Detectify vs Qualys
This is a comparison between two different disciplines that both get filed under "vulnerability scanning". Detectify watches your external attack surface — domains, sub-domains, exposed applications — and tests it with detection modules built from a crowdsourced research network. Qualys is an enterprise suite that inventories everything you own, inside and out, and manages vulnerabilities across it with agents, scanners and compliance reporting. Picking between them is mostly deciding whether your problem is what you expose or what you operate.
Key Facts
- →Detectify is external-first: attack surface discovery and monitoring plus web application scanning.
- →Qualys is estate-first: agents and scanners across internal and external assets, with modules for cloud, containers and compliance.
- →Detectify's detection modules come from Crowdsource, a network of external researchers, so novel real-world payloads arrive quickly.
- →Qualys pricing is quote-based by module and asset count; Detectify is also quote-based.
- →Neither tests authorisation between users, which is where multi-tenant applications actually fail.
Quick Comparison
| Aspect | Detectify | Qualys |
|---|---|---|
| Primary lens | What you expose to the internetTie | Everything you operateTie |
| Attack surface discovery | Core product✓ Advantage | Available, not the focus |
| Internal and host scanning | No | Core product✓ Advantage |
| Detection freshness | Crowdsourced modules, fast on new exploitsTie | Vendor feed, very broadTie |
| Cloud posture and containers | Limited | Separate modules✓ Advantage |
| Compliance reporting | Basic | Extensive, audit-oriented✓ Advantage |
| Operational weight | Light: SaaS, little to run✓ Advantage | Heavy: needs an owner |
| Fit for a small team | Good✓ Advantage | Oversized |
| Fit for a large regulated estate | Partial coverage only | Built for it✓ Advantage |
| Authorisation and business logic | NoTie | NoTie |
What is Detectify?
External attack surface management with web application scanning. Discovers and monitors domains and sub-domains, flags exposure and misconfiguration, and tests with modules derived from its Crowdsource researcher network, which keeps detection close to what is being exploited in the wild.
What is Qualys?
Enterprise vulnerability and compliance platform. Agents and network scanners feed a central inventory covering hosts, cloud accounts, containers and web applications, with policy compliance, patch prioritisation and the reporting large organisations need for audits.
Where Your Risk Actually Sits
If you are a SaaS company running managed infrastructure, most of your genuine exposure is external: the sub-domain someone forgot, the staging environment left open, the API gateway with a permissive CORS policy. There is little internal estate to scan, and an agent-based suite spends its value where you have none. Detectify's model matches that shape.
If you run laptops, servers, an Active Directory domain and three clouds, the picture inverts. Your breach path likely starts internally, and knowing what your external surface looks like is necessary but nowhere near sufficient. That is what Qualys is for, and Detectify would leave most of your estate unlit.
What Crowdsourced Detection Buys You
Detectify's Crowdsource network turns real-world researcher findings into detection modules, which means coverage of a newly exploited technique can arrive quickly and reflect how attackers actually use it rather than how a vendor describes it. For an internet-facing surface, that currency is worth a lot.
Qualys trades currency for breadth: a very large vulnerability feed across a very large asset taxonomy, with the depth of maturity that large enterprises need for audits. Both are defensible; they are optimising different variables.
The Shared Blind Spot
Neither product can tell you that one of your customers can read another's data. Detectify will find the endpoint; Qualys will tell you the host is patched; neither knows which records belong to whom, because that is a property of your application and not of any signature.
For a multi-tenant product, that blind spot is the risk. Whichever of these you buy, price application-layer testing — authorisation across roles and tenants, business logic, attack chains — as a separate line rather than assuming the scanner reaches it.
When to Choose Each
Choose Detectify when…
- →Your exposure is mostly internet-facing web applications and DNS.
- →You have no dedicated platform owner and need something that runs itself.
- →Unknown or forgotten sub-domains are a live concern.
- →You want detection that tracks what researchers are exploiting now.
Choose Qualys when…
- →You have a substantial internal estate: endpoints, servers, directory services.
- →You need audit-grade compliance reporting across assets.
- →Cloud posture and container scanning belong in the same platform.
- →You have someone to own and tune the platform.
Can You Use Both?
Reasonable at scale and often how large organisations end up: Qualys as the estate-wide system of record, Detectify watching the external edge where new exposure appears fastest. For a small team, running both is paying twice for partial overlap — pick the one that matches where your breach would come from.
Verdict
Detectify if your risk is what you expose and you want it monitored without operating a platform. Qualys if your risk is what you operate and an auditor will ask for evidence across all of it. The mistake is treating them as competing quotes for the same job: they answer different questions, and the more useful exercise is deciding which question is yours. Then add application-layer testing, because neither answers that one.
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