Axonius vs Balbix

Thinking whether to go for Axonius vs Balbix? Choosing the right vulnerability management software is critical for companies these days.

This article is going to dive into the Axonius vs Balbix debate and try to answer a key question.

Which is the better tool for vulnerability management, as well as other use cases? Value and suitability assessment: Let’s compare Axonius and Balbix to determine the best option for your company.

Let’s find out! Feature analysis: We’ve covered use cases and compared the key features of Axonius, Balbix, and an alternative solution.

Axonius vs Balbix – similarities and differences

Axonius and Balbix are both applications for vulnerability management, remediation guides, and asset discovery with several areas of overlap. Both Axonius and Balbix are popular tools used mostly for vulnerability management in companies. Both products have several similar features.

Critical execution details: Pay attention to the execution of specific features that may impact your decision.

They also have very different pricing plans. Let’s look at the details.

Axonius vs Balbix for vulnerability management – differences

In this section of the article, we’re really going to dig into the nitty-gritty of each area of product functionality. Tool selection: Depending on your use case, we’ll identify the better option between Axonius and Balbix.

Axonius for vulnerability management

Axonius provides a comprehensive solution to augment vulnerability management for all devices in your environment. It enables you to discover, track, prioritize, remediate, and report on all vulnerabilities. Axonius identifies vulnerabilities and provides full context to help you prioritize and expedite patching and remediation processes.

Axonius offers the following features:

• Asset and vulnerability visibility: Understand assets and link vulnerabilities to uncover meaningful threats and risks.
• Centralized vulnerability view: Manage vulnerabilities across all devices for easy visibility and control.

• Enhanced assessment coverage: Aggregate data from multiple sources and ensure scanner presence for comprehensive scans.
• Map vulnerabilities to assets: Enriches asset inventory data with recognized vulnerability databases to recognize the full measure of potential exposure.
• Automate remediation: Offers automation to help vulnerability remediation scale to keep up with an ever-growing IT landscape.

Balbix for vulnerability management

Balbix provides Risk-Based Vulnerability Management, enabling organizations to prioritize and mitigate their high-risk vulnerabilities before they can be exploited. With Balbix, you can continuously assess and identify cybersecurity issues such as CVEs, misconfigurations, weak and reused passwords, encryption issues, etc., across all your enterprise assets. Vulnerabilities are then prioritized based on 5 factors and dispatched to risk owners for automatic or supervised mitigation.

Balbix offers a breach likelihood dashboard, which shows unpatched vulnerabilities by breach likelihood and attack vectors, along with top risk insights and mean time to patch. The platform offers a systematic approach to exception handling and incorporates risk calculations and prioritization seamlessly. Balbix allows you to generate board-ready reports that show risk reduction progress and the value that your security program is driving for the business. Overall, Balbix provides contextual prioritization for security risks, threats, and exposures, empowering organizations to focus their remediation efforts on the greatest risks in their environment and track improvements to their overall security posture over time.

Both Axonius and Balbix will help you get the job done. But, depending on your use case, there are other options to consider.

Let’s look at the options in more detail now.

Better alternative for vulnerability management – Autobahn Security

Autobahn Security supports vulnerability management by:

• Hackability Score: Autobahn Security’s Hackability Score metric provides companies with a clear and accurate picture of their cybersecurity vulnerabilities and how they compare with their peers. This score helps businesses prioritize their remediation efforts and focus on vulnerabilities that pose the greatest risk.
• Cyber Fitness Workouts: Autobahn Security offers step-by-step remediation guides called Cyber Fitness Workouts, providing practical support for vulnerability assessment and remediation. These guides save time for IT security professionals, reducing the risk of human error and enabling focus on critical security tasks.

• Experienced Security Team: Autobahn Security has a team of experienced ethical hackers and security researchers, ensuring top-notch services and practical support. With decades of experience, the team is committed to responsive and knowledgeable customer support, delivering a seamless user experience for businesses seeking to enhance their cybersecurity posture.

Axonius vs Balbix for remediation guides – similarities and differences

In this section of the article, we’re really going to dig into the nitty-gritty of each area of product functionality for remediation guides. That way, we’ll be able to figure out which tool – Axonius or Balbix – is the best option depending on your use case.

Axonius for remediation guides

Axonius doesn’t have a specific tool for creating remediation guides. Here’s how to use the Axonius Vulnerability Management Module for remediation guidance:

• • The Axonius Vulnerability Management Module allows you to view assets from a vulnerability perspective. With this module, you can easily identify unique CVEs and determine the number of devices impacted by each specific threat. It enables you to swiftly identify exposed software, software versions, and vendors that pose risks to devices. This feature is essential in guiding remediation efforts.
  • Manage Across a Fleet of Devices: The Axonius Vulnerability Management Module allows you to manage vulnerabilities across an entire fleet of devices from a single view. You can identify threats for all devices across the entire attack surface and have confidence in the vulnerability inventory you’re managing. This comprehensive view of assets helps in prioritizing and managing remediation efforts.

• • Analyze and Prioritize Threats: Analyzing and prioritizing vulnerabilities is challenging, but with Axonius, you can incorporate contextual data from the National Vulnerabilities Database (NVD) and other third-party threat intelligence sources to better understand and assess urgency, relevancy, significance, and importance. The advanced query capability lets you reference contextual device data, such as operating system, installed software, and open ports, to deliver deep insights around vulnerabilities and the devices they impact. This information is critical in prioritizing and managing remediation efforts effectively.
  • With Axonius, you can gain comprehensive visibility into your assets and vulnerabilities. The tool allows you to see which vulnerability was identified, by which adapter, and on which devices. You can also find the first detection date to determine whether it’s a new threat or has been a persistent vulnerability that needs immediate remediation. The easy-to-reference tabular layout and clickable data style lets you probe deeper on each unique vulnerability.

