AWS Cost Explorer shows you what you spent. Cloud Cost Analyzer shows you what to delete, right-size, or migrate, with a specific fix for every finding. They do different jobs, and most teams run both.
Native to AWS and free. It is excellent for trends, forecasting, budgets, cost allocation by tag, anomaly alerts, and Reserved Instance / Savings Plans coverage. It answers where is my money going? What it does not do is walk your account resource by resource and hand you a prioritized list of specific things to fix.
A read-only CLI scan that runs 90 rules across compute, storage, networking, and more, then returns a report of idle and orphaned resources, over-provisioning, and old snapshots, each with the exact fix and estimated savings. It answers what do I do about it?
| Capability | CCA | AWS Cost Explorer |
|---|---|---|
| Primary job | Find & fix waste | Report & forecast spend |
| Specific fix per finding | 90 rules | |
| Idle / orphaned resource detection (unattached EIPs, idle NAT gateways, old snapshots) | ||
| Right-sizing recommendations | EC2 only | |
| Reserved Instance / Savings Plans guidance | ||
| Spend trends & forecasting | ||
| Cost allocation by tag | Planned | |
| Cost anomaly detection | ||
| CLI-first workflow | ||
| CI/CD integration (fail a build on new waste) | ||
| Air-gapped / offline mode | ||
| Multi-cloud (AWS + Azure) | AWS only | |
| Setup time | < 5 min | Built in to AWS |
| Price | Free tier + paid | Free |
Based on publicly available information about AWS Cost Explorer. Capabilities may have changed.
You need spend dashboards, budgets and alerts, forecasting, or to analyze Reserved Instance and Savings Plans coverage. It is free and already in your account.
You want a prioritized list of specific waste to fix this week, enforced in CI/CD, without a cross-account role, and optionally run air-gapped. Point it at an account and get a remediation list.
Cost Explorer for the dashboard and the trend line, CCA for the to-do list that actually brings the trend line down. They complement each other.