Amazon Inspector vs Orca Security comparison

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Amazon Inspector

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 9, 2024

Orca Security and Amazon Inspector compete in the cloud security landscape. Orca Security appears to have the upper hand in advanced monitoring, while Amazon Inspector is valued more for its AWS integration.

Features: Orca Security offers agentless cloud security for seamless integration without impacting performance, focusing on vulnerability management and threat detection. It ensures compliance with a wide array of standards. Amazon Inspector provides automatic assessments of security at deployment, enabling users to deeply integrate with AWS services, emphasizing continuous monitoring. Orca has an edge with a broader threat coverage, while Inspector benefits from direct alignment with AWS infrastructure.

Room for Improvement: Orca Security could enhance its AWS-specific features for users heavily invested in AWS. It may also need to work on reducing its higher setup costs. There's room for improvement in simplifying its user interface. Amazon Inspector may need to expand its threat intelligence gathering capabilities. Enhancing compatibility with non-AWS environments might be beneficial. Inspector's feature diversity could also be broadened outside its current AWS focus.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Orca Security is known for a straightforward deployment process with minimal configuration, appealing for rapid setup and broad scope. Customer service is recognized for efficiency and reliability. Amazon Inspector offers an easy setup, especially appealing to AWS users who benefit from established AWS support channels. Orca’s plug-and-play model contrasts with Inspector’s AWS-centric approach, which favors existing AWS clients.

Pricing and ROI: Orca Security tends to have a higher initial setup cost, justified by its expansive feature set and comprehensive security coverage, potentially leading to a higher ROI over time. Amazon Inspector is cost-effective for AWS customers, with lower setup costs attractive to those already utilizing AWS services, providing a notable return on investment when used within its ecosystem. Orca justifies costs through coverage, while Inspector leverages AWS integration for value.

To learn more, read our detailed Amazon Inspector vs. Orca Security Report (Updated: December 2024).

Amazon Inspector vs. Orca Security

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Categories and Ranking

Amazon Inspector

Ranking in Vulnerability Management

25th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.8

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

IT Vendor Risk Management (7th)

Orca Security

Ranking in Vulnerability Management

9th

Average Rating

9.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.9

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Container Security (9th), Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) (8th), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (6th), Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPP) (6th), Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) (6th), Cloud Detection and Response (CDR) (2nd)

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2025, in the Vulnerability Management category, the mindshare of Amazon Inspector is 2.9%, up from 0.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Orca Security is 5.0%, down from 5.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Vulnerability Management

Featured Reviews

Nikhil Sehgal

Lead Solution Advisor (Cyber Security) at Deloitte

Primarily focuses on security of EC2 instances, provides point-in-time assessments rather than real time protection but provides automated vulnerability detection

It has a limited scope. So, AWS Inspector primarily focuses on the security of the EC2 instance. So, if your architecture includes other AWS services, then you may need to use additional tools for your comprehensive security assessment. So that is one con. Another is, like, we have a dependency on agents. So other is dependency on agents, like, Inspector relies on agents installed on instances for deeper assessment. So managing these agents can be additional overhead. So these kinds of things. It does not even provide real-time protection. So, Inspector provides point-in-time assessment rather than continuous monitoring. So these are all cons. When it comes to false positives, it is there for most security tools as of now. I would not consider false positives a major concern. So, these are the major concerns that I found: dependency on agents, limited scope, and no real-time protection.

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Cédric Thian-Meng

Presales Security Engineer / CSM at Cybersel Group

It contacts your account provider and fetches metadata, eliminating the need for snapshots or reserved space to copy client infrastructure

Orca Security has patented technologies. It's an agentless solution, so you don't need to install an agent. Instead, it contacts your account provider and fetches metadata, eliminating the need for snapshots or reserved space to copy client infrastructure. The multi-cloud capability displays essential information and potential vulnerabilities with granular detail. For instance, it identifies paths that attackers might exploit to gain root or admin access to machines. It is comprehensive, covering a wide range of software needs. They also integrate with CI/CD pipelines, enabling developers to ensure security from the early stages of code deployment. This integration provides a 100% guarantee on security, safeguarding images, configurations, and other crucial information throughout the development process.

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Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"The vulnerability discovery is valuable, and they also rank those vulnerabilities for you. So, you could rapidly attack some of the higher, severe vulnerabilities as they pop up, if they do pop up."

"The most valuable feature of Amazon Inspector is the categorization of findings, which filters vulnerabilities by instance, container image, container repository, and Lambda function."

"Amazon Inspector is highly stable, rated ten out of ten, and this stability impacts business security and administration positively."

"The integration of Amazon Inspector with other AWS services has enhanced our security. Security Hub is a major asset because it allows us to centralize data from various AWS services. We can integrate third-party tools as well. It is just a single-click option."

"The findings dashboards are neat and easy to understand, offering clear demarcations for different types of findings and detailed insights into specific vulnerabilities and their associated instances. It is not a place where everything is dumped together. It offers an easy-to-understand layout."

"The automated vulnerability detection aspect is most valuable."

"I would rate the quality of support as nine stars out of ten due to their quick and helpful responses."

"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."

"I find Orca Security's CIEM feature invaluable, as it focuses on entitlement and posture management, identifying assets with older OS versions, and asset misconfiguration."

"I recommend Orca Security to others looking for a cloud security solution due to its seamless integration and side-scanning technology that does not hamper cloud asset performance."

"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."

"One of the valuable features of Orca Security is its design and options that allow flexible filtering and user-friendly visualization."

