Why choose Qualys over Aqua for hybrid environments?

Aqua Security designs its platform primarily for cloud-native assets, which inevitably creates visibility gaps for legacy virtual machines and on-premises servers. Qualys TotalCloud secures your entire hybrid estate, encompassing cloud, on-premises, mobile, and OT/IoT assets. This delivers a complete, unified risk posture that niche container solutions simply cannot match.

How does Qualys reduce Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)?

Organizations naturally reduce their Total Cost of Ownership by consolidating multiple disparate point solutions into the single Qualys platform. TotalCloud unifies CSPM, CWPP, CIEM, KSPM, and vulnerability management behind a unified agent and flexible licensing model. This directly eliminates the need to purchase, integrate, and maintain separate specialized tools like Aqua.

How does automated remediation differ between Qualys and Aqua?

Aqua focuses heavily on blocking attacks at runtime, essentially putting a shield in front of an active vulnerability. Qualys advances your security posture by automating the actual fix. Using our QFlow™ technology and integrated patch management, you automatically deploy patches and configuration fixes to permanently eliminate the root cause of the risk.

Can Qualys TotalCloud align Developers and Security teams effectively?

Absolutely. Qualys seamlessly integrates into your existing CI/CD pipelines, including Jenkins and Azure DevOps, to catch risks long before deployment. Our unique vulnerability propagation feature tracks risks continuously from build to runtime, ensuring developers and security personnel share the exact same accurate context without needing redundant system scans.

How does Qualys handle enterprise compliance as compared to Aqua?

Aqua limits its compliance checks mostly to cloud configurations and container benchmarks. Qualys provides continuous monitoring and automated evidence collection across your entire IT landscape for over 40 global regulatory frameworks. This means you maintain strict adherence to complex mandates like PCI DSS 4.0 and NIST 800-53 with minimal manual administrative effort.

What makes Qualys TruRisk superior to generic CVSS scoring?

Generic CVSS scores only tell you the theoretical severity of a flaw, which leads to massive alert fatigue. Qualys TruRisk correlates vulnerability data with real-time threat intelligence, actual exploitability, and specific asset criticality. This intelligent approach quantifies the true financial risk to your business, allowing your team to confidently prioritize the critical 5% of exposures.

How does Qualys detect zero-day threats in containers?

While many tools rely on static signatures to find malware, Qualys employs advanced Deep Learning AI paired with kernel-safe eBPF sensors. This combination continuously monitors process, network, and file behavior in real-time. By analyzing runtime drift and anomalous activities, Qualys proactively detects and quarantines novel zero-day attacks that traditional static analysis misses entirely.

Does Qualys secure the full container lifecycle including runtime or does it just scan images?

Qualys delivers complete container security spanning every stage of the container lifecycle, from image scanning in CI/CD pipelines and registry monitoring to runtime protection. With integrated drift detection, malware scanning, and real-time threat monitoring, Qualys ensures threats and vulnerabilities are identified and remediated both before deployment and during production.

Does Qualys have coverage for serverless scanning?

Yes. Qualys provides security for serverless environments by scanning serverless functions for vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and embedded secrets. This enables organizations to extend risk management and compliance capabilities to modern serverless workloads, helping to identify and remediate security issues wherever cloud-native code runs.

Qualys TotalCloud vs Aqua Security: CNAPP Comparison (2026)

Overview

Capabilities

Platform Apps

Risk Operations Center (ROC)

Vulnerability & Configuration Management

Compliance

Asset Management

Risk Remediation

Threat Detection & Response

Cloud Security

Use Cases

Segments

Customers

Resources

Research

Events

On-Demand

Support

Partners

Company