Shieldly vs Steampipe: AI Policy Review vs SQL Queries for Cloud

Steampipe is an open-source tool that exposes live cloud APIs as SQL tables, so you can query your AWS account — IAM, S3, EC2, and hundreds more resources — with plain SELECT statements. Paired with its compliance and benchmark mods, it becomes a flexible posture and reporting engine. Shieldly is an AI-Powered analyzer for AWS IAM, resource policies, and CloudFormation that explains why a specific policy is risky and returns the tightened version — free, no signup, in your pull request. One is a query engine over deployed state; the other is a reviewer for policy you are about to ship.

What Steampipe Is Great At

Ad-hoc investigation and custom posture reporting. If you can express a question in SQL, Steampipe can answer it across your live account — "which roles allow iam:PassRole on *?", "which buckets are public?" — and its mods provide ready-made compliance benchmarks. It is powerful for engineers who want full control over what they measure and how they report it.

Where Shieldly Fits

Steampipe answers questions you know to ask. Shieldly reads a policy and tells you what is wrong with it — including escalation patterns you might not have written a query for — and gives you the corrected policy. You do not need to know the right SQL or maintain a query library; you paste a policy and get the reasoning plus the fix.

And it works before deployment. Steampipe queries what is already in the account; Shieldly reviews the diff in the PR. Run it from the web app, the @shieldly/cli, the VS Code extension, the GitHub Action, or the @shieldly/cdk-guard construct.

Side by Side

Use Both

Steampipe and Shieldly are complementary. Steampipe is your flexible lens on what is deployed; Shieldly is the reviewer that explains and fixes risky AWS policy before it lands.

• Use Steampipe for ad-hoc investigation, custom dashboards, and benchmark reports across the live account.
• Use Shieldly on PRs that touch IAM or CloudFormation to explain risks and return a tightened policy at authoring time.
• When a Steampipe query surfaces a risky policy, drop it into Shieldly to get the plain-English reason and the corrected version.

AWS is a trademark of Amazon.com, Inc. Steampipe 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.