AWS GuardDuty vs Orca Security comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary
Updated on Jul 2, 2023

We performed a comparison between Orca Security and AWS GuardDuty based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.

  • Features: Orca Security offers comprehensive cloud visibility and simplified insights through its patented agentless SideScanning technology. Users like its container security, compliance dashboard, and non-intrusive vulnerability management. AWS GuardDuty stands out for its single pane of glass data collection and the ability to monitor AWS accounts at no additional cost. Orca Security could enhance its intrusion detection, data center compatibility, and integration with non-standard ticketing systems. AWS GuardDuty would benefit from a mobile version and stronger dashboard analytics. 

  • Service and Support: Users praised Orca Security's customer service for their prompt assistance and proactive approach to meeting customer requirements. Users value the team's commitment to enhancing their product. Reviewers also spoke highly of AWS technical support, but some users reported occasional delays when reaching out via phone.

  • Ease of Deployment: The initial setup of Orca Security is quick and uncomplicated, requiring minimal effort and no ongoing maintenance. AWS GuardDuty is also relatively simple and efficient to set up, although it may vary in complexity based on the architecture and integrations involved.

  • Pricing: Some Orca Security users find it expensive compared to alternatives like Wiz. At the same time, many think the cost is justified due to the level of visibility and security it offers. AWS GuardDuty offers a competitive pay-go license without any extra charges.

  • ROI: Orca Security offers an all-inclusive security solution that saves users money and allows them to consolidate tools. It delivers instant results, and minimal training is required. Additionally, Orca Security constantly introduces new features without additional charges. In contrast, AWS GuardDuty enhances an organization's overall security posture, resulting in improved customer trust and potential business prospects.

Comparison Results: Orca Security is favored over AWS GuardDuty. Users appreciate the visibility Orca Security offers and find it easy to gain insight into their environment. Orca Security effectively ranks vulnerabilities and risks and excels in container security. Users complained about AWS GuardDuty's lack of dashboard analytics and mobile app.

To learn more, read our detailed AWS GuardDuty vs. Orca Security Report (Updated: March 2024).
765,386 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"It helps us detect brute-force attacks based on machine learning.""We use the tool for threat detection. AWS includes AI features as well. AWS GuardDuty gives us reports.""It kinda just gives us another layer of security. So it does provide some sort of comfort that we do have something that is monitoring for abnormal behavior.""With anomaly detection, active threat monitoring, and set correlation, GuardDuty alerts me to any unusual user behavior or traffic patterns right away, which is great for staying on top of potential security risks.""What I like most about Amazon GuardDuty is that you can monitor your AWS accounts across, but you don't have to pay the additional cost. You can get all your CloudTrail VPC flow logs and DNS logs all in one, and then you get the monitoring with that. A lot of times, if you had a separate tool on-premise, you would have to set up your DNS logs, so usually, Amazon GuardDuty helps with all your additional networking requirements, so I utilize it for continuous monitoring because you can't detect anything if you're not monitoring, and the solution fills that gap. If you don't do anything else first, you can deploy your firewall, and then you've got your Route 53 DNS and DNSSEC, but then Amazon GuardDuty fills that, and then you have audit requirements in AU that says, "Hey, what are your additional logs?", so you can just say, "Hey, we utilize Amazon GuardDuty." You're getting your CloudTrail, your VPC flow logs, and all your DNS logs, and those are your additional logs right there, so the solution meets a lot of requirements. Now, everything comes with a cost, but I also like that the solution also provides threat response and remediation. It's a pretty good product. I've just used it more for log analysis and that's where the value is at, the niche value. Once you do threat detection, it goes into a lot of other integrations you need to implement, so threat detection is only good as the integration, as the user that knows the tools itself, and the architecture and how it's all set up and the rules that you set within that.""Deployment is great, and we didn't face any big challenges.""It is a highly scalable solution since it is a service by AWS. Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten.""We have over 1,000 employees, and we monitor their activity through AWS GuardDuty."

