Wazuh vs Commercial SIEM: The Real Enterprise Trade-off

TL;DR — The Wazuh vs commercial-SIEM debate is usually framed as "free vs expensive." That framing is wrong. The real question is who operates it. Wazuh removes the licence line item entirely; it does not remove the engineering, tuning and 24×7 staffing that make any SIEM useful. The path most enterprises actually want is a managed SIEM built on open technology — open-source economics, without the operating burden landing on your team.

Every CISO who has priced Splunk, QRadar or Microsoft Sentinel eventually asks the same question: why are we paying by the gigabyte to watch our own logs? Wazuh is the obvious counter-question. It is a capable, widely deployed open-source SIEM/XDR with no per-EPS or per-GB licence. But "free to license" and "free to run" are very different numbers, and conflating them is how SIEM projects quietly fail.

What Wazuh actually gives you

Wazuh is a genuinely enterprise-grade engine — the same one that powers the detection layer inside Ayati One.

• Log collection and analysis across Windows, Linux and macOS
• File integrity monitoring (FIM) and configuration/compliance assessment against CIS benchmarks
• Vulnerability detection mapped to CVEs
• Detection content mapped to MITRE ATT&CK
• Active response, and no licence cost that scales with log volume

The cost that doesn't appear on the invoice

The licence is zero. The operating model is not.

Commercial SIEMs bundle a vendor-operated backend, support and (sometimes) content. That is what the per-GB or per-EPS premium partly pays for. Strip the licence away with raw Wazuh and that operating responsibility does not disappear — it moves to your payroll.

The comparison that matters

The managed middle path

The reason Cloud Armor built Ayati One on Wazuh, Suricata, Zeek and OpenCTI is precisely this trade-off. You get the open-source economics — no licence that punishes visibility — and a hardened, tuned deployment operated by analysts around the clock, priced at a flat rate per asset.

Frequently asked questions

Is Wazuh really enterprise-grade, or a hobbyist tool?

Enterprise-grade. It is deployed in Fortune 500 SOCs and national CERTs, and its source is openly audited worldwide. The question is never the engine's capability — it is whether you have the team to operate it.

We have a security team. Should we just run Wazuh ourselves?

If you have the depth to run an indexer cluster, maintain detection content and staff analysts 24×7, self-hosting is viable and economical. Most teams discover the 24×7 staffing line is the one that breaks the business case — which is exactly the line a managed service removes.

How is this different from just buying Splunk or Sentinel?

You stop paying by data volume. A Microsoft Sentinel cost alternative and an IBM QRadar comparison both come down to the same structural point: flat per-asset pricing decouples your security coverage from your log bill.

Weighing open-source against commercial SIEM? Talk to our SOC engineers — we run the open stack for a living and will tell you honestly whether self-hosting or a managed service fits your team, and price it against your estate.