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Government · head to head

NEOGOV vs Qualys VMDR

NEOGOV logo

NEOGOV

Government

Public sector HR suite covering civil service recruiting, onboarding, training and policy management

From
On request
Free plan
No
Full reviewWebsite
Qualys VMDR logo

Qualys VMDR

Cybersecurity

Cloud-delivered vulnerability management licensed per asset, using scanner appliances and a lightweight agent.

From
$3/month
Free plan
No
Full reviewWebsite

The short version

  • Each has a real cost: NEOGOV each module is shallower than the specialist product it competes with, so agencies buying the full suite for coherence accept weaker performance management and learning than they would get separately.; Qualys VMDR licensing is per asset and each capability is its own subscription, so patch management, endpoint detection, web application scanning, container security and policy compliance are separate line items, and the platform demonstrated in a proof of concept is rarely the platform in the quote.
  • They diverge on capability: NEOGOV covers Civil service recruiting, Qualys VMDR covers Cloud Agent.
  • Prices and features above were last checked on 31 August 2026.

Where they differ

Only the attributes on which NEOGOV and Qualys VMDR actually diverge.

Attributes where NEOGOV and Qualys VMDR differ
AttributeNEOGOVQualys VMDR
Starting priceOn request$3/month
Pricing modelquotesubscription
PlatformsWeb, iOS, AndroidWeb, Cloud, Api
CategoryGovernmentCybersecurity
FoundedUnknown1999

Identical on both: free tier (No), user rating (Not yet rated).

What each one covers

Drawn from each product's published feature list. An absence here means we hold no record of it - not that the product lacks it.

Only in NEOGOV

  • Civil service recruiting
  • Veterans preference handling
  • GovernmentJobs.com posting
  • Onboarding workflows
  • Learning and training records
  • Policy management

Only in Qualys VMDR

  • Cloud Agent
  • Scanner appliances
  • Authenticated scanning
  • TruRisk scoring
  • Asset inventory
  • Patch Management
  • Cloud connectors
  • Container sensor

What people use each for

The jobs each tool is most often brought in to do.

NEOGOV

  • A city or county HR department that must run scored examinations and ranked eligibility listsnot Qualys VMDR
  • A public safety agency needing policy acknowledgement records that stand up in litigationnot Qualys VMDR
  • An agency replacing a commercial applicant tracking system that cannot handle veterans preferencenot Qualys VMDR
  • A school district or university consolidating recruiting, onboarding and mandated training recordsnot Qualys VMDR

Qualys VMDR

  • A hybrid workforce where scheduled network scans miss most laptops and continuous agent-based assessment is the only way to get real coveragenot NEOGOV
  • PCI DSS external scanning where an approved scanning vendor report is a contractual requirementnot NEOGOV
  • An estate spanning datacentre, multiple public clouds and endpoints that needs one vulnerability view rather than three toolsnot NEOGOV
  • Organisations replacing a manual patch-verification process with agent-reported evidence that a fix actually landednot NEOGOV

Where each one falls short

Documented limitations, not opinions. Every one is a constraint you would hit in normal use.

NEOGOV

  • Each module is shallower than the specialist product it competes with, so agencies buying the full suite for coherence accept weaker performance management and learning than they would get separately.
  • Policy management arrived through the PowerDMS acquisition rather than being built in, and the join between it and the rest of the suite still reads as two products.
  • Implementation is long and configuration heavy because the civil service rules that make the product valuable have to be encoded for your jurisdiction, and that work is billed.
  • Pricing is not published and scales with headcount, so a large agency can pay several times what a comparable one pays without knowing it unless someone reads the public contracts.
  • Private equity ownership since the Warburg Pincus investment has coincided with an acquisition led strategy, and buyers should expect further products bolted on rather than deeper integration of the existing ones.

Qualys VMDR

  • Licensing is per asset and each capability is its own subscription, so patch management, endpoint detection, web application scanning, container security and policy compliance are separate line items, and the platform demonstrated in a proof of concept is rarely the platform in the quote.
  • Ephemeral cloud instances consume asset entitlement until they age out of inventory, so an autoscaling group that creates and destroys hosts hourly can burn licence capacity on machines that existed for minutes, and controlling that means tuning purge policies rather than tuning the cloud.
  • Authenticated scanning produces materially better results than unauthenticated, but it requires storing and rotating privileged credentials for every target platform, which is a security project in its own right, and teams that skip it receive reports full of unconfirmed potential findings that nobody trusts.
  • The console is a set of modules with separate interfaces, search syntaxes and report engines, so an analyst moving between vulnerability management, policy compliance and web application scanning learns each one, and cross-module reporting usually ends in a spreadsheet or a script against the API.
  • The tool surfaces findings far faster than any organisation can remediate them, and it does not solve the ownership problem: without an agreed prioritisation policy and a named owner in IT operations, a first scan producing tens of thousands of findings becomes a dashboard that everyone learns to ignore.

