Shieldly vs Cloudsplaining: Interactive AI Fixes vs Static Reports

Cloudsplaining is an open-source IAM least-privilege assessment tool that generates a risk-prioritized HTML report of the policies attached to an AWS account. Shieldly is an AI-Powered analyzer that explains why a specific IAM policy, resource policy, or CloudFormation template is risky and gives you the tightened version — free, no signup, and in your pull request. They approach IAM least privilege from different angles.

What Cloudsplaining Is Great At

Cloudsplaining scans all the IAM policies in an AWS account and produces a self-contained HTML report that ranks risks by severity. It flags categories like privilege escalation paths, resource exposure, data exfiltration permissions, and infrastructure modification rights — all organized in a browsable report you can share with a security team or auditor.

It is free, runs locally with your AWS credentials, and focuses specifically on IAM least privilege. For a one-time audit or a periodic review of what is attached to an account, it does that job well without requiring any external service.

Where Shieldly Fits

Cloudsplaining produces a static report at a point in time. It does not integrate into the pull request loop, does not explain findings in plain English, and does not give you a copy-paste fix. Once the report is generated, the engineer still has to interpret each finding and decide what to change.

Shieldly is interactive. Paste a policy — or run the GitHub Action on a PR — and you get an AI-Powered explanation of exactly why the policy is risky, a severity ranking, and the tightened version ready to paste in. The feedback arrives in the pull request, before the policy is deployed, when fixing it costs nothing.

For teams that have adopted CI-driven security review, the difference is significant. Cloudsplaining tells you what is wrong in a report you review after the fact. Shieldly tells you what is wrong and how to fix it before the merge.

Side by Side

Use Both

Cloudsplaining and Shieldly can work together in the same security program. Cloudsplaining is useful for an initial account-wide inventory of what is already deployed — a baseline audit that shows you the scope of your least-privilege debt. Shieldly then handles the ongoing work: reviewing every new policy in the PR loop, explaining what is wrong, and handing engineers the fix.

• Run Cloudsplaining once to get a picture of existing IAM risk across the account and prioritize remediation work.
• Add Shieldly's GitHub Action to catch new risky policies at PR time, before they join the backlog.
• Use Shieldly's paste-and-analyze flow to quickly review any policy snippet — no AWS account needed, results in around ten seconds.

AWS and AWS IAM Access Analyzer are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc. Prowler and Cloudsplaining are trademarks of their respective owners. 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.