AWS Certificate Manager vs Certbot: Side-by-Side Comparison (2026)
Features, pricing, ratings, and pros and cons, compared head to head.
AWS Certificate Manager is a free certificate lifecycle management tool. Certbot is a free certificate lifecycle management tool. Compare features, ratings, integrations, and community reviews side by side to find the best certificate lifecycle 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
Teams running most or all of their infrastructure on AWS should use AWS Certificate Manager because it eliminates certificate procurement friction and automates renewal for resources already locked into the ecosystem, with zero per-certificate cost. ACM integrates natively with CloudFront, ALB, NLB, and API Gateway, meaning certificates provision in minutes and renew automatically without manual intervention or tooling. Skip this if your architecture spans multiple cloud providers or on-premises infrastructure heavily; you'll end up managing certificates across three different systems anyway, and a third-party platform will serve you better than jumping between vendor consoles. Teams managing Linux or containerized web infrastructure at scale will get the most from Certbot because it automates certificate renewal entirely, eliminating the operational toil that causes most HTTPS misconfigurations. Let's Encrypt issues certificates valid for 90 days, forcing regular rotation that Certbot handles without manual intervention or commercial CA overhead. This tool is not for organizations needing wildcard certificates, multi-domain SAN bundles, or extended validation requirements; Certbot excels at simple, repeated automation for single-domain workloads.
Based on our analysis of available product data, here is our conclusion:
