Metabadger vs Simplesense STIG Hardened AMIs: Side-by-Side Comparison (2026)
Features, pricing, ratings, and pros & cons — compared head-to-head.
Metabadger is a free cloud security posture management tool. Simplesense STIG Hardened AMIs is a commercial cloud security posture management tool by Simplesense. Compare features, ratings, integrations, and community reviews side by side to find the best cloud security posture management 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 managing large AWS EC2 fleets should use Metabadger to eliminate IMDSv1 exposure at scale; the automation handles what manual remediation cannot, reducing SSRF attack surface across hundreds or thousands of instances without requiring instance restarts. The tool is free and open-source with 143 GitHub stars, meaning it runs on your infrastructure with no vendor lock-in. Skip this if your environment is mostly containerized or your EC2 instances are already hardened through infrastructure-as-code; Metabadger solves a specific, already-known compliance gap, not a discovery problem.
Simplesense STIG Hardened AMIs
DoD contractors and defense integrators building on AWS will find Simplesense STIG Hardened AMIs worth the deployment friction because they compress ATO timelines by starting with pre-validated, continuously updated baselines instead of remediating from scratch. DISA STIG compliance is baked into each AMI across Amazon Linux 2, Amazon Linux 2023, and Ubuntu Pro FIPS 22.04 LTS, eliminating the manual baseline-hardening work that typically stretches compliance cycles. This is narrow in scope; if you need CSPM drift detection, vulnerability scanning, or runtime cloud security across your entire AWS footprint, you'll layer in additional tools anyway.
