Shieldly vs AWS IAM Access Analyzer: Plain-English Fixes for Your Policies

IAM Access Analyzer is AWS-native and free — it finds unused access, validates policies against grammar and best-practice checks, and can generate policies from CloudTrail activity. Shieldly is an AI-Powered layer that adds understanding: it explains in plain English why a policy is dangerous and gives you the tightened version, for arbitrary snippets, in the PR.

What IAM Access Analyzer Is Great At

It is built into AWS, free, and account-aware. Unused-access findings and activity-based policy generation are genuinely useful and run where your data already lives. Access Analyzer catches external sharing of S3 buckets, KMS keys, IAM roles, and other resources — the kind of cross-account exposure that is hard to spot by reading a policy alone. Its policy validation checks grammar errors and known anti-patterns against an AWS-maintained rule set.

Because it runs inside your AWS account, it has context that a standalone tool does not: it can see what permissions are actually being used, not just what is granted. That activity-based policy generation is genuinely useful for right-sizing overly broad policies over time.

Where Shieldly Fits

Access Analyzer validates; it does not explain in human terms or hand you a fix for a policy you are drafting in a PR. Finding ID 7 in a console panel tells an engineer that something is wrong. It does not tell them why it is wrong, how serious it is, or what to change.

Shieldly reviews any policy or template you paste — no account binding required — explains the risk in plain English, ranks findings by severity, and returns the corrected policy ready to paste. It also runs as a GitHub Action that comments the explanation and fix directly on the PR, so engineers get the feedback where the work is happening.

Side by Side

Use Both

Access Analyzer and Shieldly address different moments in the IAM risk lifecycle. Access Analyzer is authoritative for account-level unused access and external resource sharing — it has ground truth from CloudTrail that no standalone tool can match. Shieldly is the right tool for explaining and fixing policies as you write them.

• Enable IAM Access Analyzer in every AWS account to catch cross-account exposure and track unused access over time.
• Add Shieldly in pull requests to explain risky patterns and return a tightened policy before the change is merged and deployed.
• Use Shieldly on an ad hoc basis to audit any policy snippet — no AWS account needed, no setup, 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.