Comparison of Agentless and Agent Based Discovery Tools

Comparison of the Discovery functions within xAssets IT Asset Management to Agent Based and Agentless Products

Feature	xAssets IT Asset Management	Agent Based Solutions	Agentless Solutions
Installed Agents	No Agents Installed	Agents are Installed and Constantly Use Network Bandwidth and Local CPU	No Agents Installed
Ability to Access the Windows API and Local Resources for detailed discovery	Yes, Full Access	Yes, Full Access	No Access
Loading on End User CPU	Typically under 4 seconds CPU used per discovery - 0.004% of CPU and about 200KBytes of network bandwidth per PC.	Light but many agents are still problematic with agent task CPU delaying end users	Heavy Load on CPU due to inefficient WMI and RPC loading, and heavier load on bandwidth because requests cannot be compressed and data returned cannot be compressed.
Loading on Corporate Network	About 200KBytes of network bandwidth per PC per discovery.	Typically 100KB to 1MB per discovery depending on Vendor.	Heavy Load on network bandwidth because requests cannot be compressed and data returned cannot be compressed.
Ability to Discover Hidden Executables	Yes	Yes	No
Ability to Monitor Software Usage	Yes, in the next version	Yes, some vendors can monitor software usage	Not possible
Ability to Discover the Entire Machine	Yes	Yes, usually	Not possible
Able to function with Windows Firewall Enabled	Yes. We provide three alternative technologies to allow discovery through Windows Firewall.	Yes, but the agent has to be deployed manually.	Not possible

xAssets Network Discovery does not deploy agents across your entire network, and yet it achieves the same business objectives as most agent based discovery tools.

In 2024 we have added a discovery agent to allow customers with work-from-home assets to discover and manage these assets on demand.

Compare Discovery Solutions

Comparison of Agentless and Agent Based Discovery Tools