[Alternatives](/alternatives/) / AWS CloudTrail

# An application-level alternative to AWS CloudTrail

CloudTrail is AWS’s native audit service. It records management and API activity across AWS accounts — who called which AWS API, from where, with what result — and delivers logs to S3 or CloudTrail Lake for retention and query.

[See Veritio Cloud](/cloud/)[View on GitHub ↗](https://github.com/getveritio/veritio)

Apache-2.0 core · Verifies offline · Self-host or cloud

AWS CloudTrail

AWS control plane

Management events

-   iam:CreateRole
-   s3:PutBucketPolicy
-   signin:ConsoleLogin
-   kms:Decrypt
-   ec2:RunInstances

Who called which AWS API

Veritio

Evidence & verification

Evidence chain

-   session.startedrisk 0.05
-   tool.calledrisk 0.18
-   change.recordedrisk 0.34
-   deploy.completedrisk 0.41
-   approval.grantedrisk 0.12

Verify: validoffline

What your app and agents did

vs

## What AWS CloudTrail does well

-   Unmatched coverage of AWS control-plane activity, enabled by default for management events.
-   Organization trails aggregate accounts with no application changes.
-   Log file integrity validation with signed digest files.
-   Deep AWS ecosystem integration: S3, Athena, EventBridge, CloudTrail Lake.

## Where Veritio differs

-   Veritio records what your product and your agents did — application events, AI agent sessions, code changes, deployments, approvals — not AWS API calls. The two are complementary layers.
-   Records are hash-linked at the application level and export to an open bundle format that a third party can verify with the open-source verifier, without an AWS account.
-   Each event carries origin and a deterministic risk score under a published policy, so review queues can be sorted by risk rather than read linearly.
-   The core is open source and self-hostable on your own Postgres; the managed service is optional.

## Side-by-side comparison

Capability

AWS CloudTrail

Veritio

Records

AWS API & management events

Application, agent, change & deploy events

Scope

AWS accounts

Any app, any infrastructure

Integrity

Signed digest files (within AWS)

Hash-linked chain, open verifier

Risk model

—

Deterministic 0–1 scoring per policy

Hosting

AWS only

Self-hosted (OSS) or managed

Export audience

Your AWS tooling

Anyone, via open bundle + verifier

Comparison last reviewed August 2026. Products change — check vendor documentation for current behavior. Veritio provides evidence support for reviews and investigations, not automatic compliance.

## Choose AWS CloudTrail when…

You need to audit AWS infrastructure activity itself — IAM changes, resource creation, console sign-ins. That is CloudTrail’s job and nothing else does it as completely inside AWS.

## Choose Veritio when…

You need evidence of what your application and AI agents did — across clouds or on-prem — that reviewers outside your AWS account can independently verify.

## Stronger together

CloudTrail for your cloud account, Veritio for your application and its agents — two layers of one audit story.

[See Veritio Cloud](/cloud/)[View on GitHub ↗](https://github.com/getveritio/veritio)[More comparisons](/alternatives/)