Pricing, plan by plan

NEOGOV

On request
  • NEOGOV Suite$undefined/year
    • Quoted per module and scaled by employee headcount
    • Implementation and data migration priced separately from the subscription
    • Available through cooperative purchasing and state term contracts

Qualys VMDR

$3/month
  • VMDR$3/month
    • Per asset
    • Vulnerability scanning
    • Detection
  • VMDR+$5/month
    • All VMDR features
    • Advanced analytics
    • Cloud integration
  • VMDR Complete$7/month
    • All VMDR+ features
    • Threat intel
    • Response automation

Which should you pick?

Choose NEOGOV if

  • You need civil service recruiting.
  • You work on Web, iOS, Android.
  • You also want veterans preference handling.
NEOGOV review

Choose Qualys VMDR if

  • You need cloud agent.
  • You work on Web, Cloud, Api.
  • You also want scanner appliances.
Qualys VMDR review

Questions people ask

Is NEOGOV or Qualys VMDR better?
Neither clearly leads. NEOGOV starts at On request and Qualys VMDR at $3/month, and user ratings are close enough to be indistinguishable. Choose on capability and platform support.
Which is cheaper, NEOGOV or Qualys VMDR?
NEOGOV starts at On request and Qualys VMDR at $3/month.
Does NEOGOV or Qualys VMDR run on more platforms?
NEOGOV runs on Web, iOS, Android. Qualys VMDR runs on Web, Cloud, Api.
What is NEOGOV best used for?
NEOGOV is most often used for a city or county hr department that must run scored examinations and ranked eligibility lists, a public safety agency needing policy acknowledgement records that stand up in litigation, an agency replacing a commercial applicant tracking system that cannot handle veterans preference, a school district or university consolidating recruiting, onboarding and mandated training records. Of those, a city or county hr department that must run scored examinations and ranked eligibility lists and a public safety agency needing policy acknowledgement records that stand up in litigation are not what Qualys VMDR is typically brought in for.
What can NEOGOV do that Qualys VMDR cannot?
NEOGOV covers Civil service recruiting, Veterans preference handling, GovernmentJobs.com posting, Onboarding workflows. Qualys VMDR covers Cloud Agent, Scanner appliances, Authenticated scanning, TruRisk scoring.

Answered from the vendors’ own pages

NEOGOV: Why not use a commercial applicant tracking system?

Because civil service rules such as ranked eligibility lists, rule of three certification and veterans preference are not expressible in commercial products, so the statutory steps end up in spreadsheets.

Qualys VMDR: Agent or scanner: which do I need?

Usually both. The agent covers endpoints and servers you control and gives continuous data; scanners cover devices you cannot install an agent on, such as network gear, printers and appliances, and provide the external perimeter view.

NEOGOV: Can I find out what other agencies pay?

Yes. These are public procurements, so executed contract values appear in council agenda packets and state term contract listings. Read several before negotiating.

Qualys VMDR: Does it patch as well as detect?

Yes, through the Patch Management module, which is a separate subscription using the same agent. Core VMDR detects and prioritises but does not deploy fixes.

NEOGOV: What did NEOGOV acquire?

PowerDMS, a policy management and accreditation product, in 2021, which is now sold as the policy module of the suite.

Qualys VMDR: How are assets counted for licensing?

By the number of assets in inventory, which includes cloud instances and containers depending on the modules in use. Short-lived cloud assets count until they are purged, so purge settings directly affect what you consume.

NEOGOV: Is it only for the United States?

Effectively yes. The value is in encoding US civil service and public safety requirements.

Qualys VMDR: Can I keep the data in a specific region?

Yes. Qualys operates several regional platform instances and you choose which one your subscription lives on. Moving between them later is not trivial, so decide before onboarding.

Qualys VMDR: Does it scan web applications?

Web Application Scanning is a separate module licensed per application, not part of core VMDR, and it is a dynamic scanner with the usual limits around authenticated flows in single-page applications.

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