AWS Certificate Manager vs CRT sh: 2026 Comparison
AWS Certificate Manager is a free certificate lifecycle management tool. CRT sh 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.
CST VerdictBased on our analysis of available product data, here is our conclusion:
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.
Security teams doing threat intelligence or domain monitoring should use crt.sh as a free, fast way to spot certificate issuance anomalies that signal domain takeover or phishing campaigns before they scale. Certificate Transparency logs index roughly 15 billion certificates, giving you real-time visibility into what's been legitimately issued against your domains and competitors' infrastructure. Skip this if you need automated alerting or integration into your SIEM; crt.sh is a lookup tool, not a monitoring platform, and catching malicious certificates requires manual checks or custom scripting.
