cloud-audit: Prowler alternative with Terraform remediation and attack chain detection

No. Prowler has 572 AWS checks across 83 services and covers 41 compliance frameworks (CIS, PCI-DSS, HIPAA, SOC2, NIST, ISO 27001, GDPR, FedRAMP, NIS2, MITRE ATT&CK, and more). cloud-audit has 94 checks across 23 AWS services with 6 compliance frameworks (CIS v3.0, SOC 2, BSI C5, ISO 27001, HIPAA, NIS2), plus per-control Terraform remediation. cloud-audit v2.0 adds CLI-native IAM privilege escalation detection (25 methods), a What-If simulator for policy analysis, and AI-SPM checks for Bedrock and SageMaker. If you need compliance breadth or multi-cloud coverage, use Prowler. If you need a narrower AWS scan with CLI-native attack chains, copy-paste Terraform fixes, and breach cost estimates, cloud-audit fills that gap.

Four reasons: (1) Every finding includes Terraform code and CLI commands you can copy-paste - Prowler's auto-fixers cover 55 checks across 17 AWS services with direct API calls, while cloud-audit outputs reviewable IaC for all 94 checks. (2) 31 attack chain rules with SVG visualization run in the free CLI with zero infrastructure - Prowler offers graph-based attack path analysis through the Prowler App (Cartography + Neo4j), which is more powerful but requires the platform. (3) Built-in diff command tracks security drift in the free CLI. (4) Breach cost estimates in USD per finding and per chain. Different tools for different workflows - Prowler goes wide, cloud-audit goes deep in the CLI.

Yes. A common pattern is using Prowler for quarterly compliance audits and Prowler App for deep attack path analysis, with cloud-audit in daily CI/CD for fast pass/fail gating and drift checks. They complement each other - Prowler goes wide with full compliance coverage and graph-based analysis, cloud-audit goes narrow with CLI-native attack chains and reviewable remediation.

It correlates individual findings into multi-step attack paths with inline SVG visualization. For example: a public security group + IMDSv1 enabled + admin IAM role on the same EC2 instance = a critical account takeover path. 31 rules based on MITRE ATT&CK Cloud Matrix, rendered as visual attack graphs in the HTML report. v2.0 also adds IAM privilege escalation detection (25 methods like iam:CreatePolicyVersion + iam:AttachRolePolicy chains) and a What-If simulator to test policy changes before applying them. Prowler offers a more powerful graph-based approach via the Prowler App (Cartography + Neo4j) across the full resource graph; commercial CSPMs like Wiz and Orca go further. cloud-audit sits between: CLI-native, zero setup, pip install and done.

Yes. MIT license, all features included - attack chains, diff command, Terraform remediation, SARIF output, MCP Server. There is no paid tier. Install with pip install cloud-audit.

cloud-audit typically completes in under 60 seconds for a standard AWS account. Prowler takes 10-30 minutes depending on account size and regions scanned. cloud-audit is faster because it runs 94 targeted checks vs Prowler's 572 comprehensive ones - different coverage, different scan targets.