As businesses increasingly rely on cloud environments to store, manage, and secure their data, maintaining a robust cloud security posture becomes critical. Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) tools play a pivotal role in this by providing continuous monitoring, vulnerability detection, and compliance enforcement across cloud infrastructures. Open-source CSPM (OSS CSPM) tools, in particular, offer a cost-effective and flexible way for organizations to strengthen their cloud defenses without committing to expensive enterprise solutions.
In this article, we’ll explore the top 9 OSS CSPM tools available today, each with its unique capabilities and benefits for helping organizations identify cloud misconfigurations, prevent security breaches, and ensure compliance with industry standards. Whether you’re looking for tools that specialize in configuration management, compliance auditing, or vulnerability detection, this list will provide valuable insights into which tools might be best suited to your organization’s needs.
Cloud security posture management: An refresher
CSPM is the practice of managing and protecting cloud environments through end-to-end cloud visibility, vulnerability detection, and risk management. A term coined by Gartner, CSPM involves using tools that automate the continuous monitoring and resolution of cloud security vulnerabilities in IaaS, SaaS, and PaaS environments.
CSPM tools identify misconfigurations, broken authorization / weak access controls, insecure APIs, and more in real time to minimize the risk of data breaches. They also enforce regulatory standards and in-house security policies to prevent non-compliance fines and ensure operational best practices. Even better? Their contextual insights streamline DevSecOps processes and enhance incident response.
Key CSPM capabilities to look for
Although many OSS CSPM software options offer the benefits listed above (and more), other CSPM solutions are limited in scope. For example, some tools enable automatic remediation of security risks, while some simply detect issues, leaving the rest of the work to your teams. To get the most out of your chosen CSPM tool, be on the lookout for the following capabilities:
Comprehensive cloud resource inventorying: Be sure the tool you pick shows in clear terms where compute and storage resources are in your cloud.
Accurate risk detection: Verify that the tool you choose can benchmark your cloud, host, and app configurations against industry best practices to detect exploitable misconfigurations/vulnerabilities.
Contextual reporting and risk prioritization: Consider the CSPM product’s ability to understand your business contexts and use these insights to prioritize the risks you’re most vulnerable to.
Multi-cloud monitoring: Choose a solution that integrates monitoring across various cloud providers such as AWS, Azure, and GCP into one unified dashboard for seamless risk traceability.
Compliance management and policy enforcement: Consider a tool that can remediate compliance violations on the fly and help you enforce your organization’s policies and standards. For example, select a solution that will alert your teams in real time when new configurations stray from in-house security policies.
Top 9 OSS CSPM tools
Below are our top 9 OSS CSPM software and their core capabilities:
1. CIS-CAT Lite
CIS-CAT Lite is the free version of the Center for Internet Security’s cloud security and compliance assessment tool. Tailored specifically for implementing CIS Benchmarks, CIS-CAT Lite enforces secure configurations across various clouds, including AWS, Azure, and GCP.
Capabilities
Cloud security configuration and CIS compliance auditing
Remediation guidance
Centralized scans
GUI and CLI deployment options
Pros
Deploys fast
Gives compliance scores for easier compliance posture auditing
Cons
Covers CIS Benchmarks only
Offers very limited features compared to more advanced CSPM products
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2. Cloudsploit
Self-hosted CloudSploit is the open-source version of Aqua’s CSPM solution. It offers a range of features for managing cloud security and compliance. First, CloudSploit’s config file lets you send credentials and data from your cloud infrastructure for scanning. The results are then sent to a console in a tabular format, giving you an at-a-glance view of cloud risks.
Capabilities
Cloud misconfiguration management in Microsoft Azure, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), AWS, GCP, and GitHub
Compliance management for HIPAA, CIS, and PCI DSS standards
Collects cloud infrastructure data as JSON files, environment variables, or hard-coded data
Pros
Can define custom policies
Discovers 1,000+ risks and vulnerabilities
Minimal performance impact because it scans in the background
Cons
Offers native support for AWS but requires add-ons to monitor other clouds
Tabular reports are not comprehensive, which can make remediation cumbersome
Enables hard-coding cloud data for processing, which can pose data security risks
3. Gapps
Gapps is a cloud security posture and compliance management platform that integrates with various cloud infrastructure.
Capabilities
Supports 10+ compliance frameworks, including SOC2, NIST, and SSF
Out-of-the-box support for 1,500+ controls and 25+ policies
Support for custom policy creation and enforcement
Pros
Fast deployment with Docker
GUI for easy navigation
Cons
Doesn’t offer mitigation guidance
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4. Lynis
Lynis is designed for Linux, FreeBSD, MAC, Unix, and other Unix-based systems that run on hosts. Lynis performs compliance and security posture scans.
