Today, computers and online systems can be attacked in many ways. This often happens because software is old, settings are wrong, or new problems are found that no one has fixed yet.
Vulnerability management tools regularly check these systems to find security problems. They identify weak areas, show which issues are most serious, and help fix them before hackers can cause any harm.

What Is Vulnerability Management?

Vulnerability management is a continuous, risk‑driven practice to discover, assess, prioritize, and fix weaknesses across source code, pipelines, cloud infrastructure, workloads, and applications before they’re exploited.

The objective isn’t just to find every issue; it’s to reduce exploitable risk and shrink blast radius where it matters to the business.

1. Tenable Nessus
2. Qualys Vulnerability Management
3. Rapid7 InsightVM
4. OpenVAS (Greenbone)
5. Microsoft Defender Vulnerability Management
6. IBM Security QRadar Vulnerability Manager (QVM)
7. CrowdStrike Falcon Spotlight
8. BeyondTrust Vulnerability Management
9. Snyk (for Application Vulnerabilities)
10. Burp Suite (Web Vulnerability Management)

1. Tenable Nessus

Nessus is a leading vulnerability scanner tool in the field of cyber security and security testing. Nessus is a platform developed by Tenable that scans for security vulnerabilities in devices, applications, os, cloud services, and other network resources.

It is a remote security scanning tool, which scans a computer and raises an alert if it discovers any vulnerabilities that malicious hackers could use to gain access to any computer, that you have connected with any network.

Key Features:

• More than 70,000 vulnerability plugins
• It also supports configuration and compliance checks
• Performs scans with authenticated and unauthenticated access

2. Qualys Vulnerability Management

Qualys Vulnerability Management, now offered as VMDR (Vulnerability Management, Detection and Response), is a cloud-based platform used to continuously discover IT assets, scan them for vulnerabilities and misconfigurations, prioritize risk, and orchestrate remediation across on‑prem, cloud, and hybrid environments.

It is widely adopted as a commercial enterprise tool to measure and reduce cyber risk while supporting compliance standards like PCI-DSS, HIPAA, and GDPR.

3. Rapid7 InsightVM

Rapid7 InsightVM provides a scalable, efficient way to collect your vulnerability data, turn it into answers, and minimize risk. InsightVM leverages the latest analytics and endpoint technology to discover vulnerabilities in real-time, pinpoint their actual source, prioritize them for your business, facilitate collaboration with other teams, and confirm exposure has been reduced.

It extends the older Nexpose engine with cloud analytics, Live/Active Risk scoring, and integrated remediation workflows to turn scan results into actionable risk reduction. ​

4. OpenVAS (Greenbone)

OpenVAS is a commonly used vulnerability scanning tool provided by Greenbone Networks. It includes many built-in security tests and comes with a web-based interface for easy use.

It relies on a large, frequently updated library of Network Vulnerability Tests (NVTs) to find misconfigurations, outdated software, weak passwords, and other issues, then produces detailed reports with severity and remediation guidance.

Key Features:

• Free and open-source
• Regularly updated vulnerability feeds
• Network and web vulnerability scanning

5. Microsoft Defender Vulnerability Management

Microsoft Defender Vulnerability Management (MDVM) is Microsoft’s risk‑based vulnerability management solution built into the Defender platform that continuously discovers devices and software, assesses vulnerabilities and misconfigurations, and helps prioritize and remediate them using Microsoft threat intelligence (TI) and business context.

It is tightly integrated with Microsoft Defender for Endpoint and Microsoft 365 Defender, so organizations can manage endpoint risk and remediation from the same XDR ecosystem.

Key Features:

• Built-in Windows and endpoint coverage
• Focusing on the most risky security problems first
• Security configuration assessments

6. IBM Security QRadar Vulnerability Manager (QVM)

IBM QRadar Vulnerability Manager discovers vulnerabilities on your network devices, applications, and software adds context to the vulnerabilities, prioritizes asset risk in your network, and supports the remediation of discovered vulnerabilities.

It uses security intelligence to help organizations manage and prioritize vulnerabilities. QRadar Vulnerability Manager allows continuous monitoring of security issues, helps improve system configurations, and identifies missing software patches. It also prioritizes security risks by combining vulnerability data with network traffic, logs, firewall data, and intrusion prevention system (IPS) information.

It also supports both native QRadar scanners and third-party integrations (e.g., Nessus, Rapid7, OpenVAS) to unify vulnerability data within the QRadar console, enabling asset-based, traffic-aware, and event-driven vulnerability management.

7. CrowdStrike Falcon Spotlight

CrowdStrike Falcon Spotlight is a cloud-native vulnerability management module within the Falcon platform that provides real-time visibility into endpoint vulnerabilities without requiring additional agents, scanners, or network scans.

It leverages the existing Falcon sensor to continuously assess software, patches, and configurations on Windows, macOS, and Linux endpoints, including remote and off-network devices, then prioritizes risks using AI-driven exploit prediction.

Key Features:

• Agent-based scanning
• Real-time vulnerability detection
• No network scanning required

8. BeyondTrust Vulnerability Management

BeyondTrust Vulnerability Management, powered by the Retina scanning engine, is an enterprise solution for identifying, prioritizing, and remediating vulnerabilities across networks, hosts, cloud, containers, and virtual environments, with deep integration into BeyondTrust’s Privileged Access Management (PAM) platform.

It provides context-aware risk analysis, heat maps for exploit prioritization, and unified reporting to streamline vulnerability lifecycle management without needing multiple tools.

9. Snyk (for Application Vulnerabilities)

Snyk is a developer-first security platform focused on detecting, prioritizing, and fixing vulnerabilities in open-source code, container images, infrastructure as code (IaC), and cloud configurations early in the DevSecOps pipeline.

It emphasizes shift-left security with AI-powered scanning, automated fixes, and integrations into IDEs, CI/CD pipelines (e.g., GitHub, GitLab, Jenkins), and workflows like Jira to empower developers without slowing velocity.

10. Burp Suite (Web Vulnerability Management)

Burp suite is a web vulnerability scanner and one of the most well-known and used tools for performing web application security audits.

Burp suite sits in the middle, between the user’s browser and the web platform or mobile API to be audited, recording all traffic, passively detecting vulnerabilities and allowing modifications of HTTP requests made to detect anomalies and security problems.

Key Features:

• Automated and manual testing
• Web vulnerability scanning
• Detailed exploit analysis

Conclusion

The best vulnerability management tool always depends on your environment. For comprehensive enterprise coverage with minimal integration friction, prioritize Qualys VMDR for hybrid/multi-cloud scale or Rapid7 InsightVM for workflow-driven remediation – both excel in prioritization and broad asset support.