Top 10 Open-Source CSPM Tools for Data Security
Open-source cloud security posture management (CSPM) tools enable continuous monitoring, assessment, and management of your cloud environments, such as Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS).
Discover open-source CSPM tools, compare their usability and features:
Market presence
Source code | GitHub stars (k) | GitHub contributors |
|---|---|---|
10.9 | 240+ | |
7.1 | 160 | |
7.0 | 40+ | |
6.8 | 70+ | |
5.9 | 160+ | |
5.5 | 440+ | |
3.4 | 60+ | |
1.3 | 30+ | |
0.8 | 5+ | |
0.3 | 5+ |
Tools are sorted based on GitHub stars in descending order.
*Full access to listed compliance checks might require additional license fees.
Compliance
*Accessing some tools’ full suite of compliance checks might require additional licensing fees. This is often because features such as extended rule sets or continuous compliance monitoring fall under paid tiers.
Usability and deployment
- Dashboard: An intuitive dashboard provides users with insights, reports, and analytics, along with graphs, charts, and customizable layouts.
- Self-hosted version: A self-hosted version allows organizations to deploy the tool on their infrastructure rather than relying on a cloud provider. This is ideal for businesses that require greater control over their data.
- Docker plugin: A Docker plugin integrates the tool with Docker, enabling seamless deployment and operation within standardized containers that contain libraries, system tools, code, and runtime. The plugin simplifies installation and updates, benefiting DevOps workflows and scalable architectures.
Coverage and connections
Accessing some tools’ full suite of cloud coverage might require additional licensing fees.
- Cloud coverage: Extensive cloud support ensures security checks and configurations are compatible across multiple providers, making the tool versatile for multi-cloud strategies.
- Connectors: Connectors are integrations that enable the tool to interface with other systems, such as databases, APIs, or third-party software.
Configuration and customization
- Rules language: Defines how compliance or policy rules are written and implemented in the tool.
- YAML-based configuration: YAML is a human-readable data serialization language, making it easier for people to work with than other, more complex formats such as XML or JSON.
What are open source CSPM tools?
CSPM tools leverage standardized frameworks, regulations, and policies to proactively identify and resolve misconfigurations and compliance breaches. They are integral to enhancing data security posture management (DSPM), enabling data discovery, maintaining data lineage, and improving data quality initiatives.
Prowler
Prowler is claimed to run a scan in 5 to 15 minutes, depending on the size of the environment. It can also export its findings in several formats, including JUnit XML, JSON, CSV, HTML, and AWS Security Findings. After the scan, Prowler provides an overview of the percentage of items that passed and those that failed, the services scanned, and the number of vulnerabilities identified by severity level.
Prowler is available as an open-source tool and a service called Prowler SaaS:
- Prowler open-source: The open-source tool is available as a command-line interface (CLI).
- Prowler SaaS: This service offers features like:
- Synchronized processing to ensure that data and operations across multiple cloud environments (like different regions, cloud providers, or even development stages) are consistently updated and in sync with each other.
- Dashboards with insights for all levels of security posture
- A view of the infrastructure for any AWS region
- Kubernetes cluster scanning through Project Kubescout for container orchestration security assessment.
- Support for over 400+ security checks across AWS, Azure, GCP, and Kubernetes environments
Pricing: Prowler’s pricing is based on the size of the customer’s cloud environment, rather than per user. For the SaaS version, Prowler bills $0.001 per scanned resource per day. For small cloud users, Prowler is free if the monthly bill is under $12.
Latest version updates include enhanced Kubernetes support and expanded coverage of the compliance framework, making Prowler suitable for organizations running containerized workloads alongside traditional cloud infrastructure.
Kube-bench
Kube-bench continues active development with version 0.14.1, including security patches for CVE-2025-61729 and updated dependencies for AWS SDK integration.1 The tool remains essential for organizations running Kubernetes clusters who need to verify CIS Kubernetes Benchmark compliance through automated testing.
