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AWS CloudTrail vs Proofpoint Insider Threat Management comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 3, 2025

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
Proofpoint Insider Threat M...
Ranking in User Activity Monitoring
3rd
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
6
Ranking in other categories
User Entity Behavior Analytics (UEBA) (7th), Insider Risk Management (4th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the User Activity Monitoring category, the mindshare of AWS CloudTrail is 11.6%, up from 7.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Proofpoint Insider Threat Management is 16.8%, down from 22.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
User Activity Monitoring Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
AWS CloudTrail11.6%
Proofpoint Insider Threat Management16.8%
Other71.6%
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.
reviewer1271289 - PeerSpot reviewer
Cyber Security Leader at a tech services company with 201-500 employees
Good value, easy to use, and easy to deploy
In terms of what can be improved, that is a question I think the end users can tell you better. I'm not the end-user for this system. However, I can say that it needs to be more scalable. I think they already have a good value proposition in terms of being a hybrid model, and the reporting is okay, as well. It could have better integration with other SIEMs, but this integration has to come from the SIEM side, not ObserveIT.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"AWS CloudTrail integrates with AWS Config and provides custom event, security, and compliance auditing."
"AWS CloudTrail provides significant efficiency gains as it allows thorough monitoring of the environment, contributing substantially to security improvements."
"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."
"It is a stable solution. AWS handles it well."
"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."
"AWS CloudTrail features a totally cloud-based deployment."
"AWS CloudTrail is currently underutilized and has potential for many more use cases."
"It resolved security issues of the organization by providing audit reports and records to our customers."
"Overall, it gives a consistent and really good return on investment."
"Meta data search Alert generation."
"Customer Service: The ObserveIT professional services team has been excellent, extremely engaged and genuinely concerned with our success."
"ObserveIT is small, easy to use, easy to deploy, and is not complicated, so it's more generally suited for only SMBs. It's a good value with a cheaper price."
"Record videos that have a very small file size Management interface is very convenient and intuitive"
"All my clients are very pleased with this product as it helps them to keep track of what partners and employees are doing on the servers."
 

Cons

"AWS CloudTrail does not fit directly into our architecture as it functions more as a helper service, which limited our utilization of its capabilities."
"Filtering multiple values within the console is a feature that has yet to exist in AWS CloudTrail. You can look up a user identity, service, or action, but you can't search for multiple dimensions."
"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 could benefit from more comprehensive documentation and broader service integration."
"More controls should be introduced in CloudTrail, especially to see the logs in CloudTrail itself without saving them in S3, as S3 starts to incur charges."
"Maybe if we could do direct queries on CloudTrail without needing to export it to Athena, that'd be great."
"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."
"The solution should incorporate visibility for CloudWatch events."
"Ticketing and issue management. Based on the new system, one needs to go through the sales people."
"OCR capability, support for Mainframe, Ticketing and Incident workflow."
"The tool is still not providing records of tunnels established - we would like to see it in future versions."
"ObserveIT is not scalable and it's not for the medium to large corporations. It's for the smaller environments. For the larger corporations, we have other scalable solutions."
"I had some problems with an instance of ObserveIT in a Proof of Concept, when I installed ObserveIT with an SQL Express instance and the DB used all provisioned space."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"CloudTrail itself is free of cost."
"The solution is free if you don't need customizations but is not expensive otherwise."
"It is a very cheap service because management is a SaaS offering from AWS."
"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."
"AWS CloudTrail is a cheap solution."
Information not available
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Construction Company
19%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Construction Company
11%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Media Company
8%
Performing Arts
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
Midsize Enterprise7
Large Enterprise5
No data available
 

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...
Looking for recommendations and a pros/cons template for software to detect insider threats
In addition to responsesfrom Xavier Suriol and reviewer1324719, also consider ObserveIT from Proofpoint.
Looking for recommendations and a pros/cons template for software to detect insider threats
Hello All,I hope you had a merry Christmas.In this case it is as simple as it is.Just take Proofpoint ObserveIT - many companies in the public and financial sector have been using it for years.By ...
 

Also Known As

CloudTrail
ObserveIT
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

HTC, British Gas, Solinor, 2C2P
Coca Cola, Allianz, Premiere League, Xerox, AIG, Cigna, Starbucks, Revlon, Toshiba, Nissan and more.
Find out what your peers are saying about AWS CloudTrail vs. Proofpoint Insider Threat Management and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
908,800 professionals have used our research since 2012.