AWS Certificate Manager vs Certbot

AWS Certificate Manager (ACM) provisions, manages and deploys public and private SSL/TLS certificates for AWS, hybrid and multicloud workloads. Certificates may cover one domain, multiple named domains, wildcard domains or combinations. Management is available through the AWS Management Console, AWS CLI and ACM APIs, with usage auditable in AWS CloudTrail logs. Amazon-issued certificates can renew automatically when DNS validation is used; otherwise ACM sends notices as expiration approaches. Public-certificate integrations include Elastic Load Balancing, Amazon CloudFront, Amazon API Gateway, AWS Elastic Beanstalk and AWS CloudFormation. AWS Key Management Service helps protect stored private keys. Customers can import third-party CA certificates and deploy them with Elastic Load Balancers, CloudFront and API Gateway; importing costs nothing. The default quota is 10 domain names per certificate, with requests up to 100. The integrated-services public-certificate plan is free and non-exportable. ACM is available on web and API platforms.

Certbot is free, open-source software from the Electronic Frontier Foundation for enabling HTTPS on websites that administrators manage themselves. It obtains Let’s Encrypt certificates and can install them on a web server automatically in many cases. The command-line tool names Apache and Nginx integrations, along with webroot and standalone methods. DNS validation avoids requiring an inbound connection from Let’s Encrypt, so it does not depend on an existing HTTP site or an open port 80. Certbot renews certificates when less than one-third of their lifetime remains; for certificates lasting 10 days or less, renewal occurs when half their lifetime remains. It is generally run on a Unix-like server, often remotely over SSH, and is intended for administrators comfortable with command-line work on a dedicated server, VPS or cloud-hosted server. The project points users to its documentation and the Let’s Encrypt community forum for help.