S3Scanner vs TerraGoat: Side-by-Side Comparison (2026)
Features, pricing, ratings, and pros & cons — compared head-to-head.
S3Scanner is a free security scanning tool. TerraGoat is a free cloud security posture management tool. Compare features, ratings, integrations, and community reviews side by side to find the best security scanning fit for your security stack.
CST VerdictBased on our analysis of available product data, here is our conclusion:
DevOps teams and security engineers doing periodic S3 audits will find real value in S3Scanner's speed and specificity; it catches bucket policy misconfigurations and public access vectors that generic CSPM tools often miss in their first scan. The 3,022 GitHub stars reflect active maintenance and community trust from practitioners running it in production environments. Skip this if you need continuous monitoring and automated remediation across hundreds of buckets; S3Scanner is built for manual scans and one-off assessments, not real-time drift detection.
Security engineers validating CSPM tools or building internal cloud posture benchmarks should use TerraGoat to stress-test their scanning logic against real misconfigurations rather than vendor-curated demos. The repository contains over 50 intentional infrastructure-as-code flaws spanning AWS, Azure, and GCP, giving you actual Terraform to run detections against instead of abstract test cases. Skip this if you need a production-grade scanning tool; TerraGoat is a training ground, not a remediation platform.
