CLI tool, with installation options including Go, Homebrew, Docker, GitHub, downloadable binaries, and Helm. It is actively developed, but has no LTS or stable version, so updates may bring breaking changes. Some templates can fuzz or take actions that risk denial of service; these are tagged and excluded from default scans. The tool is intended for security engineers, analysts, red teams, DevOps teams, bug bounty hunters, and penetration testers.