No more typing reviews! Try our Samantha, our new voice AI agent.

AWS CloudTrail vs Proofpoint Insider Threat Management comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 3, 2025

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

AWS CloudTrail
Ranking in User Activity Monitoring
2nd
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.4
Number of Reviews
16
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Proofpoint Insider Threat M...
Ranking in User Activity Monitoring
3rd
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
6
Ranking in other categories
User Entity Behavior Analytics (UEBA) (7th), Insider Risk Management (4th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2026, in the User Activity Monitoring category, the mindshare of AWS CloudTrail is 7.3%, up from 6.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Proofpoint Insider Threat Management is 18.0%, down from 25.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
User Activity Monitoring Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
AWS CloudTrail7.3%
Proofpoint Insider Threat Management18.0%
Other74.7%
User Activity Monitoring
 

Featured Reviews

CR
Principal Technical Architect at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Comprehensive log management streamlines workflow and enhances monitoring capabilities
For monitoring, we use Dynatrace. Dynatrace is connected with AWS CloudTrail, so AWS CloudTrail sends the notifications via SNS to Dynatrace. We get notifications, and Dynatrace will send notifications. AWS CloudTrail is a log function that will store all logs easily for whatever services we are using on Amazon. All logs will be stored in AWS CloudTrail for 15 years, as we have the service purchased for that duration. The logs will be stored in AWS CloudTrail via S3 bucket. In AWS CloudTrail, we have enabled CPU, disk, and RAM monitoring. These are three services we are monitoring from AWS CloudTrail. AWS CloudTrail will monitor and produce graphs. We have separate L1 teams for monitoring; they will monitor and share the information. Also, Dynatrace will receive the information, and if any service goes beyond the threshold limit, AWS CloudTrail will create an alert. CloudTrail and CloudWatch are sister services. Both should be preconfigured internally. We only watch the dashboards because we can't go and watch each service; there are multiple servers running and multiple services configured, so we watch only the dashboard graphs. If any graph goes beyond the normal limit, we take action. We watch the graph. If any of the graphs show abnormal activity, then immediately we dig into AWS CloudWatch and AWS CloudTrail. We check the reason by verifying the logs. The graph will show you the time period, so we go into AWS CloudWatch, filter the logs for that particular time period, and from there, we identify the cause of the issue, and then we troubleshoot. API is a main element that allows us to connect AWS CloudWatch to AWS CloudTrail and AWS CloudTrail to Dynatrace. That connection is done via API. By API, everything is integrated. The integration part is managed by the API, transferring information from one service to another. We are not working on the API; the configuration team, the cloud operations team, they take care of it.
reviewer1271289 - PeerSpot reviewer
Cyber Security Leader at a tech services company with 201-500 employees
Good value, easy to use, and easy to deploy
In terms of what can be improved, that is a question I think the end users can tell you better. I'm not the end-user for this system. However, I can say that it needs to be more scalable. I think they already have a good value proposition in terms of being a hybrid model, and the reporting is okay, as well. It could have better integration with other SIEMs, but this integration has to come from the SIEM side, not ObserveIT.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"AWS CloudTrail features a totally cloud-based deployment."
"I have not encountered any stability issues, glitches, or performance problems with AWS CloudTrail."
"The solution is good as a central logging platform for showing all cloud events."
"The management events and CloudTrail Insights are valuable."
"AWS CloudTrail helps in accelerating incident investigation and response. It increases it because I pull out the logs to CloudTrail, and from CloudTrail watch, I'll send it to the Security Hub and do a visualization with Prometheus and Grafana."
"From a scalability point of view, the tool has no issue, and it is completely fine."
"What I found most valuable in AWS CloudTrail is that it provides a good context of what's happening in the environment, so it's an excellent way to baseline what's occurring. I also like that AWS CloudTrail helps with audits."
"AWS CloudTrail is very reasonably priced and I definitely recommend AWS CloudTrail to those who are planning or considering using it; it is a must-have service in the AWS environment, and it should be used."
"It resolved security issues of the organization by providing audit reports and records to our customers."
"Customer Service: The ObserveIT professional services team has been excellent, extremely engaged and genuinely concerned with our success."
"ObserveIT is small, easy to use, easy to deploy, and is not complicated, so it's more generally suited for only SMBs. It's a good value with a cheaper price."
"All my clients are very pleased with this product as it helps them to keep track of what partners and employees are doing on the servers."
"Record videos that have a very small file size Management interface is very convenient and intuitive"
"Overall, it gives a consistent and really good return on investment."
"Meta data search Alert generation."
 

