Comparison

Intruder alternatives for small teams in 2026

The five Intruder alternatives worth a small team's time in 2026: CloudKey VulnMonitor (continuous CVE-to-inventory matching, published pricing from $99/mo), Pentest-Tools.com (scanner with per-asset plans), Tenable Nessus Professional (the classic scanner license), Greenbone OpenVAS (free and self-hosted), and Qualys VMDR (enterprise-grade, quote-based).

Intruder removed flat prices from its public pricing page in 2026; plans are quoted per target license with a 5-license minimum. If that sent you looking, this page compares the realistic options for a team without a security department. CloudKey builds VulnMonitor, the first entry, so weigh our verdicts with that in mind. Everything was verified on June 11, 2026.

5 real options
Pricing verified June 2026
Small-team lens
Honest trade-offs

Try VulnMonitor free for 14 days Jump to the table

CloudKey VulnMonitor $99/mo, on the site
Pentest-Tools.com per-asset calculator
Nessus Professional $4,790/yr list
OpenVAS / Greenbone CE free, self-hosted
Qualys VMDR quote-based
Intruder quote-based, 5-license min

Verified against vendor sites and G2, June 11, 2026.

The field at a glance

What the shortlist actually looks like

5: Realistic options for a team without a security department
4: Of the 5 publish their price; Qualys is quote-based
$99: VulnMonitor entry price per month, published
$4790: Nessus Professional 1-year list price

Every figure sourced from vendor sites or G2 and dated. No invented benchmarks.

Why teams look

Why small teams shop for an Intruder alternative

The Intruder vulnerability scanner is capable, and nothing here says otherwise. The friction for small teams is commercial: as of June 11, 2026 its pricing page shows four plans but no numbers, the published calculator is gone, and cost is quoted per infrastructure or application license with a minimum of five. Third-party listings put the Essential plan from $149/mo. For a five-person company that wants a predictable line item, a quote-based per-target meter is work before the tool ever runs.

The right alternative depends on what you actually need. If the job is "scan my external IPs every week", you want another scanner, and three of the options below are scanners. If the job is "tell me which of this week's CVEs affect what we run, and which to patch first", you do not need scan traffic at all; you need intelligence matched to an inventory, which is what VulnMonitor does. Be clear about the question before picking the tool.

At a glance

Five alternatives, side by side

Published facts only. Where a vendor does not publish a number, the table says so.

All details verified against vendor sites and G2 on June 11, 2026.
Feature	CloudKey VulnMonitor	Pentest-Tools.com	Nessus Professional	OpenVAS / Greenbone CE	Qualys VMDR
Type	CVE intelligence matched to your inventory	Cloud scanner + pentest toolkit	Scanner license (you run it)	Open-source scanner (self-hosted)	Enterprise VM platform
Published pricing	From $99/mo annual, on the site	Per-asset plans from 5 assets; calculator on site	$4,790/yr list	Free (GPL)	Quote-based
Free option	14-day Pro trial, no card	Limited free edition	7-day trial	Entirely free	Trial via sales
Runs scans against your systems	No scan traffic; inventory matching	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Ops effort to run	Low: load inventory, read ranked findings	Low: hosted	Medium: install and maintain the scanner	High: build, tune and update it yourself	Medium-high: enterprise deployment
Exploitation-evidence ranking (KEV/EPSS)	Core of the product	CVSS-led with risk context	CVSS-led; VPR in higher Tenable tiers	CVSS-led	Has its own TruRisk scoring
Best for	Teams with an inventory who want patch priorities, not scan dumps	Teams that want cheap, hosted scanning plus pentest tooling	A practitioner who wants the classic scanner under their own control	Zero budget, real Linux skills, time to invest	Mid-market and up with procurement patience

Nessus Professional price is Tenable's published 1-year list price. Pentest-Tools.com prices vary by asset count and tier; check their calculator. Qualys does not publish VMDR pricing.

Two benchmarks that decide it

Money and time, side by side

Most shortlists collapse once you chart the two costs that hit a small team: the monthly bill and the hours someone has to spend running the tool.

Monthly cost of the published options

Charted as monthly equivalents of published list prices. Two of the six vendors on this page, Intruder and Qualys, publish no flat figure at all, which is itself a data point: if you cannot price it from the website, budget a sales cycle before the tool ever runs.

OpenVAS is free in license cost and paid in your hours
Nessus is $4,790 once a year, run and maintained by you
VulnMonitor and Pentest-Tools.com are the self-serve hosted lane

OpenVAS / Greenbone CE $0 + your hours

CloudKey VulnMonitor Starter $99/mo

Intruder Essential, per G2 from $149/mo

Nessus Professional $399/mo equivalent

Nessus shown as $4,790/yr divided by 12. Pentest-Tools.com omitted: price varies by asset count (calculator on their site). Qualys VMDR is quote-based.

Hours someone on your team has to spend

The second meter is operational. A hosted service that ranks findings for you costs minutes a day. A self-hosted scanner costs setup days and maintenance hours that never fully stop. If nobody on the team owns that time, the cheap option quietly becomes the expensive one.

Hosted intelligence: load inventory once, read the morning queue
Scanner licenses: someone installs, updates, tunes and triages
Self-hosted open source: budget a setup day plus monthly care

VulnMonitor . hosted, ranked for you low

Pentest-Tools.com . hosted scanner low

Nessus Pro . you run it medium

Qualys VMDR . enterprise rollout medium-high

OpenVAS . you build it high

Qualitative scale; it mirrors the ops-effort row of the matrix above, not a measured benchmark.

