Amazon GuardDuty vs Sysdig Secure
Amazon GuardDuty
aws.amazon.com
Sysdig Secure
sysdig.comSide by side
| Figure | Amazon GuardDuty | Sysdig Secure |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | $0.03/mo | $20/mo |
| Free plan | Yes | — |
| Free trial | Yes | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| Windows | — | Yes |
| macOS | — | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | — | Yes |
| Plans published | 6 | 2 |
| Spec score · Cloud Detection and Response Software | 9.3 (#1) | 8.2 (#4) |
| Spec score · Cloud Workload Protection Platforms | 9.2 (#1) | 8.2 (#5) |
| Company facts | LinkedIn lists Amazon Web Services as headquartered in Seattle, launched in 2006, with 148,106 employees shown on its global page. | Sysdig, Inc. is a Delaware corporation founded in 2013, headquartered at 135 Main Street in San Francisco, and listed by LinkedIn as having 501–1,000 employees. |
| Integrations | GuardDuty findings can be routed to AWS Security Hub, Amazon EventBridge, Amazon Detective, or third-party solutions. | Documented integrations include AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, Azure DevOps, Jira, Splunk, Elasticsearch, Syslog, Semgrep, and Snyk. |
| Public API | The service exposes an HTTPS API with documented operations, request and response formats, errors and regional endpoints. | Sysdig publishes REST APIs for Monitor, Secure, and Platform, authenticated with service accounts or user API tokens using Bearer authorization. |
| Rating on G2 | 4.1 out of 5 from 57 reviews | 4.8 out of 5 from 111 reviews |
| Rating on Gartner Peer Insights | 4.6 out of 5 from 536 AWS ratings; the page lists AWS broadly rather than GuardDuty specifically. | 4.8 out of 5 from 399 ratings |
| Rating on TrustRadius | 9.9 out of 10 from 4 reviews | 7 out of 10 from 3 reviews |
| 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. | Sysdig offers an on-premises deployment with Kubernetes/OpenShift installers, including air-gapped installation modes. |
| System requirements | Basic enablement requires an AWS account and Region; multi-account administration requires AWS Organizations and access to its management account, while runtime agents have resource-specific OS and Kubernetes prerequisites. | Agent installation requires a Sysdig account and key, outbound port 6443, Linux kernel 3.10 or newer, and supports x86 or ARM on several Linux distributions and Kubernetes platforms. |
| What it does | Amazon GuardDuty continuously monitors AWS data sources and logs to detect suspicious or malicious activity using threat intelligence and machine learning. | Sysdig Secure is a cloud-native application protection platform combining threat detection, vulnerability management, posture management, and identity and entitlement management. |
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
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.
Sysdig Secure
Sysdig Secure is a cloud-native application protection platform for cloud environments, containers, Kubernetes, hosts, and serverless workloads. It uses runtime insights to prioritize risks that are exploitable in a customer’s environment. Threat detection runs in real time using Falco rules, machine learning, and drift control; vulnerability scanning is available with agent-based or agentless approaches and prioritizes vulnerabilities in use. Cloud Attack Graph connects vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and excessive permissions to map potential attack paths. Sysdig Sage is an AI assistant for security search, vulnerability management, threat investigation, and response. The platform connects to AWS, GCP, and Azure, and documents integrations including Git, Jira, Snyk, Docker Scout, Splunk, Elasticsearch, and Syslog. Sysdig describes support for on-premises, air-gapped, and private cloud environments. Deployment is hybrid, with licensing based on hosts or compute instances for CSPM. The documented agent supports Linux distributions and Windows Server 2019 and later; the vulnerability CLI scanner is available for Linux and macOS. Pricing is by quote rather than displayed.