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SPECIFICTION
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Nuclei vs XBOW

Nuclei

nuclei.projectdiscovery.io

XBOW

xbow.com

Side by side

FigureNucleiXBOW
Price fromFree—
Free planYes—
Free trial——
Open source——
Web—Yes
WindowsYes—
macOSYes—
LinuxYes—
API—Yes
Self-hostedYes—
Plans published11
Spec score · Web Application Security Scanners8.3 (#5)6.6 (#20)
Spec score · Vulnerability Scanning Software8.4 (#8)6.5 (#27)
IntegrationsThe project README lists Jira, Splunk, GitHub, Elastic, and GitLab integrations.XBOW documentation names Jira, Microsoft Sentinel, and Security Copilot as integrations.

Plans

Nuclei

  • Nuclei CLIFree

Nuclei pricing →

XBOW

  • Usage-based pricingPriced on request

XBOW pricing →

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.

Visit nuclei.projectdiscovery.io

XBOW

XBOW has no write-up on Specifiction yet; its figures are above.

Visit xbow.com