Tenable pain points

Based on user feedback, we’ve listed the main pain points that we keep on hearing regarding Tenable vulnerability management:

• Siloed tools: Tenable is a collection of siloed modules that need to be licensed and maintained separately and require you to constantly switch between different consoles, making effective prioritization across the board impossible. Even if you license Tenable One that offers a unified view, you still need to install all the other tools as well.
• Insufficient prioritization: For agentless unauthenticated scans, Tenable has a high rate of false-positives. Tenable’s limited contextual visibility, ineffective prioritization, and insufficient exception handling make users feel like they’re drowning in a ‘sea of alerts’.
• Not actionable: Inadequate remediation guidance makes taking action on findings more difficult than it should be. Tenable doesn’t allow you to easily create tickets (you must write your own Python script) and cannot track and verify that tickets have been resolved.
• Lack of attack surface visibility: Tenable doesn’t offer a complete and unified view of assets and associated threat exposures across diverse environments.
• Requires too much manual effort: Tenable users often still need to resort to a manual process for triaging, with the use of spreadsheets. Setting up and integrating Tenable products with other security tools, while possible, can sometimes present configuration challenges.
• Slow and resource intensive scans: Complex scans, particularly those involving credentials and extensive checks, can take a long time to complete. Insufficient hardware resources (CPU, RAM, disk space) dedicated to Tenable products can lead to slow performance and data corruption, especially in virtualized environments.
• Clunky reporting: Creating tailored reports that provide meaningful insights for business leaders can be time-consuming and doesn’t provide granular options.
• Complicated licensing: Following Tenable licensing requirements and understanding license limitations can be a challenge. Tenable cost is seen by many organizations as too expensive.

What is Mondoo?

Mondoo is a Tenable alternative that identifies, prioritizes, and addresses vulnerabilities and misconfigurations in your entire IT infrastructure and SDLC from a single interface — covering on-prem, cloud, SaaS, and endpoints. Unlike siloed approaches, Mondoo enables you to quickly understand your most urgent risks and initiate fast remediation, ensuring optimized security efforts and significantly improving security posture. 

Mondoo doesn’t just detect vulnerabilities and misconfigurations and then leave you on your own. Instead, Mondoo:

1. Tells you what to tackle first for the biggest impact
2. Explains exactly how to fix it
3. Automates the remediation process

We call this The Mondoo Flow - the process that reduces manual work, prioritizes your business needs, optimizes efforts, and accelerates mean time to resolution (MTTR).

Ten reasons why teams choose Mondoo vs Tenable

Here are ten ways in which Mondoo helps you overcome Tenable pain points:

#1. Effective and transparent risk prioritization

While Tenable Vulnerability Priority Rating (VPR) is a black box that produces too many false positives and noise, Mondoo determines the real risk of vulnerabilities in a transparent way, showing labels for contextual risk factors, such as process listening on open ports, internet exposure, and private keys on the machine, as well as compensating controls that reduce risk.

In addition, Mondoo is the only vulnerability management tool that shows you which remediations bring the biggest risk reduction for the lowest effort: we call this the Mondoo ‘Move the Needle’ dashboard. The dashboard shows the current space risk and identifies the top actions for risk reduction along with ‘take action’ buttons for fast mobilization. Remediations are ordered by highest impact and lowest effort, so it’s immediately clear where you can get your next biggest quick win.

#2. Quick path to remediation

Mondoo quickly gets you from discovery to remediation by providing the following:

• Real, actionable remediation steps tailored to your infrastructure, as well as code snippets for Ansible, Terraform, PowerShell, Bash, CloudFormation, and more.
• All fixes are validated by Mondoo—no copy/paste from StackOverflow.
• Native ITSM integrations (Jira, Zendesk, GitHub Issues, GitLab, Azure DevOps, and more).
• Tickets include full context, prioritization information, and guided remediation so platform engineers can quickly take action without having to communicate back and forth to get the required information.
• Tickets are synced, tracked, verified, and automatically re-opened if drift occurs.

#3. Single, unified dashboard

Mondoo is one centralized platform that covers your entire IT environment and SDLC - without having to pay for extra modules. This allows you to get visibility into your entire environment and prioritize risks without having to switch tools. Mondoo covers:

• Cloud providers: AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Kubernetes, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), and VMware.
• SaaS applications: GitHub, GitLab, Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, Okta, and Slack.
• Operating systems: Linux, macOS, Windows, FreeBSD, and AIX.
• CI/CD pipelines: Azure Pipelines, CircleCI, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI/CD, and Jenkins.
• Infrastructure as Code (IaC): CloudFormation, Terraform, Ansible, Kubernetes manifests, and Dockerfiles.
• Container registries: AWS Elastic Container Registry, Azure Container Registry, Google Container Registry, and Docker Hub.
• Network scanning: Domain scanning, Shodan host/IP results.
• Ingest from third-party security tools: MS Defender for Cloud, SentinelOne, and CrowdStrike.

