AWS CloudTrail vs AWS Recon: Side-by-Side Comparison (2026)
Features, pricing, ratings, and pros & cons — compared head-to-head.
AWS CloudTrail is a free cloud security posture management tool. AWS Recon is a free cloud security posture management tool. Compare features, ratings, integrations, and community reviews side by side to find the best cloud security posture management fit for your security stack.
CST VerdictBased on our analysis of available product data, here is our conclusion:
AWS teams that need immutable audit logs for compliance and incident response should start with CloudTrail; it's free, ships with AWS, and captures every API call across your account, making it the baseline that most security programs build on. The service is SOC 2 Type II certified and satisfies most regulatory audit requirements without additional tooling. Skip CloudTrail if you're looking for behavioral threat detection or real-time alerting on suspicious activity; it's a log collection engine, not an analytics platform, so you'll need a SIEM or security data lake downstream to actually find the signal in the noise.
Teams managing sprawling AWS estates who need a fast inventory baseline before deploying paid CSPM tools should start with AWS Recon. It pulls detailed resource attributes and policies across regions in parallel, giving you a complete attack surface map in minutes rather than hours, and the 549 GitHub stars reflect actual adoption by practitioners who've weaponized it in real environments. Skip this if you need continuous drift detection or remediation workflows; AWS Recon is a point-in-time collector, not a monitoring platform.
