Aikido Virtual Machine Scanning vs Rapid7 Nexpose: Side-by-Side Comparison (2026)

Aikido Virtual Machine Scanning

Mid-market and enterprise teams managing mixed VM estates in production will find real value in Aikido Virtual Machine Scanning's agentless approach, which eliminates the operational friction of deploying agents across unstable or legacy infrastructure. The differential scanning feature meaningfully reduces bandwidth overhead in large environments, and severity recalculation based on VM purpose prevents alert fatigue from false positives tied to workload context. Skip this if you need deep OS hardening assessment or compliance-specific checks; Aikido prioritizes vulnerability detection over the broader configuration and policy evaluation you'd get from platforms like Qualys or Rapid7.

Rapid7 Nexpose

Mid-market and enterprise security teams managing on-premises infrastructure will get the most from Rapid7 Nexpose because its Real Risk Score actually deprioritizes noise by factoring in exploit availability and vulnerability age, not just CVSS severity. The tool covers NIST ID.AM and ID.RA effectively through asset discovery, dynamic tagging, and VMware/AWS integration that keeps pace with environment changes. Skip this if you need cloud-native vulnerability scanning across containerized workloads; Nexpose is built for traditional datacenter and hybrid environments where you own the infrastructure.