More AWS GuardDuty Pros →

"Orca's dashboard is excellent. My team needs to be able to focus on specific areas for improvement in our cloud environment. And most recently, we've started to get good use out of sonar, the search capabilities, and the alert creation.""With its Cloud Security Posture Management capability, we have the ability to read across all of our cloud-based environments, which includes AWS and Azure. We have visibility into those environments. Seeing all vulnerabilities and configurations is really powerful for us, but ultimately, the ability to use the API to query across the fleet to understand what is the current state, what is the patch level, which ones are potentially exposed for a new CVE that just came out is even more valuable. It allows us to gather really specific intelligence through simple queries.""Another valuable feature with Orca, something that's not talked about enough, is its ability to rank your gaps and your tasks... You can get visibility with agents and there are a lot of ways to do that. But the ranking and the context across the entire environment, that is what is unique about Orca.""Orca's SideScanning is the biggest feature. It's the 'wow' factor... With Orca's SideScanning, they just need permissions for your account and that makes it so simple.""The reporting and automated remediation capabilities are valuable to me. They're real game-changers.""The visibility Orca provides into my environment is at the highest level... When I dropped them into the environment, from the very get-go I had more insight into the risks in my environment than I had had during the entire two and a half years I had been here.""Orca's platform provides an agentless data collection facility that collects information directly from the cloud using APIs, with zero impact on performance.""Orca gives you great visibility into your assets. It shows you the issues and the things that you need to attend to first, by prioritizing things. You can see a lot of information that is not always visible, even to DevOps, to help you know about the machines and their status. It's very easy to see everything in a single dashboard. That makes it a very useful tool."

More Orca Security Pros →

Cons
"The solution's user interface could be improved because it will help users to understand multiple options.""Because it's a threat detection service, they need to keep up with the various threat factors because new threat factors and attack factors come up all the time.""It would be great if the solution had some automation capabilities.""An improvement would be to have a mobile version where remote workers can log in and monitor and fix issues.""Cost changes. It's very expensive. If you turn on every feature, it's more than most commercial vendors. For smaller orgs, that doesn't make sense.""It is evolving, and at the moment, I will just need it on a larger scale. Then, it will satisfy my demand, initially.""Amazon GuardDuty could be better enriched in threat intelligence data.""I work in a bank, and it would be good if AWS GuardDuty could be integrated with other monitoring and detection tools we use."

More AWS GuardDuty Cons →

"The solution could improve by making the dashboards more elaborative and more descriptive.""There were a couple of times when Orca was down when I was trying to access it. I work strange hours because all of my team is in the UK right now. It was 2 a.m. on a Saturday and I was trying to log in but it wasn't working. But relative to my other security tools, Orca is definitely the most stable that I've seen.""In the future, I'd like to see Orca work better with third-party vendors. Specifically, being able to provide sanitized results from third parties.""They can expand a little bit in anti-malware detection. While we have pretty good confidence that it's going to detect some of the static malware, some of the detections are heuristics. There could be a growth in the library from where they're pulling their information, but we don't get a lot of those alerts based on the design of our products. In general, that might be an area that needs to be filled since they offer it as a service within it.""The interface can be a bit cranky and sometimes takes a lot of time to load.""I think Orca could give me more alerts. It could give me a dashboard with all the specific types of alerts I want to see for the day. It should just be one click.""As with all software, the user interface can always be made simpler to use. It would be helpful for people with very little knowledge, like somebody sitting behind the SOC, to allow them to be able to drill down into things a little bit easier than it is currently.""Another improvement would be that, in addition to focusing on endpoint compliance, they would focus on general compliance."

