damnvulnerable.me vs CloudGoat: 2026 Comparison
damnvulnerable.me is a free cyber range training tool. CloudGoat 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 training leads and developers building secure coding practices need damnvulnerable.me because it isolates real web attack patterns,DOM XSS, CSRF, SQL injection,in a sandbox you control without infrastructure overhead. The free pricing and 35 GitHub stars signal active community use, which matters for getting answer threads when your team gets stuck on the exploitation mechanics. Skip this if your threat model is API-first or your team needs guided labs with compliance checkboxes; this is deliberately barebones, which is exactly why it works as a teaching tool.
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.
