What ProjectDiscovery offers
ProjectDiscovery's Nuclei is a template-based scanner for web, network, DNS, and cloud infrastructure, with asset discovery and custom exploit detection. The company also sells a hosted platform.
Alternatives / AWS GuardDuty
1 open-source alternative
1 Best Open Source AWS GuardDuty Alternatives in 2026
Looking for an open source AWS GuardDuty alternative? Only one project we verified fits loosely: ProjectDiscovery, whose Nuclei scanner finds exploitable vulnerabilities. It does not analyze CloudTrail and VPC logs for threats like GuardDuty.
Written by Maxime DERAME
Last updated:
Best AWS GuardDuty alternatives at a glance
| Alternative | Best for | License |
|---|---|---|
| ProjectDiscovery | Template-based vulnerability scanner | MIT (Nuclei) |
How we chose these AWS GuardDuty alternatives
We looked for open-source security tools. We verified Nuclei's license, recent activity, stars, and scope in its repository. See our methodology for the full criteria.
Important: different job
Nuclei scans for known vulnerabilities. It does not provide GuardDuty's anomaly detection on cloud logs.
License details
Nuclei is MIT.
Maintenance status
Nuclei had commits within days of this update and has over 32,000 stars.
Why look for a AWS GuardDuty alternative?
GuardDuty is a managed AWS service that detects threats from logs and network activity. Open-source scanners cover different ground, mainly vulnerability detection, so you may combine several tools for full coverage.
projectdiscovery.io
ProjectDiscovery builds open-source security tools such as Nuclei, a template-based vulnerability scanner, alongside a hosted platform for asset discovery and vulnerability management. It covers security scanning rather than application performance monitoring.
32.2K3.9KMIT (Nuclei)
Pricing: Free open-source tools; the hosted platform is paid.
- Template-based vulnerability scanning with Nuclei
- Large community of templates
- MIT-licensed core tools
- Security tooling, not infrastructure or APM monitoring
- The managed platform is a separate hosted service
Compare AWS GuardDuty alternatives
| Alternative | Type | License | Self-hosted | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ProjectDiscovery | Vulnerability scanner | MIT (Nuclei) | Yes | Finding exploitable issues |
Which one should you choose?
Want to scan for exploitable vulnerabilities
Nuclei uses templates to detect known issues across web, network, DNS, and cloud.