The five options

Each alternative, on one card

Name, price, strengths, trade-offs and a one-line verdict per vendor. Full disclosure on card one: VulnMonitor is our product.

CloudKey VulnMonitor

CVE intelligence matched to your inventory. A different answer to the problem, not another scanner.

Our product
$99/mo published
14-day trial, no card

Strengths

Matches every published CVE against the inventory you load: Excel import, API, or by hand
Ranks hits by exploitation evidence: CISA KEV first, high EPSS second, CVSS after
Short ranked patch list instead of a thousand-finding scan report
Pro at $399/mo adds compliance reporting (ISO 27001, SOC 2, NIST), SSO, API, 500 assets

Trade-offs

Does not scan: it will not find a misconfigured bucket or an exposed admin panel
Pair with a periodic vulnerability assessment or pentest for hands-on coverage, ours or anyone's

Pentest-Tools.com

The closest like-for-like Intruder substitute on this list: hosted scanning with a public price calculator.

Per-asset plans
Limited free edition
Calculator on site

Strengths

Hosted scanner covering network and web application targets
Recon and exploitation toolkit that working pentesters actually use
Plans scale per asset from 5 assets; you can price it without talking to sales

Trade-offs

Scanner output still needs someone to triage it
Deeper exploitation features sit in the higher tiers

Tenable Nessus Professional

The scanner most security people learned on, at a public, flat price.

$4,790/yr list
You run it
7-day trial

Strengths

Excellent detection breadth, scan whatever you point it at
Price is public and flat: one license, one year, your machine

Trade-offs

You install, update and operate it yourself
Output is CVSS-ranked findings that need human triage
Continuous monitoring of a changing estate is a discipline you maintain

Greenbone OpenVAS (Community Edition)

The serious open-source scanner: genuinely free, if your time is.

Free (GPL)
Self-hosted
No asset caps

Strengths

Zero license cost, no asset caps
Respectable detection for network vulnerabilities

Trade-offs

You host it, update feeds, tune false positives and build your own reporting
Community feed coverage lags Greenbone's commercial feed
Price a setup day plus a few hours of care per month against the $99-149 tools

Qualys VMDR

A full enterprise vulnerability management platform, with the process that implies.

Quote-based
Agents + scanners
TruRisk scoring

Strengths

Asset discovery, patch orchestration and prioritization in one platform
Capability is not the question; fit is

Trade-offs

Assumes a security function exists to drive it
Small-team reviews consistently mention weight rather than gaps
Pricing is quote-based, so budget a procurement cycle

All prices and plan details verified against vendor sites and G2 on June 11, 2026. Where a vendor publishes nothing, the card says so.

How to choose

Three questions that settle it

Answer these before any demo and the list shrinks to one or two.

Do you need scan traffic?

Yes Pick a scanner: Pentest-Tools.com, Nessus or OpenVAS probe live targets, perimeter and web apps.
No Pick intelligence: VulnMonitor tells you which published CVEs hit your stack without touching production.

What is the real budget?

$0 OpenVAS. Free license, paid in your hours.
$99/mo VulnMonitor, published price. Or Pentest-Tools.com, per asset.
$4,790/yr Nessus Pro, for a practitioner with an annual tool budget.
Quote Qualys or Intruder, if procurement does the buying.

Who reads the output?

Analyst Scanner reports work when someone owns the triage hour every week.
Nobody You need ranked output: KEV and EPSS priorities that say what to patch first. The exact gap VulnMonitor was built for.

How this list was made

CloudKey builds VulnMonitor, so this page has a conflict of interest and says so. The mitigation is method: every price and plan detail above comes from vendor sites or G2, verified on June 11, 2026; where a vendor publishes nothing, the table says "quote-based" instead of guessing; and each entry names its trade-offs, including ours.

Verified June 11, 2026: intruder.io, pentest-tools.com, tenable.com, greenbone.net, qualys.com, G2
No invented ratings, no affiliate links, no pay-for-placement
Corrections: [email protected]

FAQ

Intruder alternatives, answered

What is the cheapest Intruder alternative?

OpenVAS (Greenbone Community Edition) is free software, but you pay in setup and maintenance hours. The cheapest hosted options with published prices are Pentest-Tools.com's entry tiers and CloudKey VulnMonitor at $99/mo billed annually with 100 assets included.

Is there a free Intruder alternative?

OpenVAS is fully free and open source if you can host and maintain it. Pentest-Tools.com has a limited free edition. VulnMonitor offers a 14-day Pro trial without a card rather than a permanent free tier.

Why did Intruder remove its public pricing?

Intruder has not said publicly, so we will not speculate on motive. The observable facts as of June 11, 2026: the pricing page lists four plans without figures, the former calculator is gone, and quotes are per target license with a 5-license minimum. Third-party listings such as G2 still show Essential from $149/mo.

Is CloudKey VulnMonitor a drop-in Intruder replacement?

No. Intruder scans targets; VulnMonitor matches published CVEs against your asset inventory and sends no traffic to your systems. Many teams find the intelligence approach answers the question they were actually asking a scanner; teams that need scan coverage should pick a scanner from this list or pair VulnMonitor with a periodic vulnerability assessment.

What about Rapid7, Tenable.io or other enterprise platforms?

They are credible products aimed above this page's audience. Rapid7 and Tenable's platform tiers price per asset with high entry counts, and Qualys VMDR (covered above) is quote-based. For a team without a security department, the realistic short list is the five compared here.

Next step

Want priorities, not another scan report?

Load your inventory into VulnMonitor and get every matching CVE ranked by KEV and EPSS at a price that is on the website. 14-day Pro trial, no card.

Start the 14-day Pro trial See how VulnMonitor works