More Orca Security Cons →

Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "We use a pay-as-you-use license, which is competitively priced in the market."
  • "I don't have all the details in terms of licensing for Amazon GuardDuty, but my organization does have a license set up for it."
  • "In terms of the costs associated with Amazon GuardDuty, it was $1 per GB from what I recall. Pricing was based on per gigabyte. For example, for the first five hundred gigabytes per month, it'll be $1 per GB, so it'll be $500. If your usage was greater, there's another bracket, for example, the next two thousand GB, then there's an add-on cost of 50 cents per GB. That's how Amazon GuardDuty pricing slowly goes up. I can't remember if there was any kind of additional cost apart from standard licensing for the solution. Nothing else that at least comes to mind. What the service was charging was worth it. That was one good thing when using Amazon GuardDuty because my company could be in a certain tier for a certain period. My company wasn't under a licensing model where it could overestimate its usage and under-utilize its usage and pay much more. This was what made the pricing model for Amazon GuardDuty better."
  • "Pricing is determined by the number of events sent."
  • "The pricing model is pay as you go and is based on the number of events per month."
  • "On a scale of one to ten, where one is a high price, and ten is a low price, I rate the pricing a four or five, which is somewhere in the middle."
  • "GuardDuty only enables accounts in regions where you have an active workload. If there are places where you don't have an active workload, you wouldn't even enable them. That's one area where they could allow you to cut down your cost."
  • "The tool has no subscription charges."
  • More AWS GuardDuty Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "The most expensive solution is Palo Alto. They claim to be very robust. The next most expensive is Wiz, followed by Orca and all the rest."
  • "It is the cost of the visibility that you get. When you really sit down and think about what do you need to do to secure an environment with a low impact on the business, and you take a look out into the world, I think this tool is well justified around cost."
  • "While it's competitive with Palo Alto Prisma, I think Orca's list price is very high. I would advise Orca to lower it because, at that price, I might consider alternatives like Wiz, which also offers agentless services."
  • "The pricing depends on how many assets you have running in your cloud and how many environments you have. If you have a dev environment, test environment, and a production environment then it's really important that you have coverage for all of them."
  • "Overall, the pricing is reasonable and the discounts have been acceptable."
  • "I think their pricing model is aligned with market demand. Of course, Orca could probably better align their pricing model with the needs of smaller businesses as well as some larger-scale enterprises with millions of assets. But in all fairness, I think the Orca sales team has been accommodating and ensured that we're happy with the pricing."
  • "Orca is very competitive when compared to the alternatives and is not the most expensive in the market, that's for sure."
  • "We have a total of 25 licenses for this solution. The solution is on a pay-and-you-use model."
  • More Orca Security Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer:We have over 1,000 employees, and we monitor their activity through AWS GuardDuty.
    Top Answer:I have heard that the solution's price is quite high. Sometimes, they need to fine-tune the service on AWS. For example, Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) is used for static content because it is… more »
    Top Answer:The solution's user interface could be improved because it will help users to understand multiple options. Currently, we have multiple options on AWS GuardDuty, which may confuse new users.
    Top Answer:The reporting and automated remediation capabilities are valuable to me. They're real game-changers.
    Top Answer:Maybe better customization options for security frameworks and better integration with reporting tools like Power BI or Grafana dashboards. Modularizing reports and dashboards would be fantastic… more »
    Top Answer:I mainly use it as a posture management tool to comply with security frameworks like CIS and NIST, strengthening my overall security posture.
    Ranking
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    7,436
    Reviews
    16
    Average Words per Review
    671
    Rating
    7.9
    Views
    9,274
    Comparisons
    5,921
    Reviews
    3
    Average Words per Review
    613
    Rating
    9.0
    Comparisons
    Learn More
    Overview

    Amazon Guard Duty is a continuous cloud security monitoring service that consistently monitors and administers several data sources. These include AWS CloudTrail data events for EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service) audit logs, VPC (Virtual Private Cloud) flow logs, DNS (Domain Name System) logs, S3 (Simple Cloud Storage), and AWS CloudTrail event logs.

    Amazon GuardDuty intuitively uses threat intelligence data - such as lists of malicious domains and IP addresses - and ML (machine learning) to quickly discover suspicious and problematic activity in a user's AWS ecosystem. Activities may include concerns such as interactions with malicious IP addresses or domains, exposed credentials usage, or changes and/or escalation of privileges.

    GuardDuty is able to easily determine problematic AWS EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) instances delivering malware or mining bitcoin. It is also able to trace AWS account access history for evidence of destabilization. such as suspicious API calls resulting in changing password policies to minimize password strength or anomalous infrastructure deployments in new or different never-used regions.

    GuardDuty will continually alert users regarding their AWS environment status and will send the security discoveries to the GuardDuty dashboard or Amazon CloudWatch events for users to view.

    Users can access GuardDuty via:

    • AWS SDKs: Amazon provides users with several software development kits (SDKs) that are made up of libraries and sample code of numerous popular programming languages and platforms, such as Android, iOS, Java, .Net, Python, and Ruby. The SDKs make it easier to develop programmatic access to GuardDuty.

