Use Prowler for check breadth. Use Hanu for the join.
Prowler is an excellent open-source cloud security tool with a broader check catalogue than Hanu's, and this page is not a case for replacing it. It is a case for knowing which question each one answers: Prowler tells you whether a resource is configured correctly, and Hanu tells you whether that resource is part of a chain that is being walked.
These two tools overlap at the point where a cloud API is read, and almost nowhere else. Prowler's unit of output is a check result, and its centre of gravity is framework-aligned coverage. Hanu's unit of output is a compound risk with a chain behind it. One of those answers a compliance question and the other answers an incident-prevention question, and a team that needs both should say so out loud rather than picking a winner.
Where the other tool wins
Prowler wins several of the comparisons that matter most, including the one this page is nominally about.
- Check breadth. If the question is how many cloud checks are available, Prowler is the larger catalogue and Hanu is not trying to win that comparison. Ours is 368 AWS service checks, 77 for Azure and 77 for GCP, and no Oracle Cloud support at all.
- Framework and benchmark mapping as a first-class output. Prowler is built for framework-aligned review, which is what a compliance lead or an external assessor actually asks to see. Hanu's evidence engines cover seven frameworks, but its output is a risk ledger rather than a benchmark report.
- Community scale. A large contributor base keeps adding checks and services at a rate one vendor's team cannot match, and anyone can read exactly what a check does before they run it.
- CLI-first ergonomics. Prowler fits into a pipeline in one line and produces machine-readable output, which is why it turns up in so many CI jobs. Hanu expects a deployed stack before it produces anything at all.
- No standing footprint. A local CLI run needs nothing running between scans. Hanu needs eight services and four datastores, and that is a genuine cost of adoption, not a footnote.
Where Hanu fits
Hanu's claim is deliberately narrower: posture findings matter because of what they join to.
- Correlation across 32 domains. 166 typed signals from cloud, code, CI/CD, identity, certificates, containers, network and AI surfaces land on one bus. 75 correlation rules join them inside a declared window. A misconfiguration with no reachable path stays low; the same misconfiguration inside a chain that reaches a crown-jewel asset is ranked accordingly.
- Compound risk instead of check count. 609 behavioural detections exist to supply the joins, not to be the deliverable. What a person receives is one risk per chain, with the rule id, the score and every contributing signal attached, so it can be closed by an engineer and read by an auditor.
- Deterministic scoring. Severity base, a bounded increment per contributing signal, then multipliers for public exposure, crown-jewel reach and known-exploited status, capped at 10. Nothing in the path is a model and 0 LLMs are involved.
- Self-hosted, zero egress, ELv2. Eight services, your datastores, minimum 2 vCPU, 6 GB RAM and 10 GB disk, 0 bytes of telemetry leaving your account, air-gap capable, source-available under the Elastic License 2.0 with the Community edition at $0 in production. Not OSI open source, and we say so.
- Findings where the work already is. Remediation routes to Jira, ServiceNow, Cortex XSOAR, PagerDuty or Slack, and code-level feedback returns to the forge as a check run, so a chain becomes work in the system that already holds work.
One integration point, stated before you discover it yourself: there is no Prowler connector in Hanu. Scanner results arrive through the scan-ingest plugin interface - Snyk, Semgrep, Trivy and Tenable ship as plugins - and Prowler is not one of them today. You can read the two side by side, or write an ingest plugin against the same interface, but do not plan around a supported connector that does not exist.
| Question | Cloud check scanner (Prowler) | Hanu |
|---|---|---|
| Is this resource configured correctly? | Yes, across a broader check catalogue, mapped to benchmarks | Yes, at lower breadth: 368 AWS · 77 Azure · 77 GCP checks |
| Does the misconfiguration connect to anything that matters? | A separate question, usually answered by another tool | Attack-path reach and compound-risk scoring in the same engine |
| Framework-aligned scan report | The tool's centre of gravity | Evidence engines for 7 frameworks, reading live findings rather than a scan snapshot |
| Signals joined across domains | Cloud and Kubernetes scope | 32 domains, including CI/CD, certificate trust, non-human identity and AI workloads |
| Output unit | Check result with remediation text | Ranked risk with its contributing signals and evidence trail |
| Custom logic | Checks written in the project's own language | Declarative rules registered in the two tier indexes, with ATT&CK mapping and tests |
| Cloud check scanner (Prowler) | Hanu | |
|---|---|---|
| Deployment | A CLI, a self-hosted server deployment, or a hosted option from the maintainers | 8 services from one compose file, plus its own datastores |
| Who runs it | You, at whatever depth you choose | You, including upgrades and the detection feed; a managed instance exists in Growth and Enterprise |
| Data residency | Self-hosted runs stay in your account | Your Postgres, Neo4j, Redis and object store, sealed with your KMS |
| Telemetry egress | None for a local run | 0 bytes; air-gap capable |
| Licence | Open source, free to run | Elastic License 2.0, source-available; Community edition $0 in production |
| Content cadence | Community and maintainer releases | With each release in Community; a continuously updated signed feed in Growth |
| Time to first output | Minutes, for a CLI run | A deploy and a first full scan |
Verdict
Keep Prowler if you are a cloud or platform engineer whose job is check coverage, or a compliance lead who needs a benchmark-mapped scan to hand to an assessor, or a security team that wants a free scanner running in a pipeline today. Add Hanu if you are the CISO or the SOC lead who has to explain which of those findings is on a path to something that matters and in what order to fix them. The honest configuration for most teams is both, and it is a better answer than arguing about check counts, which is a comparison we would lose.
The Prowler question
Should we replace Prowler with Hanu?
How do Prowler findings get into Hanu?
Does Hanu produce framework evidence?
Is Hanu open source?
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