Open Source Alternatives to Nessus

A vulnerability scanning solution that identifies security issues, missing patches, and misconfigurations across operating systems, devices, and applications. It provides vulnerability scoring using CVSS v4, EPSS, and VPR to help users prioritize critical threats. The software includes pre-built policies for configuration and compliance audits, as well as customizable reporting to summarize security posture. It is designed for security practitioners, network penetration testers, cybersecurity students, and small to medium-sized business security administrators. The tool can be deployed on various platforms, including Raspberry Pi, and offers both professional and expert tiers with capabilities extending to web application and external attack surface scanning. It utilizes dynamically compiled plugins to increase scan performance and efficiency for the user.

Whether you want to cut software costs or escape vendor lock-in, these open source alternatives to Nessus give you an option you fully own. You can self-host them, so your data stays on infrastructure you control. This page lists 1 open source alternative to Nessus. The most popular is ProjectDiscovery. It uses the MIT license and ships an official Docker image.