Ironwood Cyber Enlight vs Pacu: Side-by-Side Comparison (2026)
Features, pricing, ratings, and pros & cons — compared head-to-head.
Ironwood Cyber Enlight is a commercial penetration testing tool by Ironwood Cyber. Pacu is a free penetration testing tool. Compare features, ratings, integrations, and community reviews side by side to find the best penetration testing fit for your security stack.
CST VerdictBased on our analysis of NIST CSF 2.0 coverage, core features, integrations, company size fit, here is our conclusion:
Security teams responsible for validating whether their network can actually resist lateral movement and privilege escalation should run Ironwood Cyber Enlight; it simulates the full attack chain autonomously rather than stopping at vulnerability discovery. The platform covers ID.RA and DE.AE functions well, but NIST RS.AN (incident analysis and forensics) sits outside its scope, meaning it's built for continuous attack simulation and remediation validation, not incident response integration. Skip this if you need a tool that hunts active compromises or correlates findings across your existing detection stack.
Red teamers and cloud security engineers who need to validate AWS IAM misconfigurations will find Pacu's modular attack chains faster to customize than commercial frameworks, since you can fork the codebase directly. The 4,883 GitHub stars reflect active community contribution and real-world validation against common cloud privilege escalation paths. Skip this if your team lacks AWS-specific offensive knowledge or needs a guided UI; Pacu rewards practitioners who can read Python and chain attacks manually.
