AWS CloudTrail vs. AWS Control Tower

AWS Control Tower

Overview
Product	Rating	Most Used By	Product Summary	Starting Price
AWS CloudTrail	Score 8.6 out of 10	N/A	AWS CloudTrail is a service that enables governance, compliance, operational auditing, and risk auditing of an AWS account. With CloudTrail, users can log, continuously monitor, and retain account activity related to actions across AWS infrastructure. CloudTrail provides event history of AWS account activity, including actions taken through the AWS Management Console, AWS SDKs, command line tools, and other AWS services. This event history simplifies security analysis, resource change tracking,…	N/A
AWS Control Tower	Score 9.3 out of 10	N/A	The vendor presents AWS Control Tower as the easiest way to set up and govern a new, secure multi-account AWS environment. With AWS Control Tower, builders can provision new AWS accounts in a few clicks, while knowing new accounts conform to company-wide policies.	N/A

Pricing

AWS CloudTrail

AWS Control Tower

Editions & Modules

No answers on this topic

Offerings

Pricing Offerings
AWS CloudTrail	AWS Control Tower
Free Trial
Yes	No
Free/Freemium Version
Yes	No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No	No

Entry-level Setup Fee

No setup fee

Additional Details

You can view, filter, and download the most recent 90 days of your account activity for all management events in supported AWS services free of charge. You can set up a trail that delivers a single copy of management events in each region free of charge. Once a CloudTrail trail is set up, Amazon S3 charges apply based on your usage. You will be charged for any data events or additional copies of management events recorded in that region. In addition, you can choose CloudTrail Insights by enabling Insights events in your trails. CloudTrail Insights analyzes write management events, and you are charged based on the number of events that are analyzed in that region.

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More Pricing Information

Community Pulse
	AWS CloudTrail	AWS Control Tower
Considered Both Products	AWS CloudTrail AS Anton Smyslov Product Owner Chose AWS CloudTrail We mainly needed to focus on logging and auditing of AWS services and activity, while Datadog & New Relic are more about performance monitoring and analytics. Moreover, AWS CloudTrail has a seamless integration with AWS, since it's coming from one bucket of products. So having … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose AWS CloudTrail For this specific functionality, I am not aware of any other product that can do what [AWS] Cloudtrail does. We did not evaluate any other products. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose AWS CloudTrail Our company has not used any alternatives. Within our industry, it seems that AWS CloudTrail is the defacto standard for this type of functionality within the AWS environment. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose AWS CloudTrail I think in the end, CloudTrail has more features and you can dive deeper inside the logs so it depends on your usage and what you expect in the end to make the right choice, I would say that both tools are really useful and bring a lot of benefits to I.T. companies. Incentivized Helpful?	AWS Control Tower Arkadiusz Góral Lead Engineer Chose AWS Control Tower AWS Control Tower is an extension of AWS Organizations - think of it like the Organiztions on steroids. Incentivized Helpful? KM kevin mcgillicuddy IT Infrastructure Supervisor Chose AWS Control Tower We did not look at other vendors because we generally want to try to use AWS native products as much as possible for greater support directly from AWS and to reduce 3rd party priority shifts. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose AWS Control Tower Using AWS Systems Manager and other slightly lower level components has been helpful for us to manage parts of our AWS presence at a more granular level than AWS Control Tower was designed for. It's not at all an apples-to-apples comparison as they solve different use cases, … Incentivized Helpful?

Best Alternatives
	AWS CloudTrail	AWS Control Tower
Small Businesses	Armor Score 6.0 out of 10	Armor Score 6.0 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies	Druva Security Cloud Score 9.7 out of 10	Druva Security Cloud Score 9.7 out of 10
Enterprises	Druva Security Cloud Score 9.7 out of 10	Druva Security Cloud Score 9.7 out of 10
All Alternatives	View all alternatives	View all alternatives

User Ratings
	AWS CloudTrail	AWS Control Tower
Likelihood to Recommend	8.0 (0 ratings)	9.0 (0 ratings)
Usability	- (0 ratings)	8.0 (0 ratings)

User Testimonials
	AWS CloudTrail	AWS Control Tower
Likelihood to Recommend	Most probably it would be suitable for Finance industries, where security is at the head of the table. However, in our case for E-commerce, it's also quite suitable, since we have quite a significant amount of data and usage of AWS services. Especially with usage of AWS services, AWS CloudTrail comes into play as a heavy plus. For instance, troubleshooting any issues in AWS services is really nice. Therefore, it would be less appropriate with a small amount of AWS service usage and some basic web hosting. Incentivized AS Anton Smyslov Product Owner Read full review	AWS Control Tower is great if you have multiple organizations or disciplines inside a company that needs to be separated for billing purposes or separation of concern. Multiple accounts is part of AWS's well-architected framework and are generally a good idea. AWS Control Tower makes central logging easy which enables those logs to be quickly picked up by a logging tool to provide even more reports and insight. For smaller organizations, AWS Control Tower may seem like an over-engineered solution Incentivized KM kevin mcgillicuddy IT Infrastructure Supervisor Read full review
Pros	Logs details Easy implementation Great support Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review	AWS Control Tower integrates with AWS organizations AWS Control Tower provides Account Factory to provision preconfigured AWS accounts AWS Control Tower helps to isolate workloads and billing via AWS accounts separation AWS Control Tower supports data residency controls out of the box AWS Control Tower supports post provisioning actions to newly provisioned AWS accounts: for example it can trigger enabling VPC flow logs in the new account Incentivized Arkadiusz Góral Lead Engineer Read full review
Cons	Delay User interface, must send logs elsewhere to view them Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review	This level of abstraction leaves you vulnerable to not knowing exactly what's been created, and that can enable you to mess things up. Because it provisions things on your behalf, you might end up paying for resources you don't need. The import process of existing accounts, which we did not end up pursuing, is tedious and manual. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review
Usability	No answers on this topic	There is no way to easily close an AWS account whether it was created manually or via the AWS Control Tower. It takes too many steps to close it vs to provision a new AWS account Incentivized Arkadiusz Góral Lead Engineer Read full review
Alternatives Considered	For this specific functionality, I am not aware of any other product that can do what [AWS] Cloudtrail does. We did not evaluate any other products. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review	Using AWS Systems Manager and other slightly lower level components has been helpful for us to manage parts of our AWS presence at a more granular level than AWS Control Tower was designed for. It's not at all an apples-to-apples comparison as they solve different use cases, but for us, the use case associated with AWS Systems Manager was a better fit for our specific needs and skillsets. We did not need everything that AWS Control Tower was doing for us. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review
Return on Investment	Saved us from purchasing and managing 3rd party solutions Satisfies Security/Governance requirements No upkeep/maintenance Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review	AWS Control tower allowed us to drop several third-party vendors for security appliances and logging, which saved us considerable funds. AWS Control tower reduced the amount of time we spend deploying AWS accounts. AWS Control tower reduced the amount of time we have to spend on quarterly security audits. Incentivized AK Alex Kranz Senior System Administrator Read full review
ScreenShots	AWS CloudTrail Screenshots