Aqua Real-Time CSPM vs AWS Network Firewall: Side-by-Side Comparison (2026)
Features, pricing, ratings, and pros and cons, compared head to head.
Aqua Real-Time CSPM is a commercial cloud security posture management tool by Aqua Security Software Ltd.. AWS Network Firewall is a free next-gen firewalls tool. Compare features, ratings, integrations, and community reviews side by side to find the best cloud security posture management fit for your security stack. Independent and vendor-neutral: our scores and rankings are earned, never bought — sponsored placement is always labeled.
CST VerdictShort answer
Mid-market and enterprise teams managing AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud simultaneously will get the most from Aqua Real-Time CSPM because its agentless scanning paired with in-workload visibility actually catches misconfigurations that surface-level inventory tools miss. The vendor's support for VMs, containers, serverless, and Kubernetes clusters across 30+ compliance frameworks means you're not rebuilding mappings for HIPAA one year and PCI the next. Skip this if your organization runs primarily on a single cloud or needs sophisticated identity and access governance; Aqua prioritizes configuration posture over the identity layer, leaving supply chain risk assessment to adjacent tools. AWS teams deploying multi-VPC or hybrid architectures will find AWS Network Firewall most useful because it eliminates the operational friction of managing third-party appliances across availability zones; the managed service handles failover and scaling without extra engineering. Stateful inspection and IPS-grade threat prevention are baked in at the VPC boundary, which matters for teams that can't afford the latency tax of inline third-party solutions. Skip this if your organization standardizes on a single firewall vendor across cloud and on-premises environments, since AWS Network Firewall won't integrate with your existing SIEM dashboards or policy framework without custom plumbing.