#4. Full asset inventory of your IT infrastructure

Mondoo provides a full inventory of all your assets, including cloud, on-prem, SaaS, endpoints, and applications. This means you can search every asset for affected software instantly to respond to threats, including for zero-days, even before a CVE is released. It also enables you to discover shadow IT and make sure these systems are secure.

#5. Out-of-the box compliance support

Mondoo includes 300+ out-of-the-box policy templates for compliance frameworks (such as SOC 2, PCI DSS, NIS2, HIPAA, and NIST) and CIS benchmarks. Tenable only supports a limited number of frameworks and doesn’t provide comprehensive visibility. In addition, Tenable custom checks are very difficult to write and require a lot of regular expressions. With Mondoo, custom policies are easy to create, and we even provide an AI Policy Generator to help with this.

#6. Superior shift left security

Where Tenable only provides limited support for IaC scanning, Mondoo offers IaC scanning for CloudFormation, Terraform, Ansible, Kubernetes manifests, and Dockerfiles with CI/CD integrations. Mondoo also covers code runtimes like Python and NodeJS.

#7. Flexible reporting

Whereas creating reports with Tenable often means working with spreadsheets, Mondoo allows you to create security and compliance reports with one click, for all assets or specific workspaces, show SLA levels, track progress of security efforts, and understand overall risk posture.

Mondoo also comes with a flexible business intelligence platform that allows you to easily create tailored reports for your needs. You can slice all Mondoo findings to your requirements and deliver automated reports and dashboards that make your work shine to the business. Unlike Tenable, this is fully integrated with Mondoo and doesn't require manual workarounds.

#8. Less manual work, more automation

Mondoo reduces manual work in many ways by offering synced ticketing, effective prioritization, a move the needle dashboard, comprehensive and verified remediation steps and code, automated reporting, and easy deployment. 

Mondoo also offers further automation through the use of Policy as Code and by integrating Mondoo in an Ansible or Terraform CI/CD Pipeline to automatically suggest and apply fixes (after human approval). If drift is detected, Mondoo fixes issues autonomously.

By automating more processes, Mondoo accelerates triage and remediation, creating a more secure environment and leaving teams more time to focus on higher value tasks.

#9. Easy and flexible deployment

Tenable is complex to use and requires extensive training to be able to use the platform. Mondoo has been built with intuitiveness in mind, and enables users with different skill levels to leverage the platform to complete their tasks effectively. While Tenable Enclave is highly complex to set up, Mondoo offers straightforward deployment options for private clouds.

#10. Predictable pricing

Mondoo is licensed as one unified platform, making pricing straightforward and predictable. With Tenable, costs can escalate rapidly with add-on modules and pricing tiers like VMDR/TruRiskScore. Contact us for a price comparison.

What our customers say

“Before Mondoo we had a sea of red with no clear path forward. By adopting Mondoo, we were able to identify the most important things to address so that by the time we had it fully enabled, we had only a handful of issues.”

Todd Bradfute, Senior Director of Security & Technology at SimpleRose

“Mondoo saves us on average 10 minutes per vulnerability by eliminating the need to research remediations and write the Ansible code ourselves.”

Karl Fischer, CIO at Obsidian Systems

“One of the main reasons we stayed away from Tenable and Rapid7 and other tools like that is because they rely heavily on agents. The fewer agents I have on my boxes, the happier I am.”

Austin Palmer, Head of Cybersecurity and Compliance at Campminder

Conclusion

At Mondoo, we believe that security and compliance findings must be actionable. This means that we don’t only tell you what’s wrong, we also tell you how to fix it - while automating the process as much as possible.

The result? Mondoo saves teams many hours of manual work, reduces friction between security and platform engineering teams, and allows organizations to focus on strategic security efforts instead of just being reactive.

Where Tenable gives you a list of issues, Mondoo actually gives you actionable information that eliminates investigation and accelerates remediation. Want to see it for yourself? Schedule a demo to experience the Mondoo difference.

FAQ

How long does it take to deploy Mondoo?

Mondoo can be deployed in a matter of minutes with agentless cloud snapshot and remote connectivity scanning for AWS, Azure, GCP, and OCI. Mondoo also offers lightweight agents for on-prem, containers and endpoints, across all operating systems: Linux, Windows, Mac, BSD, and AIX. 

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What are the benefits of using Mondoo?

Mondoo reduces manual work, customizes to fit your business needs, optimizes efforts, and accelerates mean time to resolution (MTTR).

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Interested but not ready to make a full switch yet? 

Mondoo and Tenable can function side-by-side. Try out Mondoo in one of your environments, and experience the difference for yourself. Believe us, you’ll soon be counting the days to make the full switch.

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How is Mondoo licensed?

Mondoo is licensed per covered asset. Since Mondoo is licensed as one unified platform, pricing is straightforward and predictable, plus offers a lot more value at lower cost than Tenable.

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