AWS IAM Access Analyzer vs IAMSpy: Side-by-Side Comparison (2026)
Features, pricing, ratings, and pros & cons — compared head-to-head.
AWS IAM Access Analyzer is a commercial identity governance and administration tool by Amazon Web Services, Inc.. IAMSpy is a free identity governance and administration tool. Compare features, ratings, integrations, and community reviews side by side to find the best identity governance and administration fit for your security stack.
CST VerdictBased on our analysis of NIST CSF 2.0 coverage, company size fit, deployment model, here is our conclusion:
Teams managing large AWS environments who need to eliminate excess IAM permissions without manual policy review will find AWS IAM Access Analyzer indispensable; it surfaces unused access across your account ecosystem and validates least privilege automatically. The tool covers NIST PR.AA and ID.AM functions directly, catching the permission creep that auditors flag every time. Skip this if your organization runs mostly outside AWS or treats IAM governance as a once-yearly compliance checkbox rather than ongoing hygiene.
Security engineers auditing AWS IAM policies will find IAMSpy's Z3 prover approach uniquely valuable for catching logical permission contradictions that manual review misses, especially in complex multi-policy scenarios. The tool is free and already in use across 222 GitHub stars worth of deployments, lowering adoption friction for teams already comfortable with CLI-based analysis. Skip this if your organization needs a UI-driven governance platform or real-time policy enforcement; IAMSpy is for practitioners who want to query and validate, not manage identity lifecycle at scale.
