ManageEngine Vulnerability Manager Plus vs Nuclei

ManageEngine Vulnerability Manager Plus identifies and assesses vulnerabilities across a network and helps teams prioritize and remediate them. Its risk prioritization uses AI-based scores, CVSS severity, EPSS and active attack trends. It includes out-of-the-box policies for more than 130 CIS benchmarks and supports downloading, testing and deploying patches across operating systems and more than 1,500 third-party applications. Pre-built, tested scripts can mitigate zero-day vulnerabilities. The product can discover network devices, scan firmware for vulnerabilities and remediate identified threats, but network-device management is on-premises only and requires extra licenses. Vulnerability Manager Plus supports Windows and Linux; macOS support is limited to patch management. It offers a free edition and a 30-day trial with unlimited endpoints. Listed annual prices include Professional On-Premises at $695 a year and Professional Cloud at $895 a year, each for 100 workstations and one technician. Enterprise options are listed at $1,195 a year on-premises and $1,545 a year in the cloud, on the same workstation and technician basis.

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.