AWS IAM Reviews in June 2026: User Ratings, Pros & Cons

AWS IAM - heart of AWS security

What do you like best? AWS Identity and Access Managemen (IAM) is a user and access control service. It'a allows you to create new users, add permissions, manage access keys and many more. You can create groups of users for easy access management. Permissions are granted using policies (document that defines allowed actions). What's really cool is that policie can be attach not only to users but to EC2 instances as well so your application can run certain actions without credentials ...

Security by granularity

What do you like best? IAM is the heart of AWS security. Main and most important thing is that you can grant privileges on granularity level of API call for certain object in certain region and availability zone . You can control all your users and their privileges from one place.Other great features are: two factor authentication, Active Directory integration, great web interface to manage policies, roles and group and useful predefined policies. Last but not least is feature called ...

easy to understand and clean service

What do you like best? A very clean and straightforward service for account management. I can quickly make a limited to very limited access account for a developer or someone totally new and unaware for a quick QA run or any other check/test they may want to run. What do you dislike? Could have more explanation on steps while creating new roles and accounts, rest all is fine. Maybe bring in the new console for this service instead of S3. Recommendations to others considering the ...

Powerful access management

What do you like best? The basic functionalities are there. It's what you need to use in order to access the other AWS goodies. CLI support is pretty good. It's easy to setup really advanced and specific policies, giving your users only the access they need. MFA support. Powerful administration tools and fine-grained tools. What do you dislike? The UI could use some improvement. It's often hard to find things. Policies are powerful but unnecessarily complicated - ...

Powerful but Tricky

What do you like best? Gives you total control of your AWS services and permissions. Extremely useful for a startup or large company that has a fluctuation of employees because it allows you to quickly give certain permissions to certain users. What do you dislike? Can be conceptually complicated and often need to "code" policies. There can be an easier process. What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized? Sometimes you don't want to give ...

Robust service for managing cloud application access

What do you like best? - Granular permission control - GUI interface is easy enough to use, has room for improvement however - CLI interface is easy to use - API interface available to dynamically build roles - Must have good IAM roles setup to manage application access, as it is the entry point into your cloud system What do you dislike? - GUI interface can be simpler. AWS tends to build minimum UI but the ability to CLI and use API interfaces makes IAM a winner ...