Steampipe
Steampipe offers zero-ETL security tools that enable direct access to metadata from APIs and services. With Steampipe, you can query cloud APIs, cloud, code, and logs from 500+ data sources. It also offers open-source benchmarks and dashboards to improve security and insights.
Steampipe is available in various distributions:
- The Steampipe CLI connects APIs and services as relational databases, enabling you to query dynamic data using SQL. The Steampipe CLI includes its own PostgreSQL database and plugin administration.
- Steampipe Postgres FDWs are native Postgres Foreign Data Wrappers that convert APIs into foreign tables to enable access to your data from an external API directly within a database.
- Steampipe SQLite Extensions offer SQLite virtual tables that convert your queries into API calls to retrieve information from your API or service.
Steampipe’s extensible plugin format enables it to support a diverse set of source data, including:
- Cloud suppliers include Amazon Web Services, Azure, Google Cloud Platform, Cloudflare, Alibaba Cloud, IBM Cloud, and Oracle Cloud.
- Cloud-based services include GitHub, Zoom, Okta, Slack, Salesforce, and ServiceNow.
- Structured file formats include CSV, YAML, and Terraform.
- Ad hoc investigation into network services such as DNS and HTTP.
ScoutSuite
ScoutSuite is an open-source security auditing tool for cloud environments that evaluates their security posture. It collects configuration data, identifies security vulnerabilities, and highlights potential threats via cloud provider APIs.
ScoutSuite can be utilized offline once the data has been collected. ScoutSuite generated HTML reports including findings (e.g., access control policies, public IPs, etc) and cloud account configuration:
CloudQuery
CloudQuery helps establish a robust CSPM architecture by collecting and preparing data from your cloud providers, storing it in PostgreSQL, transforming it with dbt (a data build tool), and visualizing it with Grafana. See a step-by-step methodology showing how CloudQuery helps CSPM:
- ETL ingestion layer: CloudQuery – Gathers and preprocesses cloud resource data for further analysis.
- Datastore layer PostgreSQL – A reliable relational database used to manage cloud data systematically.
CloudQuery has expanded its capabilities with support for the MCP (Model Context Protocol) Server, enabling natural-language querying of cloud infrastructure data. This makes infrastructure monitoring accessible to users without SQL expertise, allowing teams to ask questions like ‘Show me all publicly accessible S3 buckets’ in plain English.”2
See the AWS compliance dashboard of data collected with CloudQuery and visualized with Grafana :
Real-life example: Tempus, a business technology company, manages over 80 AWS accounts and 1000+ GCP projects and offers compliance monitoring, assurance, and cloud security posture management (CSPM).3
CloudCustodian
CloudCustodian lets you manage your cloud resources by filtering, tagging, and performing actions using YAML. It can enforce security policies by natively integrating with the cloud provider’s control panel and remediating issues in real time.
The solution can run locally or on any AWS Lambda function. With CloudCustodian, you can manage AWS, Azure, and GCP public cloud systems, with support for Kubernetes, Tencent Cloud, and OpenStack in beta.
Cloudsploit
CloudSploit by Aqua is an open-source project that detects and lists potential misconfigurations and security issues. It can collect data from cloud infrastructure accounts, including AWS, Microsoft Azure, GCP, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, and GitHub.
PacBot
Policy as Code Bot (PacBot) is a platform for continuous compliance monitoring, reporting, and cloud security automation.
PacBot implements security and compliance policies as code. PacBot evaluates any resources it discovers against these policies to determine policy compliance.
The PacBot auto-fix framework allows you to automatically respond to policy infractions by performing predetermined actions.
PacBot key capabilities:
- Auto-fix for policy violations.
- Omni Search allows you to search all discovered resources.
- Self-Service Portal.
- Dynamic asset grouping for viewing compliance.
- Supports multiple AWS accounts.
- Role-based access control.
CloudGraph
CloudGraph is a free, open-source CSPM tool for AWS, Azure, GCP, and K8s. The hosted version includes a managed SaaS/self-hosted version of CloudGraph with built-in 3D visualization, automated scans, and additional compliance checks.
