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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
231
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 October 2026, in the User Activity Monitoring category, the mindshare of AWS CloudTrail is 9.9%, up from 6.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Idira Privileged Access Manager is 14.7%, up from 11.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
User Activity Monitoring Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Idira Privileged Access Manager14.7%
AWS CloudTrail9.9%
Other75.4%
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

"The management events and CloudTrail Insights are valuable."
"The product’s most valuable feature is monitoring. It helps us audit the changes in AWS account at the application and resource level."
"AWS CloudTrail is currently underutilized and has potential for many more use cases."
"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."
"From a scalability point of view, the tool has no issue, and it is completely fine."
"AWS CloudTrail features a totally cloud-based deployment."
"AWS CloudTrail is very reasonably priced and I definitely recommend AWS CloudTrail to those who are planning or considering using it; it is a must-have service in the AWS environment, and it should be used."
"It is a stable solution. AWS handles it well."
"We have demoted a lot of domain admins and taken a lot of that away from people, giving it a shared account structure."
"Creating policies and the password rotation feature have been valuable. We don't have to memorize our password for the ADM account."
"The ability to develop and deploy applications with no stored secrets is very valuable."
"Automates password management to remove the human chain weakness."
"The access control feature and privilege and role-based assignment are outstanding."
"It gives us the capability to rotate passwords."
"The logs and reporting features are impressive."
"This product is helpful for financial auditing needs, as well."
 

Cons

"The solution's operation visibility could be improved."
"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."
"The product's initial setup phase is not pretty straightforward."
"AWS CloudTrail can sometimes generate too much information, which might lead to a lot of unnecessary data, particularly false positives."
"AWS CloudTrail does not fit directly into our architecture as it functions more as a helper service, which limited our utilization of its capabilities."
"Searching the logs is not very easy; it requires a lot of patience and hard work to find the right information in the log."
"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."
"Maybe if we could do direct queries on CloudTrail without needing to export it to Athena, that'd be great."
"Sometimes they didn't always offer, for the less critical issues perhaps, a quick, easy, how-to-implement-it solution."
"It should be easy to use for non-technical people. Its interface can be a bit difficult."
"Three-year support (unlimited case and call support) is free with license purchase but I would say sometimes it's not sufficient to resolve the issues with this model."
"Many of the infrastructure folks who use the product dislike it because it complicates their workflow. They get a little less control, and they have to go through a specific solution. It proactively logs in for them, which obfuscates some of the issues that they may be troubleshooting."
"The one place where we found that this product really needs to improve is the cloud. Simple integrations don't exist, even today. We don't have anything specific on CyberArk for managing, SaaS products, SaaS vendors, SaaS credentials. I understand it's a vendor-based thing and that they have to coordinate with the other vendors to be able to do that, and there are integrations coming. But these are the major places where CyberArk definitely needs to invest some more time."
"In terms of mean time to respond, I acknowledge variable response time. The L1 team is proactive, yet the vendor often pushes to close incidents swiftly, even when issues remain unresolved."
"Online help needs to be looked into with live agent support."
"The technical support is very poor."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"AWS CloudTrail is a cheap solution."
"CloudTrail itself is free of cost."
"The solution is free if you don't need customizations but is not expensive otherwise."
"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."
"I would rate the tool’s pricing a six out of ten."
"Compared to other solutions, it is costly."
"The solution is cost-effective for the features."
"The price of this solution is quite reasonable."
"There are no additional costs other than the standard licensing fees."
"The price of CyberArk support could be a little bit less. Otherwise, pricing is fine."
"CyberArk Privileged Access Manager is perceived to be somewhat overpriced compared to similar market products. It is a little bit overvalued. It could come down a little bit for my liking. However, the industry-leading reputation and the quality of service justify the high price point to some extent."
"Our risk is definitely significantly lower. Also, our resources are low."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
15%
Construction Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
14%
University
6%
Outsourcing Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Comms Service Provider
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 Enterprise43
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?
The pricing is reasonable compared to other software options we evaluated, and it is straightforward. However, overall costs depend on deployment size and licensing requirements.
What needs improvement with CyberArk Privileged Access Manager?
While the access control capabilities are useful, streamlining some configuration and policy management workflows could enhance the user experience for administrators. A simpler interface for creat...
 

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.
917,433 professionals have used our research since 2012.