    • GuardDuty HTTPS API: This allows users to issue HTTPS requests directly to the service.

    • GuardDuty Console: This is a browser-based intuitive dashboard interface where users can access and use GuardDuty.

    Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS)

    Kubernetes protection is an optional add-on in Amazon GuardDuty. This tool is able to discover malicious behavior and possible destabilization of an organization's Kubernetes clusters inside of Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS).

    When Amazon EKS is activated, GuardDuty will actively use various data sources to discover potential risks against Kubernetes API. When Kubernetes protection is enabled, GuardDuty uses optional data sources to detect threats against Kubernetes API.

    Kubernetes audit logs are a Kubernetes feature that captures historical API activity from applications, the control plane, users, and endpoints. GuardDuty collates these logs from Amazon EKS to create Kubernetes discoveries for the organization's Amazon EKS assets; there is no need to store or turn on the logs.

    As long as Kubernetes protection remains activated, GuardDuty will continuously dissect Kubernetes data sources from the Amazon EKS clusters to ensure no suspicious or anomalous behavior is taking place.

    Amazon Simple Cloud Storage (S3) Protection

    Amazon S3 allows Amazon GuardDuty to actively audit object-level API processes to discover possible security threats to data inside an organization's S3 buckets. GuardDuty continually audits risk to the organization’s S3 assets by carefully dissecting AWS CloudTrail management events and AWS CloudTrail S3 data events. These tools are continually auditing various CloudTrail management events for potential suspicious activities that affect S3 buckets, such as PutBucketReplication, DeleteBucket, ListBucket, and data events for S3 object-level API processes, such as PutObject, GetObject, ListObject, and DeleteObject.

    Reviews from Real Users

    The most valuable features are the single system for data collection and the alert mechanisms. Prior to using GuardDuty, we had multiple systems to collect data and put it in a centralized location so we could look into it. Now we don't need to do that anymore as GuardDuty does it for us.” - Arunkumar A., Information Security Manager at Tata Consultancy Services

    Orca Security is the pioneer of agentless cloud security that is trusted by hundreds of enterprises globally. Orca makes cloud security possible for enterprises moving to and scaling in the cloud with its patented SideScanning™ technology and Unified Data Model. The Orca Cloud Security Platform delivers the world's most comprehensive coverage and visibility of risks across AWS, Azure, Google Cloud and Kubernetes.

    At Orca Security, we’re on a mission to make it fast, easy, and cost effective for organizations to address critical cloud security issues so they can operate in the cloud with confidence.

      Key Platform Features: 

      • Agentless: Complete, centralized coverage of the entire cloud estate, without the need for installing and configuring agents or layering together multiple siloed tools. Full visibility of cloud misconfigurations, vulnerabilities, workload protection, malware scanning, image scanning, file integrity monitoring and more.

      • Asset Inventory: Get a complete inventory of all your public cloud assets, including detailed information on installed OSes, software, and applications, as well as data and network assets such as storage buckets, Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs), and Security Groups.

      • Attack Path Analysis: Visualize attack vectors to critical assets or crown jewels. See which assets are susceptible to lateral movement, assume roles, privilege escalation, and more.

      • Risk Prioritization: Prioritize the 1% of risks that matter the most, based on impact scores. Secure the vulnerabilities and misconfigured targets (critical assets) and eliminate the potential risks residing on the attack paths to those targets.

      • Cloud Threat Detection: Monitor for malicious activity within your entire cloud estate. Be aware of detected threats, user behavior anomalies and more.

      • Breach Forensics: Log every change and all activity into a central repository for investigation procedures to confirm or deny entry and compromises within the cloud estate.

      • Cloud To Dev (Shift Left): Orca’s built-in shift left capabilities enables DevOps to focus more security attention earlier in the CI/CD pipelines. Security teams are able to trace a production risk (misconfiguration or vulnerability) directly to the original source code repository from which it came, even down to the exact line of code that is at the root of the identified risk. 

      • Compliance: Choose from over 60 preconfigured compliance frameworks, cloud security best practices, CIS Benchmarks, or design and build your own compliance framework for fast and continuous reporting.

