Licensing Tenable Products

This guide explains how to license Tenable products, which components are purchased separately, and what happens during license overages or expirations. To get the best experience, use it in collaboration with your Tenable representative, who can guide you on how Tenable customizes each license for your organization.

Note: This guide does not cover Tenable Cloud Security. For more information on licensing that product, contact your Tenable representative.

Tenable Licensing Overview

For all Tenable products except Tenable Nessus, which is subscription-based, you purchase licenses for assets in your environment: resources identified by—or managed in—your Tenable products.

When your environment expands, so does your asset count, so you purchase more licenses to account for the change. Tenable licenses use progressive pricing, so the more you purchase, the lower the per-unit price. For prices, contact your Tenable representative.

Tip: On the Tenable platform, assets are any data, device, or environmental component that supports information-related activities and needs to be protected from threats. Assets can be desktop computers, web servers, cloud resources, name servers, IoT devices, network printers, enabled users, or other items—and have elements such as hostnames, web application names, IP addresses, or DNS records. Assets are defined differently in each Tenable product.

Tenable Products

The following table lists Tenable’s products and summarizes their licensing methods.

Product Licensing Method
Tenable One Purchase licenses and allocate them to your Tenable One products based on the asset types you want to scan or manage.
Tenable Vulnerability Management

Purchase licenses for assessed assets from the past 90 days and imported assets with vulnerabilities.
Tenable Web App Scanning

Purchase licenses for unique fully qualified domain names (FQDNs) assessed in the past 90 days.
Tenable Cloud Security Purchase licenses for billable cloud resources. For more information, contact your Tenable representative.
Tenable Security Center Purchase licenses for assessed hosts from Tenable Security Center or imported from other Tenable products.
Tenable Identity Exposure Purchase licenses for enabled users in your directory services.
Tenable Attack Surface Management

Purchase licenses for observable objects, which include domain names, subdomains, or IP addresses for internet-connected or internal network devices.

Tenable OT Security

Purchase licenses for detected devices with IP addresses, one license for each IP address.
Tenable Nessus

Purchase a subscription to Tenable Nessus Expert or Tenable Nessus Professional.

What to Do Next

If you have already purchased your Tenable products, do one of the following: