Nuclei is the right pick if you have security engineers who want full control, custom templates and no licence fee, and will run and maintain the scanner themselves. AttackerView is the right pick if you want testing managed for you: type a URL and get authenticated testing, AI pentests, monitoring and audit evidence without operating anything.
Nuclei is ProjectDiscovery's open-source (MIT) vulnerability scanner driven by YAML templates, which your team installs and runs. ProjectDiscovery also sells a hosted Cloud platform and Neo, a separate AI pentesting product.
Scan your domain free| Feature | AttackerView | Nuclei |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing | Free, Starter €39/mo, Watchtower €119/mo, Hunter €299/mo | Free, open source (MIT); you pay for the infrastructure and time to run it source |
| Free plan or trial | Yes:free plan, plus a 14-day Starter trial with no credit card | Yes:open source, plus a free ProjectDiscovery Cloud tier source |
| Where checks come from | Own checks + NVD and CISA KEV + retire.js + Wordfence data | 12K+ community YAML templates (vendor figure), and you can write your own source |
| Shows how problems connect | Yes:attack chain diagrams | Workflows run templates in sequence when one matches; no attack-path view listed source |
| Audit-ready evidence | SOC 2, ISO 27001 and HIPAA reports, PCI DSS supporting evidence, Vanta and Drata sync, from Watchtower (€119/mo) | Through ProjectDiscovery Cloud: reports for SOC 2, PCI-DSS, HIPAA and others source |
| Monitoring | Free: full scan weekly. Starter: full scan daily. Watchtower (€119/mo) and Hunter: heartbeat every 30 minutes, standard check every hour, full scan every day | The CLI runs on demand or in CI/CD; recurring scans are a ProjectDiscovery Cloud feature source |
| Scans behind your login | Yes:from Watchtower (€119/mo) | Yes:secret file: basic, bearer, cookie, header, query, or a login template source |
| AI pentesting | Yes:parallel sub-agents with real exploit tools, €10 plus VAT per selected method and route on any plan, 20 a month included on Hunter | Not in Nuclei; ProjectDiscovery sells Neo, a separate AI pentester source |
Last verified: October 2026. Nuclei facts come from its own pages, linked beside each cell.