prowler

What it is and what it does

Prowler is an open-source cloud security platform that runs security and compliance checks across AWS, Azure, GCP, Kubernetes, GitHub, M365, OCI, Alibaba Cloud, and other cloud environments. It includes hundreds of built-in controls aligned with industry standards (CIS, NIST 800, NIST CSF, CISA, MITRE ATT&CK) and regulatory frameworks (PCI-DSS, GDPR, HIPAA, FedRAMP, SOC2, ISO 27001). The tool provides CLI, API, and web UI interfaces for running assessments, viewing results, and generating compliance reports.

It's designed for organizations needing continuous security monitoring and compliance validation across multiple cloud accounts and providers. Prowler can be deployed as a standalone CLI tool, a self-hosted web application (Prowler Local Server), or used via the managed Prowler Cloud service. For AWS, it includes Attack Paths functionality that combines inventory data with security findings to visualize attack chains using Neo4j or Amazon Neptune graph databases.

Use it for:

• Audit AWS, Azure, or GCP environments against CIS benchmarks and regulatory frameworks like PCI-DSS or HIPAA.
• Continuous compliance monitoring across multiple cloud accounts with automated check execution and reporting.
• Identify and prioritize security misconfigurations using Prowler ThreatScore risk weighting.
• Scan Kubernetes clusters for security policy violations and compliance gaps.
• Generate compliance evidence and reports for audits, certifications, or incident response investigations.
• Visualize attack paths in AWS using graph-based analysis of cloud resources and security findings.

Worth the install?

AI-flagged interpretation of the facts on this page — verify before relying

Prowler automates security and compliance assessments across multiple cloud providers using hundreds of built-in security checks and compliance frameworks.

Yes. Prowler is actively maintained, widely used, carries no known vulnerabilities, and offers permissive licensing. It's the right choice if you need multi-cloud security assessment with compliance framework support. Install friction is low. The main consideration is whether you need all 93 dependencies or can work with a subset; verify your provider's SDK requirements before deploying at scale.

Install

prowler on PyPI

pip install prowler

uv add prowler

poetry add prowler

Installing prowler

Before you install

Low install friction with a pure Python wheel distribution. Actively maintained with a release 8 days ago. Supports Python 3.10–3.13 and carries 93 runtime dependencies, mostly cloud provider SDKs that are installed on demand.

License in practice

Apache-2.0 permissive license allows commercial and private use with minimal restrictions, making it suitable for enterprise deployments without licensing concerns.

Quickstart

pip install prowler
prowler aws
# For dashboard: prowler dashboard

Requires Python 3.10 or later. Cloud provider credentials (AWS keys, Azure identity, etc.) must be configured in the environment for the relevant provider scans to function.

Verify before relying

• Whether all 93 runtime dependencies are required for basic operation or if they are conditionally installed per provider.
• Performance characteristics and typical runtime for scanning large multi-account or multi-subscription environments.
• Whether the Neo4j or Neptune graph backend for Attack Paths is required for core functionality or optional.
• Availability and maturity of the self-hosted Prowler Local Server relative to the cloud-hosted version.

Package facts

Evidence: prowler-5.38.0-py3-none-any.whl

Tags

More Security packages

Further reading