Shieldly vs AWS Security Hub: PR-Time IAM Fixes vs Account-Wide Findings

AWS Security Hub is an AWS-native service that aggregates, normalizes, and prioritizes security findings across your account. It pulls from standards like AWS Foundational Security Best Practices and CIS, and from integrated services such as GuardDuty, Inspector, IAM Access Analyzer, and Macie, into a single dashboard with a security score. Shieldly is an AI-Powered analyzer that explains why a specific IAM policy, resource policy, or CloudFormation template is risky and hands back the tightened version — free, no signup, at the moment the policy is written. They sit at opposite ends of the timeline, and most teams benefit from both.

What AWS Security Hub Is Great At

Centralized visibility across a live account, and across many accounts via the organization integration. Security Hub gives you one place to see prioritized findings, track a posture score over time, run automated response and remediation through EventBridge, and demonstrate compliance against named standards. If you need an always-on, account-wide view of your security posture and a single feed of findings, that is exactly what Security Hub is built for.

Where Shieldly Fits

Security Hub surfaces a finding after a resource is deployed and a check has evaluated it. Shieldly reviews the policy before it ships and explains the why in plain English, plus the corrected policy, for the engineer in the pull request. It also reasons about multi-step privilege-escalation chains inside a single policy — for example a PassRole paired with lambda:CreateFunction — which a per-control finding does not express as one connected risk. And there is nothing to enable: paste a policy into the web app, or run the @shieldly/cli, VS Code extension, GitHub Action, or @shieldly/cdk-guard construct.

Side by Side

Use Both

The two cover different ends of the lifecycle, and they reinforce each other.

• Use AWS Security Hub for continuous, account-wide and multi-account finding aggregation, posture scoring, and automated response.
• Use Shieldly at PR time to explain and fix risky IAM / CloudFormation before it ever becomes a deployed resource Security Hub has to flag.
• When Security Hub raises an IAM-related finding, drop the offending policy into Shieldly for the plain-English reason and a tightened version.

AWS and AWS Security Hub are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc. Shieldly is not affiliated with or endorsed by Amazon Web Services. Comparisons reflect public information as of 2026 and general product categories.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a trademark of Amazon.com, Inc. Shieldly is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Amazon Web Services.