"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."

"The best features of Orca Security include its ability to perform a lot of security controls without requiring any installation of agents, making it very easy to set up."

More Orca Security pros

Cons

"One major area for improvement is remediation. My team works on remediating findings over time, likely using available patches. However, easier integration with Amazon's patching services would be very helpful."

"One area for improvement in Amazon Inspector is the automation aspect."

"It has a limited scope. So, AWS Inspector primarily focuses on the security of the EC2 instance. So, if your architecture includes other AWS services, then you may need to use additional tools for your comprehensive security assessment. So that is one con. Another is, like, we have a dependency on agents."

"There isn't too much to improve right now. Scanning on demand or as a part of the pipeline versus a post pipeline solution would be good, but it is not a deal breaker by any means."

"There is room for improvement in the scanning capabilities. I'd like to see broader coverage in terms of the vulnerabilities detected."

"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 solution could improve by making the dashboards more elaborative and more descriptive."

"I would be happy if they offered more automatic remediation options. They're working on that, but the more the better. For example, if they want you to harden a server, they would offer a hardening script that would be more aware of what's going on."

"Orca needs improvement in snoozing or dismissing specific alarms."

"The documentation for Orca Security could be improved."

"The main drawback in an agentless approach is that if the solution detects a virus or malware in the environment, we need to manually remove it. But from my experience with other production environments, it's not straightforward to install agents in the hope they will automatically remediate viruses, even from production environments... Ultimately, the ability to auto-remediate is something that I would like to see."

"It's not all clouds that they are currently onboarded with. For instance, they are not yet with public cloud and many other private clouds."

"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."

More Orca Security cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It is scaled as you go. There are probably a certain number of scans per month, and there are tiers. If you're under a certain tier, it is free. The second level is pennies, and then all the way up to like a million. So, it has a tiered pricing program. They're pretty good with your initial scanning, and there is room to scale based on being affordable, but it is fairly cheap. There are no additional costs. They pretty much think about it as a pay-per-scan type model."

"The pricing is very transparent and clear."

"It's priced according to market standards for its services."

"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."

"Orca Security is cheaper compared to other solutions in the same space."

"Orca is very competitive when compared to the alternatives and is not the most expensive in the market, that's for sure."

"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."

"Orca Security charges are based on cloud workloads. So, it's based on workloads. If we look at one feature, it might be expensive."

"We have a total of 25 licenses for this solution. The solution is on a pay-and-you-use model."

"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."

"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."

More Orca Security pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

13%

Financial Services Firm

12%

Government

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

17%

Financial Services Firm

13%

Manufacturing Company

University

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Amazon Inspector?

The integration of Amazon Inspector with other AWS services has enhanced our security. Security Hub is a major asset because it allows us to centralize data from various AWS services. We can integ...

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Amazon Inspector?

The pricing for Amazon Inspector is very fair, and I would rate it as two out of ten, with ten being the most expensive. It's on the cheaper side.

What needs improvement with Amazon Inspector?

One area for improvement in Amazon Inspector is the automation aspect. Automation for scheduling 'turn on' and 'turn off' operations and better integration with CloudWatch for alarms could enhance ...

What do you like most about Orca Security?

It's for protection. It's an agentless tool. We don't need to install anything at a customer's premises. We can just scan the entire assets in the cloud.

What needs improvement with Orca Security?

Orca Security could improve its ticket creation process. Currently, it allows for creating tickets in only one bucket, which requires monitoring to redirect tickets to the appropriate team. It woul...

What is your primary use case for Orca Security?

I am primarily using Orca Security for cloud security. Being part of the vulnerability management team, I utilize Orca Security for generating vulnerability alerts on cloud assets.

Tenable Vulnerability Management vs Amazon Inspector

Comparisons

Compared 27% of the time

Tenable Nessus vs Amazon Inspector

Compared 18% of the time

Microsoft Defender for Cloud vs Amazon Inspector

Compared 12% of the time

Wiz vs Amazon Inspector

Compared 7% of the time

Tanium vs Amazon Inspector

Compared 3% of the time

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Wiz vs Orca Security

Compared 38% of the time

Microsoft Defender for Cloud vs Orca Security

Compared 9% of the time

Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks vs Orca Security

Compared 8% of the time

CrowdStrike Falcon Cloud Security vs Orca Security

Compared 6% of the time

AWS Security Hub vs Orca Security

Compared 4% of the time

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Product Reports

Amazon Inspector

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Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Overview

Amazon Inspector is an automated security assessment service that helps improve the security and compliance of applications deployed on AWS. Amazon Inspector automatically assesses applications for exposure, vulnerabilities, and deviations from best practices. After performing an assessment, Amazon Inspector produces a detailed list of security findings prioritized by level of severity. These findings can be reviewed directly or as part of detailed assessment reports which are available via the Amazon Inspector console or API.

Amazon Inspector security assessments help you check for unintended network accessibility of your Amazon EC2 instances and for vulnerabilities on those EC2 instances. Amazon Inspector assessments are offered to you as pre-defined rules packages mapped to common security best practices and vulnerability definitions. Examples of built-in rules include checking for access to your EC2 instances from the internet, remote root login being enabled, or vulnerable software versions installed. These rules are regularly updated by AWS security researchers.

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

betterment, caplinked, flatiron, university of nutri dame

BeyondTrust, Postman, Digital Turbine, Solarisbank, Lemonade, C6 Bank, Docebo, Vercel, and Vivino

Amazon Inspector vs. Orca Security