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Nuclei

Nuclei is ProjectDiscovery's MIT-licensed, template-based vulnerability scanner: simple YAML templates, community-contributed checks, multi-protocol support and CI/CD use for regression testing.

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Introduction

Nuclei, from ProjectDiscovery, is a modern, high-performance vulnerability scanner built on simple YAML templates. It is MIT-licensed with about 32,800 GitHub stars.

Templates describe the steps needed to confirm a vulnerability, which the README says helps reduce false positives by simulating real-world conditions. Thousands of security professionals contribute templates for trending vulnerabilities to the public template repository.

Nuclei supports many protocols, including TCP, DNS, HTTP, SSL, WHOIS, JavaScript and code templates. It integrates with Jira, Splunk, GitHub, Elastic and GitLab, and ProjectDiscovery offers Pro and Enterprise editions on top of the open-source CLI.

In the quality loop, Nuclei can run in CI against staging for regression checks and on a schedule against production assets you own.

Features

  1. YAML templates: Readable checks you can write and review like code.
  2. Community templates: Large shared library for CVEs, misconfigurations and exposures.
  3. Multi-protocol: HTTP, DNS, TCP, SSL, WHOIS, JavaScript and more.
  4. Fast: Parallel scanning and request clustering.
  5. CI/CD: Run in pipelines for vulnerability regression testing.
  6. Integrations: Export to Jira, GitHub, GitLab, Splunk and Elastic.
  7. Workflows: Chain templates for multi-step detection.
  8. Editions: Open-source CLI plus commercial Pro and Enterprise.

Pros

  1. Easy to extend: Writing a template is quick.
  2. Fresh checks: Community responds quickly to new CVEs.
  3. Free: MIT CLI.
  4. Fast at scale: Good for many hosts.
  5. Popular: Large community.

Cons

  1. Signature-based: Finds known issues, not unknown logic flaws.
  2. Authorisation required: Only scan assets you own or are allowed to test.
  3. Template quality varies: Review community templates before trusting results.
  4. Noise on large scans: Needs severity filters.
  5. Not a crawler-first DAST: Pair with ZAP or Burp for deep app testing.

Run default templates against a target you are authorised to test:

nuclei -u https://staging.example.com

Filter by severity and tags:

nuclei -u https://staging.example.com -severity high,critical -tags cve

Tips: keep templates updated, write custom templates for your own past incidents so they never return, and run scans from CI against staging rather than ad hoc against production.

Resources:

Pricing

The Nuclei CLI is free and open source (MIT). ProjectDiscovery offers Pro and Enterprise editions; see projectdiscovery.io for pricing.

  1. Security teams checking many assets for known issues.
  2. DevSecOps running vulnerability regression tests in CI.
  3. Bug bounty and red teams with authorisation.
  4. Not a fit as a full DAST for business-logic flaws.

Conclusion

Nuclei makes vulnerability checks fast to write and share, with a large community template library.

Use it responsibly on authorised targets and pair it with deeper DAST tools.

Alternatives

Other tools on CheckOps that cover similar ground. Open a page, or compare one with Nuclei side by side.