Cons

"More controls should be introduced in CloudTrail, especially to see the logs in CloudTrail itself without saving them in S3, as S3 starts to incur charges."
"AWS CloudTrail only supports AWS, and Azure has its functions, GCP has their own. Dynatrace offers more flexible dashboards and services, making it more adaptable compared to AWS CloudTrail."
"The solution should incorporate visibility for CloudWatch events."
"Searching the logs is not very easy; it requires a lot of patience and hard work to find the right information in the log."
"Maybe if we could do direct queries on CloudTrail without needing to export it to Athena, that'd be great."
"I have not experienced any challenges while using it."
"The product's initial setup phase is not pretty straightforward."
"AWS CloudTrail can sometimes generate too much information, which might lead to a lot of unnecessary data, particularly false positives."
"Ticketing and issue management. Based on the new system, one needs to go through the sales people."
"I had some problems with an instance of ObserveIT in a Proof of Concept, when I installed ObserveIT with an SQL Express instance and the DB used all provisioned space."
"ObserveIT is not scalable and it's not for the medium to large corporations."
"The tool is still not providing records of tunnels established - we would like to see it in future versions."
"OCR capability, support for Mainframe, Ticketing and Incident workflow."
"ObserveIT is not scalable and it's not for the medium to large corporations. It's for the smaller environments. For the larger corporations, we have other scalable solutions."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"AWS CloudTrail is pretty affordable, and I have to double-check, but the service is free to use. I can add logs on the console, but if I want to store logs long-term, then I have to pay a storage fee, but it's relatively inexpensive."
"The solution is free if you don't need customizations but is not expensive otherwise."
"It is a very cheap service because management is a SaaS offering from AWS."
"AWS CloudTrail is a cheap solution."
"CloudTrail itself is free of cost."
"AWS CloudTrail is free."
Information not available
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which User Activity Monitoring solutions are best for your needs.
885,311 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Performing Arts
9%
Media Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business6
Midsize Enterprise7
Large Enterprise3
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about AWS CloudTrail?
In one specific scenario, we encountered a situation where a terminated employee still had access to our environment without our knowledge. With AWS CloudTrail, we could track and monitor the emplo...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for AWS CloudTrail?
AWS CloudTrail is categorized into management events, data events, and CloudTrail Insights. For one hundred thousand events, management costs are approximately two dollars, data events ten cents, a...
What needs improvement with AWS CloudTrail?
I do not think there could be improvements in AWS CloudTrail because I am too small to suggest anything. It is already a well-established service from AWS, and I have only been using it for the las...
Looking for recommendations and a pros/cons template for software to detect insider threats
In addition to responsesfrom Xavier Suriol and reviewer1324719, also consider ObserveIT from Proofpoint.
Looking for recommendations and a pros/cons template for software to detect insider threats
Hello All,I hope you had a merry Christmas.In this case it is as simple as it is.Just take Proofpoint ObserveIT - many companies in the public and financial sector have been using it for years.By ...
 

Also Known As

CloudTrail
ObserveIT
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

HTC, British Gas, Solinor, 2C2P
Coca Cola, Allianz, Premiere League, Xerox, AIG, Cigna, Starbucks, Revlon, Toshiba, Nissan and more.
Find out what your peers are saying about AWS CloudTrail vs. Proofpoint Insider Threat Management and other solutions. Updated: March 2026.
885,311 professionals have used our research since 2012.