CloudGoat vs Sadcloud: Side-by-Side Comparison (2026)
Features, pricing, ratings, and pros & cons — compared head-to-head.
CloudGoat is a free cyber range training tool. Sadcloud is a free cyber range training tool. Compare features, ratings, integrations, and community reviews side by side to find the best cyber range training fit for your security stack.
CST VerdictBased on our analysis of available product data, here is our conclusion:
Security teams building AWS-native incident response skills need CloudGoat because it's free, hands-on, and designed specifically around real misconfiguration chains rather than generic vulnerabilities. The 3,500+ GitHub stars reflect adoption by security shops serious enough to run their own labs, and the capture-the-flag format forces teams to think like attackers moving laterally through cloud infrastructure. Skip this if your organization needs managed training with compliance reporting or if you lack engineers who can provision and troubleshoot AWS environments independently; CloudGoat teaches through broken infrastructure, not polished courses.
Security teams building hands-on incident response muscle for AWS will get the most from Sadcloud because it embeds 84 real vulnerabilities across 22 services into a free, reproducible lab environment rather than asking engineers to memorize threat scenarios. The Terraform-based infrastructure means your team practices detection and remediation against actual misconfigured resources they'll encounter in production, not sanitized simulations. Skip this if your organization needs compliance-focused training or remediation guidance; Sadcloud assumes you already know what "secure" looks like and just need the reps to find it under pressure.
