Shieldly vs Checkov: AI Explanations and Fixes vs Policy-as-Code Rules

Checkov is an open-source static analysis tool for infrastructure as code. It ships with thousands of built-in policies and scans Terraform, CloudFormation, Kubernetes, and more for misconfigurations, with support for custom rules written as policy-as-code. Shieldly is an AI-Powered analyzer focused on AWS IAM, resource policies, and CloudFormation: it explains why a given policy is risky in plain English and returns the tightened version — free, no signup, right in your pull request. The two overlap on IaC scanning but differ in how they reach a finding and what they hand back.

What Checkov Is Great At

Deterministic, customizable coverage across many IaC frameworks. Checkov's rule library is broad and the results are repeatable: the same input always produces the same finding, which is exactly what you want for a gate. Teams that maintain policy-as-code can extend it with custom checks and a graph-based query language to catch organization-specific patterns. It is open source and integrates cleanly into pipelines.

Where Shieldly Fits

When a rule fires, an engineer still has to understand why the pattern is risky and what the corrected policy should look like. That is the gap Shieldly fills. Instead of a rule ID and a severity, it returns the reasoning and a concrete, tightened policy you can paste back. It reads the whole policy in context — so it can flag privilege-escalation combinations that individually look benign and would not match a single rule.

There is also nothing to configure. With Checkov you install the CLI and wire it into a pipeline; with Shieldly you can paste a policy into the web app and see AI-Powered findings in around ten seconds, or run the @shieldly/cli, the VS Code extension, the GitHub Action, or the @shieldly/cdk-guard CDK construct.

Side by Side

Use Both

Checkov and Shieldly complement each other well. Checkov enforces a deterministic baseline across all of your IaC; Shieldly adds explanation and a fix for the AWS IAM and CloudFormation risks that need human judgment.

• Run Checkov as the broad policy-as-code gate across every IaC framework in your repos.
• Run Shieldly on PRs that touch IAM or CloudFormation to explain the risk and return a tightened policy the author can apply immediately.
• Reach for Shieldly when a finding is subtle — a privilege-escalation chain or an over-broad PassRole — and you want the reasoning, not just a rule match.

AWS is a trademark of Amazon.com, Inc. Checkov is a trademark of its respective owner. Shieldly is not affiliated with or endorsed by any of them. 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.