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AWS CloudTrail vs Idira Privileged Access Manager comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jun 2, 2026

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

AWS CloudTrail
Ranking in User Activity Monitoring
2nd
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
5.3
Number of Reviews
17
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Idira Privileged Access Man...
Ranking in User Activity Monitoring
1st
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
230
Ranking in other categories
Enterprise Password Managers (2nd), Privileged Access Management (PAM) (1st), Mainframe Security (1st), Operational Technology (OT) Security (3rd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2026, in the User Activity Monitoring category, the mindshare of AWS CloudTrail is 10.6%, up from 7.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Idira Privileged Access Manager is 13.4%, up from 13.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
User Activity Monitoring Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Idira Privileged Access Manager13.4%
AWS CloudTrail10.6%
Other76.0%
User Activity Monitoring
 

Featured Reviews

Chukwudi Uzoma - PeerSpot reviewer
Head Of IT, Infrastructure at a financial services firm with 5,001-10,000 employees
Comprehensive audit trails have transformed incident investigations and strengthen security posture
The best features AWS CloudTrail offers are complete API activity logging, multi-account audit visibility, integration with AWS Organizations, event history for investigation, integration with CloudWatch and Security Hub, S3 log activity, and compliance and forensic support. Using AWS CloudTrail in that investigation has significantly improved my security posture, governance capabilities, and audit readiness. It provides data accountability across the AWS environment that helps me investigate incidents much faster than would ever be possible. AWS CloudTrail has reduced investigation times dramatically. Activities that previously required hours of manual analysis can now be resolved in seconds because the audit trail is readily available. It has also simplified audit preparation because evidence of AWS activities is automatically captured and retained. I particularly value the ability to answer the questions: who did what, when, and from where. Those are the most important questions during incident investigations and audits. AWS CloudTrail has positively impacted my organization by significantly improving my security posture, audit readiness, governance, and control capabilities. It provides accountability across AWS environments and helps me investigate incident management much faster than ever was possible. I noticed that my investigations during incidents are significantly more surgical, more reliable, and straight to the point.
Singaravelu C - PeerSpot reviewer
CyberArk Engineer at Tata Consultancy
Provides full visibility into user activity and ensures secure end-to-end access across critical systems
In CyberArk Privileged Access Manager, I see room for improvement as I am working in the on-premises networks, and now we are also having the cloud-based PAM. So there, everything is maintained by the CyberArk Privileged Access Manager team, and we are only maintaining the PSM servers. So it is already upgraded from the on-premises network to the cloud network. If you ask me what we can implement beyond that, I just need a few minutes to think about what new things, because it is already an end-to-end security on-premises itself. Now, when it comes to PCloud, Privileged Cloud, it is more secure than the on-premises networks because most of the things are handled using the cloud itself. So it is an already upgraded version; we do not need to implement something new. But if you think in that way, we can have a chance to implement our things. If anything could be improved in CyberArk Privileged Access Manager, I think we could build a small agent AI in my team, we could give access to these logs—the Vault logs, PSM logs, and CPM logs. Whenever the system is going down, the AI will automatically check. If we actually implement agent AI in CyberArk Privileged Access Manager, it will check the logs, and if any errors are coming, it automatically triggers alerts and gives the solution. That is the best improvement I can think of because these days, most things are done by agent AI. So if we also implement this agent AI in CyberArk Privileged Access Manager, we can add more features.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"In one specific scenario, we encountered a situation where a terminated employee still had access to our environment without our knowledge. With AWS CloudTrail, we could track and monitor the employees' activities, revealing that they were downloading specific files from our customer's environment. Without it enabled, we wouldn't have been aware of this."
"It is a stable solution. AWS handles it well."
"AWS CloudTrail helps in accelerating incident investigation and response. It increases it because I pull out the logs to CloudTrail, and from CloudTrail watch, I'll send it to the Security Hub and do a visualization with Prometheus and Grafana."
"The management events and CloudTrail Insights are valuable."
"From a scalability point of view, the tool has no issue, and it is completely fine."
"What I found most valuable in AWS CloudTrail is that it provides a good context of what's happening in the environment, so it's an excellent way to baseline what's occurring. I also like that AWS CloudTrail helps with audits."
"The solution is good as a central logging platform for showing all cloud events."
"AWS CloudTrail features a totally cloud-based deployment."
"CyberArk's support is excellent, providing personalized assistance through a dedicated local account manager and sales engineer."
"Security has been improved."
"CyberArk Privileged Access Manager is excellent for meeting compliance and regulatory requirements."
"Service count rotation is probably one of my favorite features... The ability to automatically rotate any password I need to really helps with the entire enterprise strategy that we're pushing right now."
"I find the discovery feature, which includes credential management, session management, monitoring, and remediation within a session, to be very valuable."
"This product helped our customer manage their privileged accounts; it is easier for them to manage and control the privileged accounts."
"The most valuable features of CyberArk Privileged Access Manager include its search capabilities."
"There are two main ways CyberArk Privileged Access Manager Server Control has been helpful to us."
 

