Amazon GuardDuty vs Calico Cloud
Amazon GuardDuty
aws.amazon.com
Calico Cloud
calicocloud.ioSide by side
| Figure | Amazon GuardDuty | Calico Cloud |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | $0.03/mo | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | Yes | Yes |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| Windows | — | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | — | Yes |
| Plans published | 6 | 4 |
| Spec score · Cloud Workload Protection Platforms | 9.2 (#1) | 8.9 (#2) |
| Documentation depth | AWS publishes a user guide, API reference, CLI reference, setup tutorials, finding-type catalog, regional availability, security guidance and a dated document history. | The documentation includes installation guides, system requirements, troubleshooting checklists, API schemas, resource definitions, tutorials, operations guidance and release notes. |
| Integrations | GuardDuty findings can be routed to AWS Security Hub, Amazon EventBridge, Amazon Detective, or third-party solutions. | Calico Cloud supports Prometheus and Grafana metrics, either through its Tigera-managed Prometheus operator or a customer-provided Prometheus deployment. |
| Purpose | Amazon GuardDuty continuously monitors AWS accounts and workloads for malicious activity and generates detailed security findings. | Calico Cloud provides network security, observability, and traffic controls for Kubernetes environments in cloud, on-premises, or at the edge. |
| Rating on Gartner Peer Insights | 4.6 out of 5 from 536 AWS ratings; the page lists AWS broadly rather than GuardDuty specifically. | 5.0 out of 5 from 3 ratings |
| Rating on TrustRadius | 9.9 out of 10 from 4 reviews | 0 out of 10 from 0 reviews and ratings |
| Self-hosting | GuardDuty is a fully managed AWS service activated in the console or by API; foundational protection requires no customer-deployed security software or infrastructure. | Calico Cloud is managed SaaS; Tigera positions Calico Enterprise as the self-managed alternative. |
| What it does | Amazon GuardDuty continuously monitors AWS data sources and logs to detect suspicious or malicious activity using threat intelligence and machine learning. | Calico Cloud is a managed networking, network-security and observability service for Kubernetes workloads across cloud, on-premises and edge environments. |
Plans
Amazon GuardDuty
- 30-day free trialFree
- Amazon GuardDutyFree
- Malware Protection for EBS$0.03 a month
- Malware Protection for S3$0.09 a month
- Foundational threat detection — VPC Flow Logs and DNS query logs$1 a month
- Foundational threat detection — CloudTrail management events$4 a month
Calico Cloud
- FreeFree
- Calico Cloud SaaS PlatformPriced on request
- Calico EnterprisePriced on request
- Pay-As-You-GoPriced on request
In their own words
Amazon GuardDuty
Amazon GuardDuty monitors AWS accounts and workloads for malicious activity and generates security findings for response. It analyzes CloudTrail, VPC Flow, DNS, S3, Aurora login, AWS Backup, AI workload, and runtime activity. Detection combines AI, machine learning, anomaly detection, and AWS and third-party threat intelligence. Runtime Monitoring covers EKS, ECS workloads including those on Fargate, and EC2 instances. GuardDuty can scan EC2-attached EBS volumes after suspicious activity and detect potentially harmful uploads to S3 buckets. AI Protection addresses threats such as unusual model invocations, cost harvesting, and prompt injection attempts in Amazon Bedrock and SageMaker workloads. Findings can go to AWS Security Hub, EventBridge, Amazon Detective, or third-party solutions. Foundational protections require no additional security software or infrastructure to deploy and maintain. The service is pay as you go: charges depend on analyzed data and vary by source and AWS Region. New accounts can receive a 30-day trial in supported Regions, and some features are unavailable in some Regions.
Calico Cloud
Calico Cloud provides network security, observability and traffic controls for Kubernetes environments in cloud, on-premises or at the edge. Its observability features map network topology, workload connections, dependencies and traffic data to support troubleshooting. Security capabilities include integrated IDS/IPS, WAF and DDoS protection, as well as forensics and network-policy quarantine for infected workloads. Policy tools include recommendations, tiered enforcement and security policy as code in CI/CD pipelines. The listed networking capabilities include eBPF, nftables, iptables, Windows data planes, Envoy Gateway, Egress Gateways and cluster mesh. Compliance reporting covers PCI, SOC 2, HIPAA and GDPR. Tigera presents Calico Cloud as a managed SaaS service and lists self-provisioned Kubernetes, Amazon EKS, Azure AKS, Google GKE and Rancher Kubernetes Engine 2 among supported environments. A cluster needs a CNI installed before connection; Calico Open Source is required if Calico Cloud supplies both networking and network policy. The Free plan permits one user and one cluster, with logs retained for 24 hours.