Lynis vs Steampipe

Lynis performs security health scans to support system hardening and compliance testing on Linux, macOS, and Unix-based systems. Its stated uses also include security auditing, penetration testing, and vulnerability detection, for audiences such as developers, system administrators, IT auditors, and penetration testers. The tool checks components and tools found on each system through modular, opportunistic scans and is described as having almost no dependencies. It includes 300+ built-in tests and allows custom tests. Results appear on screen; technical details go to a log file, while warnings and suggestions are kept in a separate report. Lynis can help test security practices associated with CIS benchmarks, NIST, NSA, OpenSCAP data, and vendor guides. Listed systems include AIX, FreeBSD, HP-UX, Linux, macOS, NetBSD, NixOS, OpenBSD, and Solaris, along with Raspberry Pi, IoT, and QNAP devices. The free GPLv3 version costs nothing and comes without warranties or support. Lynis Enterprise SaaS is listed at $36 a year per system, billed annually; self-hosted Enterprise pricing is by quote.

Steampipe provides open-source, zero-ETL tools for querying live data from APIs and services. Its CLI presents connected resources as relational tables, includes a PostgreSQL database and accepts SQL queries over dynamic information. Plugins implement the interface for each cloud service, file or other resource, so the relevant plugin is required. Steampipe can join live cloud configuration data with internal or external datasets for compliance, security, operations and cost work. Other distributions include PostgreSQL Foreign Data Wrappers, SQLite extensions that translate queries into API calls and standalone export CLIs that extract information without a database. Turbot Pipes offers hosted database instances, shared dashboards and snapshots. The plugin hub lists 157 plugins across public cloud, SaaS, security and software development categories. Installers are available for macOS, Linux and Windows, with API and self-hosted use also listed. Steampipe was founded in 2021; Turbot describes itself as founded in 2014 and bootstrapped. AWS access uses default credentials from a credential file or environment variables.