Why not just run Prowler?
You will ask this in every evaluation, so here is the honest answer. Prowler, ScoutSuite, Steampipe/Powerpipe and CloudSploit are mature, widely used, and a team with a cloud security engineer who already runs one of them should keep doing so. RISKAudit is built for the organisation that does not have that engineer, needs the evidence and the report rather than the raw results, and will not grant a SaaS vendor a role into its accounts.
| Capability | RISKAudit | Prowler CLI | Prowler App | Steampipe + Powerpipe |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| AWS checks | 96 | 500+ | 500+ | 500+ |
| Pass/fail per control, with the missing permission named | ||||
| What changed since the last scan, with open-since dates | ||||
| Board-ready PDF with a remediation plan | ||||
| External attack surface, confirmed takeover | ||||
| Score with tag-based criticality | ||||
| Install | one installer | Python + pip | Docker, Postgres, Valkey | binaries + plugins |
| Multi-cloud | ||||
| Someone accountable when it is wrong | ||||
| Price | annual license | free | free | free |
Counts are approximate and change with every release; check the projects themselves before quoting them.
Where the free tools are better
- Breadth
- Prowler checks hundreds of things RISKAudit does not: API Gateway, Cognito, Glue, SageMaker, Redshift, OpenSearch, Bedrock, and long tails within every service. If a specific check matters to you and it is not in our list, we will not pretend otherwise.
- Multi-cloud
- Prowler and ScoutSuite cover Azure, GCP and Kubernetes. RISKAudit is AWS only.
- Extensibility
- Writing your own Prowler check is a Python file. RISKAudit's rules are compiled into the product.
- Price
- Free is free.
Where RISKAudit is better
- Evidence a non-engineer can hand to an auditor
- The control matrix says pass, fail, not applicable, not evaluated or manual for every control of every framework, and when a check could not run it says which permission was missing. It exports as a CSV for the evidence workbook and appears in the PDF.
- Change, not just state
- Every scan is compared with the previous one of the same scope: new, resolved, still open, and how long each finding has been open. Weekly runs turn into "three new, five fixed" in Slack, and the CLI can fail a pipeline on anything new.
- The report
- Executive summary, what changed, compliance verdicts, a remediation plan grouped by check with every affected resource, methodology and a glossary: generated, not assembled by hand from CSV files.
- A defensible score
- Findings are weighted by severity, normalised by the number of resources scanned, and weighted by the criticality your own tags declare, with the method printed in the report.
- Fairness on regional defaults
- AWS creates a default VPC, security group and network ACL in every region. CIS fails all of them out of the box, and a naive tool emits seventeen identical findings per rule. RISKAudit reports the untouched regions as one finding per rule and scores them lightly.
- Attack surface
- Certificate-transparency discovery, dangling DNS and subdomain takeover confirmed against provider fingerprints, in the same product and the same report.
- Nothing to operate
- One installer on a laptop, or the same binary from cron on a server. No Python environment, no Docker, no database to keep alive, no auto-updater phoning home.
- Someone to call
- A license comes with a vendor who is accountable for false positives, missing checks and the next AWS API change.
How to evaluate it yourself
Run both against the same account and compare the CIS control verdicts. Where they disagree, one of us is wrong; tell us, and we will either fix the check or document why we read the benchmark differently. Every source used for the control numbers is documented with the product so the comparison can be done control by control.
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