      • Security Score: The Orca Security Score is found on Orca’s Risk Dashboard and is updated daily. The overall score is calculated based on performance in the following five categories - Suspicious Activity, IAM, Data at Risk, Vulnerable Assets, and Responsiveness. Since the scores are percentage based and not raw numbers, you can objectively make comparisons to other organizations within your industry or business units of different sizes. In addition to reporting to senior management, the Orca Security Score can help with internal self-monitoring, as a way of measuring risk mitigation efforts, to know where to focus efforts, and track progress.

      Orca Security Benefits

      • Consolidate technologies to reduce costs and complexity:

      The more I can get out of this one solution, the better. I see Orca as the tool where we get all cloud-related security data.” - Joshua Scott, Head of Security and IT | Postman

      • Avoid costly breaches:

      "I look at proactive asset discovery, configuration management, and vulnerability management as being able to find a vulnerability before the bad guys do and being able to deal with it before something exploits it. This is what Orca does for us." - Doug Graham, CSO & CPO | Lionbridge

      • Increase team productivity and efficiency by focusing on high-value activities and solving the 1% of risks that matter most:

      "Orca is unique in that it locates vulnerabilities with precision and delivers tangible, actionable results – without having to sift through all the noise." - Aaron Brown, Senior Cloud Security Engineer | Sisense

      • Quick Time-to-Value with Immediate ROI:

      "Orca told us we could have some visibility within 5 or 10 minutes, and I thought, ‘There’s no way.’ Well, I was wrong. They really did it." - Thomas Hill, CISO | Live Oak Bank

      • Reduce MTTR and remove operational friction:

      We can’t ask developers things like ‘Did you think about security? When you start a new VM on AWS, can you please let me know so I’m able to scan it? Can you please deploy an agent on that machine for me?’ We need a better way to work. Orca provides that better way by eliminating organizational friction.” - Erwin Geirnaert, Cloud Security Architect | NG Data

        Sample Customers
        autodesk, mapbox, fico, webroot
        BeyondTrust, Postman, Digital Turbine, Solarisbank, Lemonade, C6 Bank, Docebo, Vercel, and Vivino
        Top Industries
        REVIEWERS
        Financial Services Firm38%
        Computer Software Company15%
        Media Company8%
        Manufacturing Company8%
        VISITORS READING REVIEWS
        Financial Services Firm16%
        Computer Software Company16%
        Manufacturing Company8%
        Healthcare Company5%
        REVIEWERS
        Media Company20%
        Financial Services Firm20%
        Computer Software Company20%
        Insurance Company10%
        VISITORS READING REVIEWS
        Computer Software Company17%
        Financial Services Firm12%
        Manufacturing Company7%
        University6%
        Company Size
        REVIEWERS
        Small Business35%
        Midsize Enterprise15%
        Large Enterprise50%
        VISITORS READING REVIEWS
        Small Business20%
        Midsize Enterprise14%
        Large Enterprise66%
        REVIEWERS
        Small Business54%
        Midsize Enterprise31%
        Large Enterprise15%
        VISITORS READING REVIEWS
        Small Business24%
        Midsize Enterprise14%
        Large Enterprise62%
        Buyer's Guide
        AWS GuardDuty vs. Orca Security
        March 2024
        Find out what your peers are saying about AWS GuardDuty vs. Orca Security and other solutions. Updated: March 2024.
        765,386 professionals have used our research since 2012.

        AWS GuardDuty is ranked 4th in CWPP (Cloud Workload Protection Platforms) with 19 reviews while Orca Security is ranked 12th in CWPP (Cloud Workload Protection Platforms) with 13 reviews. AWS GuardDuty is rated 8.2, while Orca Security is rated 9.4. The top reviewer of AWS GuardDuty writes "A stellar threat-detection service that has helped bolster security against malicious threats". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Orca Security writes "Allows agentless data collection directly from the cloud". AWS GuardDuty is most compared with Microsoft Defender for Cloud, Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks, CrowdStrike Falcon Cloud Security, Wiz and Threat Stack Cloud Security Platform, whereas Orca Security is most compared with Wiz, Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks, Microsoft Defender for Cloud, Tenable Vulnerability Management and Aqua Cloud Security Platform. See our AWS GuardDuty vs. Orca Security report.

        See our list of best CWPP (Cloud Workload Protection Platforms) vendors.

        We monitor all CWPP (Cloud Workload Protection Platforms) reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.