Google Security Operations vs HAWK: Side-by-Side Comparison (2026)
Features, pricing, ratings, and pros and cons, compared head to head.
Google Security Operations is a commercial detection engineering tool by Google. HAWK is a free detection engineering tool. Compare features, ratings, integrations, and community reviews side by side to find the best detection engineering fit for your security stack. Independent and vendor-neutral: we never sell rankings.
CST VerdictBased on our analysis of NIST CSF 2.0 coverage, core features, integrations, company size fit, here is our conclusion:
Enterprise and mid-market SecOps teams with mature detection programs should pick Google Security Operations for its Google-maintained threat detection library, which cuts the busywork of building and tuning rules from scratch. Gemini AI's natural language detection creation meaningfully accelerates analyst onboarding, and the platform's strength in DE.CM and DE.AE (continuous monitoring and incident characterization) reflects a tool built to surface threats faster than your team can manually correlate them. Skip this if your organization lacks cloud infrastructure maturity or needs deep on-premises SIEM capabilities; Google Security Operations assumes you're already cloud-native and that your detection engineers want to write logic, not configure wizards.
Teams scanning cloud object storage for malware in multi-cloud environments should use HAWK for its API-first design that integrates directly into S3, Blob Storage, and Cloud Storage ingestion pipelines without agents or sidecars. The dual-engine approach using CLAMAV and YARA signatures catches both known malware and custom indicators, which is why it's genuinely useful for detecting compromised uploads before they propagate. Skip HAWK if you need behavioral detection or threat hunting; it's signature-based scanning only, so zero-days and polymorphic malware will slip through.
