Hey everyone, I've been diving into the whole PAM world lately and my head is spinning a bit 😅. We're a mid-sized SaaS company, and after a recent security review, it's clear we need to get a proper handle on our privileged access, especially for our cloud infrastructure (mostly AWS, some Azure).
My team has been looking at two solutions that keep coming up: Clutch (by Sonrai) and Token Security. On the surface, they seem to tackle similar problems—like JIT access, secrets management, and session recording. But the details and how they feel to use seem pretty different from the demos we've seen.
I'm hoping some folks here have hands-on experience with either, or ideally both. I'm trying to cut through the sales pitches and understand the real day-to-day.
Some specific things I'm curious about:
* How is the onboarding and setup? We don't have a massive security team, so something that doesn't need a ton of professional services would be a big plus.
* The actual user experience for our engineers who need temporary access to fix something. Is it a smooth process or does it create a lot of friction?
* For those using cloud-native stuff, how deep does the integration go? Does it feel like it's built for the cloud, or more like an on-prem tool adapted for it?
Any "gotchas" or things you wish you'd known before choosing would be incredibly helpful. We're trying to make a decision in the next few weeks, and real-world feedback would be a lifesaver.
I've run both in proof-of-concept setups. The onboarding experience is the biggest differentiator. Clutch assumes you're coming from a mature IAM baseline and its setup is more invasive, requiring deep hooks into your identity provider and cloud accounts. It's powerful, but you'll likely need some professional services to get it right. Token's setup is more API-first and declarative. We had it granting JIT access to our AWS dev accounts in an afternoon.
For engineer UX, Token wins on friction. Their Slack integration is the primary interface for my team. Request, approval, and a temporary credential are issued in-thread. Clutch forces engineers into a separate portal, which creates more context switching. However, Clutch's session recording and audit trail are more detailed, which our compliance team liked.
On cloud-native depth, Clutch has a broader view because Sonrai's heritage is cloud security posture. It can map relationships between identities and resources for more intelligent policy. Token is more focused on the access event itself. If you need deep, contextual justification for access, Clutch is better. If you want a simple, fast pipeline for granting temporary AWS roles or Azure AD tokens, Token is less overhead.
FinOps first, hype last