In conclusion, the Axonius Vulnerability Management Module provides IT and security teams with the visibility, context, and management capabilities needed for effective remediation guidance — but stops short of providing step-by-step guides on how to carry out each remediation action.

Balbix for remediation guides

Balbix is a vulnerability management platform that does not provide direct vulnerability remediation guides or step-by-step walkthroughs. Instead, they offer a comprehensive vulnerability management program that helps you discover, prioritize and respond to vulnerabilities. Vulnerability management is an ongoing process that involves discovering, assessing, prioritizing, and remediating software vulnerabilities. Balbix offers the following features to help organizations address vulnerabilities and improve their security posture:

• • • Discovery: Balbix helps organizations gain full visibility of all enterprise assets, including systems, applications, devices, data, business processes, and users. This capability is essential for discovering all potential vulnerabilities, making it a core requirement.
    • Prioritization: Balbix adopts a risk-based vulnerability management approach to help organizations prioritize vulnerabilities based on their level of threat to the organization. With hundreds or thousands of vulnerabilities, it’s important to effectively prioritize remediation to ensure your security team isn’t racing to address issues that pose little or no real risk to your business-critical assets.
    • Response: Balbix helps organizations determine how to effectively manage vulnerabilities using the best remediation approach. They provide a risk-based vulnerability management tool that analyzes different remediation scenarios and recommends the best remediation option for your security team. They also help align remediation efforts to business priorities by identifying the owners of risk issues and assigning them remediation tasks.

Better alternative for remediation guides: Autobahn Security

Autobahn Security is best in class with its unique remediation guides, called Cyber Fitness Workouts. Written for non-experts, they are a powerful tool to improve your security posture.

• • • Autobahn Security provides step-by-step remediation guides called Cyber Fitness Workouts to help users fix vulnerabilities quickly and easily.
    • The guides have a design that ensures ease of understanding and following, catering to users who may not be experts in cybersecurity.
    • Users can directly access the guides from the Autobahn Security platform or receive them as sent by the asset owner, facilitating convenient retrieval of needed information.

Axonius vs Balbix for asset discovery – similarities and differences

Finally, most SaaS companies considering Axonius vs Balbix want to look at their functionality for asset discovery. Let’s dive into it in more detail.

Axonius for asset discovery

Axonius uses comprehensive device discovery to fetch data continuously from any source that knows about devices at any cadence, allowing for the discovery of all assets regardless of location, uptime, or power state. To achieve this, Axonius aggregates, correlates, and normalizes data from numerous sources, including CMDBs, device scanning technologies, and agents.

• • • Comprehensive device discovery is the ability to fetch data continuously from any source that knows about devices at any cadence.
    • One or two discovery sources often populate CMDBs, resulting in incomplete or unreliable data.
    • Device discovery methods, such as scanning technologies, require machines to be turned on and available. However, even in those cases, scanning typically limits to weekly or monthly cycles.

    • The deployment of agents is limited to known devices, resulting in restricted visibility. This limitation implies that the quality of visibility depends on the deployment locations of agents.

    • Axonius aggregates, correlates, and normalizes data from numerous sources to deliver comprehensive device discovery.
    • Axonius complements CMDB discovery tools with correlated data from several sources to create rich, accurate CMDB records.
    • To surface gaps across your fleet of assets, you need numerous data sources. Asset discovery made easy: Axonius utilizes various data sources, revealing gaps often missed in CMDBs.

    • Direct connection and device finding: Axonius connects via APIs, locating devices regardless of online status or usage history.

    • Unmanaged device identification: Axonius integrates with network infrastructure, accounting for IoT and OT devices in CMDBs.

Balbix for asset discovery

Balbix offers automated asset discovery that continuously monitors the enterprise to discover, identify, and categorize all assets. This includes devices, applications, and services; managed and unmanaged; on-prem and cloud; fixed and mobile; IoT, etc., and users.

Balbix’s unified view: Balbix automatically cleans and merges conflicting and duplicate data, providing a comprehensive view of every asset detail. It also automatically identifies and categorizes the type and role of assets in your extended enterprise network, along with understanding the distribution of Internet-facing assets across physical locations.

Better alternative for asset discovery – Autobahn Security

Autobahn Security’s internet-facing asset discovery is a valuable tool for businesses looking to improve their cybersecurity posture. Here are some key benefits of Autobahn Security’s asset discovery:

• • • Internet-facing asset discovery empowers businesses to ensure that they account for everything by identifying assets that may have been overlooked in the inventory. This process provides a complete view of a company’s online asset boundaries. This can help reduce the attack surface and make smarter decisions about cybersecurity strategies.

    • Centralized view of all assets exposed to the internet: Manual asset tracking methods can lead to a lack of accurate data and difficulty in tracking the location of assets. Autobahn Security’s internet-facing asset discovery empowers organizations to track the locations of their assets more effectively and ensure their appropriate usage. It achieves this by providing a centralized view of all assets exposed to the internet.
    • Industry-leading asset discovery results: Autobahn Security’s internet-facing asset discovery service is easy to set up and supports multiple domains, enhancing asset discovery results.

Conclusion – which tool is better for your company, Axonius or Balbix?

Hopefully, this post helped you decide whether Balbix or Axonius is more appropriate for your company. As you can see – both have many upsides and downsides.

Undeniable value and choice: Autobahn Security provides better value for money and is the preferred choice for mid-market SaaS, especially in vulnerability management and asset discovery.

Interested in finding more? Book a demo with our team here!