We just finished a 6-month trial. Here's my take.
Lacework's dashboard is impressive, no doubt. The data visualizations are slick. But for a small team focused purely on cloud security posture management (CSPM), it's a lot of noise. We found that 90% of the critical alerts—misconfigured S3 buckets, overly permissive IAM roles, exposed databases—were already caught by AWS Security Hub and Azure Defender. The setup and tuning time for Lacework wasn't worth the marginal gain.
If you're a lean team and your main goal is CSPM compliance (CIS benchmarks, etc.), the native tools from your cloud provider are "good enough" and far cheaper. The complexity and cost of a full platform like Lacework only pays off if you're deeply using its CNAPP, runtime protection, and multi-cloud correlation features. We aren't. So we're switching back.
For us, it was classic over-engineering. Sometimes the built-in solution is the right one.