Cons

"The solution should incorporate visibility for CloudWatch events."
"Searching the logs is not very easy; it requires a lot of patience and hard work to find the right information in the log."
"AWS CloudTrail only supports AWS, and Azure has its functions, GCP has their own. Dynatrace offers more flexible dashboards and services, making it more adaptable compared to AWS CloudTrail."
"AWS CloudTrail should be redesigned to capture non-API calls. It would be more effective to have one tool that can perform multiple tasks instead of relying on multiple services for non-API activities."
"Once the organization defines its policies, it must immediately enable AWS CloudTrail and integrate it with auto-remediation procedures using Lambda functions. This ensures that the main administrator can receive information quickly and on time without delay."
"AWS CloudTrail does not fit directly into our architecture as it functions more as a helper service, which limited our utilization of its capabilities."
"Maybe if we could do direct queries on CloudTrail without needing to export it to Athena, that'd be great."
"The platform’s reporting log sheet feature could be more user-friendly."
"They are sometimes not flexible with things. For instance, from one day to another, there might be something that had been done years ago by CyberArk, then they say, "We do not support that." You then have to initiate a complaint and start working with them. Things might become complicated and months pass while you are working with them. Usually, they are good and fast, but sometimes they seem to be blocked with problems, e.g., you will suddenly be working with another team instead of the team that you were working with the day before."
"Integration of this tool with SAML is a problem, as there is a bug."
"It is complicated to deploy for Windows servers compared to other vendors."
"Transitioning from a traditional on-premises deployment to the privileged cloud has resulted in losing access to many logs and administrative tools typically available on the back end."
"On-prem CyberArk is pretty expensive."
"The initial setup was a bit complex."
"Initially, there was a lot of hiccups, because there were a lot of transitions due to manual installations."
"Improvements in CyberArk Privileged Access Manager should focus on simplifying installation and upgrade times, and also consider making professional services training more accessible to implementers and partners."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"CloudTrail itself is free of cost."
"AWS CloudTrail is a cheap solution."
"AWS CloudTrail is pretty affordable, and I have to double-check, but the service is free to use. I can add logs on the console, but if I want to store logs long-term, then I have to pay a storage fee, but it's relatively inexpensive."
"AWS CloudTrail is free."
"It is a very cheap service because management is a SaaS offering from AWS."
"The solution is free if you don't need customizations but is not expensive otherwise."
"The pricing for CyberArk is on the higher side compared to other Privileged Access Management products. Something should be done regarding enterprise licensing for long-standing customers."
"The price of CyberArk Privileged Access Manager is expensive. There are no other fees other than the standard licensing fees."
"The pricing is slightly higher compared to other solutions, but it is reasonable because there are better security features."
"The product's licensing is yearly. I would rate the solution's pricing a six out of ten."
"I would rate the cost of CyberArk Privileged Access Manager seven out of ten with ten being the most expensive."
"With reducing the privileged account access, there has been a huge improvement. They are now bringing more accounts on a little at a time."
"I would rate the tool’s pricing a six out of ten."
"The price of this solution is expensive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Construction Company
17%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
8%
University
7%
Outsourcing Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Construction Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
Midsize Enterprise7
Large Enterprise5
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business59
Midsize Enterprise42
Large Enterprise175
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for AWS CloudTrail?
AWS CloudTrail is categorized into management events, data events, and CloudTrail Insights. For one hundred thousand events, management costs are approximately two dollars, data events ten cents, a...
What needs improvement with AWS CloudTrail?
AWS CloudTrail could be improved by adding more intelligent anomaly detection capabilities, stronger AI-assisted investigation workflows, easier root cause analysis for complex event chains, and im...
What is your primary use case for AWS CloudTrail?
The primary use case for AWS CloudTrail is auditing and security monitoring. AWS CloudTrail allows me to track all API activity across my AWS organization, investigate security events, support comp...
How does Sailpoint IdentityIQ compare with CyberArk PAM?
We evaluated Sailpoint IdentityIQ before ultimately choosing CyberArk. Sailpoint Identity Platform is a solution to manage risks in cloud enterprise environments. It automates and streamlines the m...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for CyberArk Privileged Access Manager?
My thoughts on the pricing of CyberArk Privileged Access Manager depend entirely on the vendors' requirements. If they want their things to be secure, they have to spend accordingly. We have four t...
What needs improvement with CyberArk Privileged Access Manager?
I believe account discovery and rolling support need to be improved. Account discovery is important when integrating with other systems, as other PAM solutions can perform account discovery and onb...
 

Also Known As

CloudTrail
CyberArk Privileged Access Security, CyberArk Enterprise Password Vault
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

HTC, British Gas, Solinor, 2C2P
Rockwell Automation
Find out what your peers are saying about AWS CloudTrail vs. Idira Privileged Access Manager and other solutions. Updated: September 2026.
913,349 professionals have used our research since 2012.