About Nessus
Nessus, made by Tenable, is one of the most widely used vulnerability assessment scanners in the world. It scans networks, systems, and applications to identify known vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and compliance gaps. Nessus Professional is licensed per scanner with no per-asset fee, making it cost-effective for mid-size organizations. Nessus Expert adds web application scanning, external attack surface scanning (5 domains/quarter), and infrastructure-as-code scanning for Terraform and Kubernetes. Pricing increased effective March 2, 2026.
AI Agent Use Cases
- Unlimited IP scanning with no per-asset fee on a per-scanner license
- Over 180,000 plugins covering CVEs, misconfigurations, and compliance checks
- Credentialed and uncredentialed scanning modes
- Web application scanning for up to 5 FQDNs (Nessus Expert only)
- External attack surface discovery for up to 5 domains per quarter (Expert only)
- Infrastructure-as-code scanning for Terraform and Kubernetes configs (Expert only)
Available Actions
These are the specific actions that AI agents can perform with this tool