Intruder vs Nuclei

Intruder provides continuous vulnerability scanning for infrastructure, web applications, APIs, and cloud environments, with issue prioritization and remediation guidance. It ranks issues using exploit likelihood and real-world threat intelligence, while emerging-threat scans check systems within hours of new risks appearing. Cloud scans assess AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud environments for vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and exposures. Authenticated dynamic application testing covers customer-controlled web apps and APIs, including OWASP Top 10 checks. Supported targets also include external IP addresses, domains, subdomains, internal Windows, macOS, and Linux devices, and container images. Integrations include cloud platforms, code hosts, issue trackers, chat services, Vanta, and Drata. Its API can manage targets, view issues, start scans, and retrieve results. A free plan and 14-day trial are listed. The free plan covers five infrastructure targets and weekly external scans, but does not include web apps. Internal target scanning is available only on Pro and Enterprise plans. All customers receive live chat support.

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.