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Network assessment tools like Network Detective?

My company has begun a 30 day trial of Network Detective, a network assessment suite primarily used by MSPs to inspect the infrastructure of prospective clients.  It reports on missing patches, insecure passwords, old/stale AD objects, etc.  There are optional modules for Exchange and SQL Server as well.  We're using it primarily to assess existing clients, as a sort of 'sanity check' of work we already perform for them.

While we're finding the tool useful, I'm getting the impression it's basically a nice front-end for freely-available software/scripts like MBSA (Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer).  It saves us time, and presents the information in an easy-to-parse format, but I'm not sure the pricetag of $400/month forever is worth it.  

What I'm wondering is, have you had success with a similar tool or Network Detective competitor, that has a similar feature set at a lower price?

If this is the best tool for the job, so be it (as I said, we do save a lot of time with it).  But if there's something very much like it, I'd like to at least take a look.
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btan

One similar tool is Nessus which also does equivalent compliance check on the security posture of the targets in a netqrpk segment. Another is the use of nmap which is so called pentesting discovery tool that may not covers to such presentable reports. A GUI equivalent of nmap is Zmap. Minimally you can say that it is a vulnerability scan tools that is of interest.
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That's really helpful, Adrian, thank you.  Let me run this by you then:  what do you use to assess PC patch levels when you go into a new environment?  The MBSA (Microsoft Baseline Security Assessment) tool is a little awkward to use, and it's not clear Microsoft wants to keep supporting it, so I'm wondering if you're aware of something better.  WSUS reporting is an option, of course, but that depends on the customer having a functioning WSUS instance running on their network.
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