Key features include:
- Free compliance checks (Azure CIS 1.3.1, GCP CIS 1.2, etc).
- Full resource data, including links between resources, to help you comprehend context.
- Historical snapshots of your data across time
- A single endpoint to query your cloud data at once (e.g., retrieve AWS and GCP data in the same query).
For example, you can use the CloudGraph Policy Pack for AWS CIS 1.2 to query your CIS findings for all of your AWS accounts:
This query will return a JSON payload.
Additionally, you can integrate playgrounds such as GraphQL for engaging UX to query a GraphQL schema:
OpenCSPM
When implemented into your environment, OpenCSPM can:
- Capture numerous cloud configuration data on a one-time or periodic basis from your cloud account resources (VMs, Clusters, IAM, etc.).
- Facilitate advanced querying, processing, and loading the data into a graph database.
- Customize policy checks to ensure compliance and regularly record passing/failing resources.
- Notify when deviations from desired baselines occur at multiple destinations.
What is cloud security posture management (CSPM)?
Cloud security posture management (CSPM) identifies and mitigates risk (e.g., GCP with public access) by automating visibility, continuous monitoring, threat detection, and remediation workflows to look for misconfigurations across various cloud environments/infrastructure, including:
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
- Software as a Service (Saas)
- Platform as a Service (PaaS)
What are open source CSPM tools?
The CSPM market is evolving beyond a standalone posture management toward Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPPs). Modern security strategies integrate CSPM with workload protection, vulnerability management, container security, and runtime protection for comprehensive cloud-native security coverage. 4
This shift reflects the reality that securing cloud infrastructure requires more than configuration monitoring; organizations need unified visibility across infrastructure, workloads, applications, and data layers. While open-source CSPM tools excel at configuration management and compliance checking, many organizations combine them with additional security tools to achieve CNAPP-level protection.”
How do CSPM tools help to secure cloud systems?
Cloud misconfiguration occurs when a cloud system’s security architecture breaches a configuration policy.
CSPM provides visibility across multi-cloud environments, enabling you to detect and remediate configuration issues quickly through automation. CSPMs monitor and mitigate risk across an organization’s whole cloud attack surface using: the
- Continuous monitoring
- Threat detection and prevention
- Remediation workflows
Then, workloads that do not match security criteria or known security risks are flagged and added to a prioritized list of issues.
Who should use open-source CSPM tools?
- Security teams managing multi-cloud infrastructure who need visibility into security risks and compliance violations across AWS, Azure, GCP, and Kubernetes environments
- DevSecOps teams implementing shift-left security practices who want to integrate compliance checks into CI/CD pipelines before deployment
- Development and infrastructure teams seeking automated security best practices and continuous monitoring without enterprise licensing costs
- Compliance officers who need to maintain a continuous compliance posture for frameworks like CIS, PCI-DSS, HIPAA, SOC 2, and GDPR
- Red teams are developing targeted attack scenarios based on real misconfigurations in their environment to improve Blue Team readiness
- Organizations establishing security baselines, prioritizing vulnerabilities by risk, and tracking remediation progress over time
- Small to medium enterprises that need enterprise-grade security capabilities but lack the budget for commercial CSPM solutions
Reference Links
Cem's work has been cited by leading global publications including Business Insider, Forbes, Washington Post, global firms like Deloitte, HPE and NGOs like World Economic Forum and supranational organizations like European Commission. You can see more reputable companies and resources that referenced AIMultiple.
Throughout his career, Cem served as a tech consultant, tech buyer and tech entrepreneur. He advised enterprises on their technology decisions at McKinsey & Company and Altman Solon for more than a decade. He also published a McKinsey report on digitalization.
He led technology strategy and procurement of a telco while reporting to the CEO. He has also led commercial growth of deep tech company Hypatos that reached a 7 digit annual recurring revenue and a 9 digit valuation from 0 within 2 years. Cem's work in Hypatos was covered by leading technology publications like TechCrunch and Business Insider.
Cem regularly speaks at international technology conferences. He graduated from Bogazici University as a computer engineer and holds an MBA from Columbia Business School.
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