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Cloudsplaining vs Policy Sentry: catalog facts
Cloudsplaining	Policy Sentry
Best for: AWS administrators reviewing IAM permissions for excessive access	Best for: Developers and administrators writing least-privilege policies for AWS
Free Free and open source under the BSD 3-Clause license.	Free Free and open source under the MIT license.
Command line	Command line
Scans individual policies or account authorization details Groups findings by security risk All 3 strengths for Cloudsplaining Scans individual policies or account authorization details Groups findings by security risk Produces HTML and JSON output	Generates policies from CRUD levels and resource ARNs Can query its IAM database All 3 strengths for Policy Sentry Generates policies from CRUD levels and resource ARNs Can query its IAM database Can generate policies from Terraform output
Account scans require configured AWS credentials and IAM read permissions	Designed specifically for AWS IAM
Downloadable app	Downloadable app
Open source	Open source
License: BSD-3-Clause	License: MIT
Not stated if an account is needed	Not stated if an account is needed
Not stated if it works offline	Not stated if it works offline
Official website Full listing and sources Sources for Cloudsplaining cloudsplaining.readthedocs.io/en/latest Catalog checked October 8, 2026	Official website Full listing and sources Sources for Policy Sentry policy-sentry.readthedocs.io/en/latest Catalog checked October 8, 2026

“Not stated” means we have not confirmed it. Features can vary by device and plan.