Best CSPM Tools for DevSecOps Teams

If you are looking for automated cloud posture management using CSPM, here are your best options.

Aikido

An agentless CSPM that acts as your cloud’s central nervous system, pinpointing real risks across AWS, Azure, and GCP and telling you what actually needs a fix.

Key Features:

• Contextual Risk Engine: A vulnerability’s zip code matters. An issue in production gets a red flag; the same flaw in a staging branch gets a footnote. It connects container CVEs to their cloud hosts for a risk score grounded in reality.
• Cloud Asset Search: Forget endless console spelunking. Query your entire cloud infrastructure with plain text with Aikido. Find misconfigurations, orphaned resources, or over-permissioned roles with a single search command.
• Agent-Free VM & Container Scans: Direct API hooks into your cloud scan AWS EC2 instances and container registries.
• Pre-Deployment IaC Gates: A CI-native scanner for Terraform, CloudFormation, and Kubernetes manifests. It acts as a gatekeeper to prevent misconfigurations from ever touching your production environment.
• The AI AutoFix PR: Moves beyond simple detection with auto-generated pull requests. The AI writes the fix for vulnerable container base images, machine image CVEs, and insecure IaC definitions. Your job shifts from research and remediation to a simple code review and merge.
• End-of-Life Runtime Tracker: More than just CVEs. This feature hunts down out-of-support runtimes—that forgotten Node.js version on a Lambda or an ancient Python in an Elastic Beanstalk instance—before they become unpatchable security holes.

SentinelOne

A CSPM that connects a bad cloud config to the vulnerable code running on it, showing you the few critical threats instead of a thousand minor alerts.

Key Features:

• Connects Config to Code: Finds the public port and the unpatched Log4j running on the box behind it. Turns two separate low-priority alerts into one critical finding.
• Finds IAM Roles: Flags over-permissioned service accounts. Tells you which credentials, if stolen, would give an attacker the keys to the kingdom.
• Draws the Kill Chain: Maps how a public S3 bucket leads to a vulnerable container.
• Pre-Flight IaC Checks: Fails the CI/CD build if your Terraform plan tries to deploy a resource with a public IP. Stops bad configs before they hit apply.
• Plain English Cloud Query: Lets you ask, “Show me all prod EC2 instances with port 22 open to the world,” and get a list. It’s basically grep for your entire cloud.

CrowdStrike Falcon Horizon

A CSPM built on EDR principles, flagging cloud misconfigs that are known entry points for active threat groups.

Key Features:

• Adversary-Driven Prioritization: It doesn’t just show you a CIS violation. It tells you which of the 257 tracked adversary groups are actively exploiting that specific misconfiguration in the wild, so you fix what’s actually dangerous.
• “Break Glass” Agent Deployment: It’s agentless for discovery, but if it finds a live threat on a workload, you can one-click-deploy the full Falcon EDR agent for immediate containment and forensic response.
• Attack Path Mapping: Shows you exactly how an attacker could chain an exposed instance to a misconfigured IAM role to get to your critical data. It connects the dots from config to compromise.
• Real-Time Threat Detection: Uses Indicators of Attack from CrowdStrike’s threat intelligence to spot malicious activity inside your cloud environment.
• Audit-Ready Compliance Reports: Maps all findings directly to compliance frameworks and generates the reports needed for auditors.

Zscaler 

A CSPM that’s basically a feature flag in their bigger Zero Trust platform, designed to find holes in your cloud that their network security tools can’t see.

Key Features:

• Zero Trust Context: The main selling point. It correlates a cloud misconfiguration with actual network traffic data from Zscaler’s agents. It can tell you if that exposed server is actually being hit by traffic from a risky location.
• Platform-Integrated Discovery: It inventories your cloud assets and treats a misconfiguration like any other threat signal inside the main Zscaler dashboard. It’s not a separate tool; it’s another data source for their engine.
• Audit-Ready Reporting: Translates your cloud’s state into the specific reports for PCI, HIPAA Security Rule, and NIST. It generates the evidence so you can hand it to the auditor and close the ticket.
• Auto-Fixes for Obvious Blunders: Has scripts to automatically fix the low-hanging fruit. It’ll close a public S3 bucket or a wide-open security group without needing a person to approve it.
• A Build Breaker for Bad IaC: Acts as a gate in the CI/CD pipeline. It scans your Terraform and will fail the build if a developer tries to deploy an insecure configuration.

Summing Up

The “best” CSPM on the market is the one that doesn’t get its Slack notifications muted after the first week. It’s the one that fits the DNA of your team and your existing workflow.

One tool might be perfect for a team that lives and breathes the command line and wants deep API integration. Another is built for the team that needs auto-generated PRs to unblock developers. And a third is for the org that needs to hand a clean report to a compliance officer without spending a week in spreadsheets.

Before you purchase one, ask yourself: Does this tool create work, or does it complete it? Does it just point out the problem, or does it show you the entire trajectory of the problem?

The goal isn’t to buy another dashboard to stare at; it’s to buy back your team’s time and focus. Choose the one that does that.