Capabilities
Compliance assessment for HIPAA, PCI DSS, and ISO 27001
Provides recommendations for system hardening
Vulnerability/misconfiguration detection
Intrusion detection
Pros
Multi-language support
Custom security controls
Cons
No web interface
Limited compliance coverage
5. Magpie
Magpie is composed of layered FIFO queues that allow it to output query results in order while running as a single process or as a set of processes across multiple machines. It has a plugin architecture that integrates with AWS and GCP clouds, enabling security architects to unify CSPM scans from both clouds.
Magpie works in four stages:
Enumerate, where it discovers your cloud infrastructure
Query, where it analyzes the infrastructure for security risks
Transform, where it converts the query data for downstream processing
Output, where it outputs the data as JSON files or sends it to Kafka or PostgreSQL
Capabilities
Asset and service discovery, including shadow and abandoned clouds, non-native apps, and data stores with DMAP
Misconfiguration and regulatory compliance management, including AWS CIS Security Benchmarks
Security best practice enforcement via a security policy and rules engine
Pros
Storage of historical security and compliance assessments to enable trend analysis and compliance auditing
Built-in ransomware rules to prevent ransomware and supply chain attacks
Data preview feature for analyzing sensitive data without exposing systems to data-focused attacks
Cons
Does not support IBM, Oracle, or Microsoft Azure
Cannot scan Kubernetes and serverless resources
6. OpenSCAP
OpenSCAP is a toolkit with a range of cloud security, policy, and compliance management tools. It includes OpenSCAP Base, Workbench, Daemon, and more, which help secure clouds, containers, and container images.
Capabilities
Configuration and vulnerability scanning via OpenSCAP Base, a NIST-certified CLI tool
Tracking infrastructure compliance with various SCAP policies through OpenSCAP Daemon
Storage of historical SCAP scan results in SCAPtimony
Compliance enforcement while building images via OSCAP Anaconda Addon
Pros
Continuous compliance and vulnerability checks
Support for 25+ standards, including CIS Benchmarks
Cons
The multiple layers and add-ons can be difficult to navigate
Does not support compliance management for popular standards like GDPR
7. Prowler
Prowler is a PyPI project for assessing the security posture of AWS, Azure, GCP, and Kubernetes environments. It can be run as a Kubernetes Job, an AWS EC2 instance, an Azure VM, or a Google Compute Engine.
Capabilities
Facilitates compliance assessments and audits for standards like CIS, NIST, CISA, and SOC2
Benchmarks AWS, Azure, GCP, and Kubernetes configs against custom policies
Has a dashboard for exploring CSPM reports
Pros
Hardens clouds by disabling unnecessary ports, deleting abandoned instances and datastores, and more
Remediation and incident response
Cons
Does not support all clouds
Aggregating results from multi-cloud environments may be difficult due to its distributed deployment options
8. Scout Suite
Scout Suite is a cloud security auditing tool for providing point-in-time security risk and configuration assessments. As a CLI tool, Scout Suite integrates easily with multiple cloud environments.
Capabilities
Support for seven cloud environments, including Microsoft Azure, Oracle, and DigitalOcean Cloud
Automatic cloud risk discovery via scanning for exposed CSP APIs
Summarized risk and attack surface reports
Outputs reports in HTML format
Pros
Enables fast and lightweight scanning
Supports interacting with reports offline (once data collection and scanning is complete)
Cons
Does not perform in-depth security posture scans
Does not support compliance management; only identifies misconfigurations and security risks
Summarized reports lack the depth and context needed to speed up remediation efforts
9. S3Scanner
S3Scanner checks S3 buckets in AWS, DigitalOcean, and a range of other CSPs for misconfigured permissions. It contains a host of tools for managing the security posture of S3 buckets.
Capabilities
Multi-threaded scanning
Misconfiguration detection via S3-compatible APIs
Docker support via Whales
Pros
Stores historical data in the PostgreSQL database
Multi-language and multi-OS support
Cons
Automating scans is only possible through complex add-ons
Limited compliance scanning
Wiz CSPM
The cloud is vast and borderless, and with multiple components interacting with each other, misconfigurations are inevitable. That’s why cost-effective and highly extensible OSS CSPM tools are attractive solutions to help enterprises discover misconfigurations and keep their clouds standards-compliant. Still, there’s no singular OSS CSPM tool that offers all the essential capabilities we’ve discussed above.
Enter Wiz. From context-aware scanning and risk prioritization to automatic remediation and multi-cloud support, WIZ CSPM is a unified platform that has everything you need. Request a demo today to see how Wiz can solve all your cloud infrastructure security pain points.
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