Resoto vs. Google Cloud Asset Inventory

Resoto is an open-source alternative to Google's Cloud Asset Inventory.

Cloud Asset Inventory is a managed service that collects metadata from Google Cloud resources to create an inventory, allowing you to monitor asset changes.

Similarities Between Resoto and Cloud Asset Inventory

Both Cloud Asset Inventory and Resoto take asset snapshots.

With either tool, you can:

• Collect metadata from Google Cloud resources
• View a history of resource creation, update, and deletion events
• Generate metrics and time-series data for Google Cloud resources
• Monitor changes, write queries, and ask questions about your Google Cloud infrastructure

Differences Between Resoto and Cloud Asset Inventory

Cloud Asset Inventory is a fully managed service that Google introduced after their open-source Cloud Asset Inventory Import to BigQuery tool gained popularity.

To enable data storage, analytics, notifications and security scenarios, Cloud Asset Inventory requires integration with Google Cloud Storage and BigQuery.

Cloud Asset Inventory is Google Cloud's native inventory service, and therefore only supports Google Cloud resources and Kubernetes. Cloud Asset Inventory lacks support for other cloud platforms and non-Google tooling such as GitHub.

Resoto, on the other hand, also supports other cloud providers (including AWS and DigitalOcean).

	Resoto	Cloud Asset Inventory
Resource Coverage	Offers support for a growing number of Google Cloud resource types.	Supports about 140 Google Cloud asset types.
Full-Text Search	Creates an inventory of discovered resources and offers full-text search as an easy way to explore your cloud inventory.	Searches require writing queries using a custom Google syntax and are limited to a set of predefined attributes. Searches require knowledge of asset metadata fields.
Data Model	Uses a unified data model for all platforms and resources. Unifying base properties and common abstractions allows you to search, sort, aggregate, and act on a higher level of abstraction and query resources across clouds.	Requires specialized knowledge of Google Cloud assets and how their attributes are represented.
Multi-Cloud	Cloud agnostic and can be used as a single control plane for multiple clouds. Open source and offers an SDK that makes it easy to add support for additional platforms and resources (e.g., on-prem or SaaS).	Purpose-built for Google Cloud and lacks support for other clouds.
Remediation	Integrates analytics and governance into a single product to enforce policies and perform actions on resources. Offers commands and jobs to automate remediation. Can be used to write custom code and rules for any resource in a cloud-agnostic way.	Only offers alerting; lacks remediation capabilities.
Pricing	Open-source and free to use.	Free of charge, but requires other Google Cloud services (e.g., Cloud Storage to store data, BigQuery to run queries, and Pub/Sub for notifications).