What is the best SIEM for a small business in 2026?
The one someone will actually watch. For a small company, who reads the alerts at 3 a.m. matters more than the feature list.
A SIEM (security information and event management) pulls logs from your email, directory, endpoints and firewall, then correlates them to flag an attack in progress. Here is the short answer for a small business.
No one on staff can watch alerts at night: go with Huntress Managed SIEM at $4 per data source per month with a 24/7 human SOC (security operations center) included, or Blumira, whose Respond plan adds 24/7 incident support. Already all-in on Microsoft 365: start with Microsoft Sentinel, where several Microsoft sources are ingested at no charge. You have a hands-on admin and a thin budget: Wazuh is free to self-host, or $571 a month for up to 100 agents as a hosted service.
The ranking is editorial: a sponsored spot is always labeled on its card, and no affiliate link changes a score.
The best SIEM for your situation
24/7 human SOC included, $4 per data source per month list price
Flat budget per employee$12 to $21 per employee per month, unlimited ingestion, 1-year retention
Microsoft 365 shopsOffice 365 audit logs and Defender alerts ingested free, 90 days retention included
Tight budget, capable adminFree to self-host, hosted plans from $571 a month up to 100 agents
Low log volume, technical teamFrom $0.09 per GB ingested: about $16 for a first month at 5 GB a day
Windows-heavy networkPublished price grid, from $120 a month for 10 log sources
9 SIEM options for small business, compared
The billing column matters more than the score. A 60-person company pays very different amounts depending on whether the vendor counts gigabytes, employees, data sources or agents. Always convert the price to your own environment before comparing two rows.
| Best for | Billing unit | Free plan | Team size | Visit | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Microsoft Sentinel | Best SIEM for Microsoft 365 small businesses | Per GB ingested, some Microsoft sources free | 4.3/5 | Per GB ingested, rate in the Azure calculator | — | 20 to 250 employees on Microsoft 365 | Visit → |
| 2 | Elastic Security | Best per-GB price for a technical team | Per GB ingested and per GB retained | 4.3/5 | From $0.09/GB ingested | — | Small businesses with in-house technical skills | Visit → |
| 3 | Blumira | Best per-employee price for small business | Per employee per month, unlimited ingestion | 4.1/5 | From $12 per employee per month | — | 20 to 250 employees, no security staff | Visit → |
| 4 | Huntress Managed SIEM | Best SIEM with a 24/7 human SOC included | Per data source per month, SOC included | 4.1/5 | $4 per data source per month | — | Small businesses without dedicated IT, often via an MSP | Visit → |
| 5 | Wazuh | Best free SIEM for small business | Free, or tiered by agent count when hosted | 4.1/5 | Free; hosted from $571/mo | ✓ | Small businesses with an available sysadmin | Visit → |
| 6 | Sekoia Defend | Best European option through an MSSP | Quote only, mostly sold through MSSPs | 4.0/5 | Quote only | — | Small businesses using a managed security provider | Visit → |
| 7 | ManageEngine Log360 Cloud | Best published price per log source | Per bundle of log sources, billed yearly | 3.8/5 | From $1,095/yr for 10 sources | ✓ | Windows-heavy small businesses | Visit → |
| 8 | Graylog Security | Best open source option with no volume cap | Free Open edition, Security licensed per GB/day | 3.8/5 | Free; Security from $18,000/yr | ✓ | Technical teams already centralizing logs | Visit → |
| 9 | Rapid7 Incident Command | Best quote-based SIEM with optional MDR | Per monitored asset, quote only | 3.8/5 | Quote only, per asset | — | Growing companies ready to negotiate | Visit → |
Prices from the vendors' official pricing pages in 2026, in US dollars, before tax. When two tools share a score, the order follows fit for a small business with no security team.
Is your tool missing from this page? Email us: hello@hackceleration.com
How we compared and scored these options
Most SIEM roundups that rank for this search either list prices nobody can verify or skip the human side entirely. A small business needs two answers first: what will this cost per month for my company, and who is going to look at the alerts. We compared nine options using their official pricing pages, their contract terms, and what admins at small companies and MSPs report in forums and review sites.
Each score uses the same five criteria as our general SIEM ranking, so a tool carries the same score everywhere on the site. The three tools new to this page (Huntress, Log360 Cloud, Rapid7) were scored on the same grid. We left out offers with no price and no official quote process, and those built for enterprise volumes: Splunk, Google Security Operations, Sumo Logic, Guardsix and CrowdStrike's SIEM. The buyer's guide below explains why.
- Ease of operationHow many hours a small team spends each week triaging alerts and keeping the platform healthy. Plans where the vendor's analysts read the alerts score higher here.20%
- Pricing clarityA public price, a billing unit you can map to your company (employee, data source, agent), and a bill that does not jump from one month to the next.25%
- Detection and correlationHow well the tool links events from different sources to surface a real attack rather than piling up logs. This is the core job, so it carries the most weight.30%
- Support and servicesWhat the vendor takes on: human support, coverage hours, incident response, and a partner network to help you get started.10%
- Available connectorsSources you can plug in without custom work: email, directory, firewall, endpoints, cloud apps. A small business has no time to build its own integrations.15%
No affiliate link changes a score or a rank.
Microsoft Sentinel
Sentinel is Microsoft's cloud SIEM, running in Azure. If you already pay for Microsoft 365, the pitch is concrete: several data sources carry no ingestion charge. Office 365 audit logs (SharePoint, Exchange, Teams), Azure activity logs and alerts from the Defender products are free to ingest, and 90 days of retention are included.
Everything else is billed per gigabyte. Microsoft does not list a readable per-GB figure on its pricing page; you get it from the Azure calculator for your region. So run the 31-day trial (10 GB a day free), connect your real sources, and look at your daily volume before you commit to anything.
Small-company users tell the same story. When Microsoft licenses cover most sources, the bill stays low. Add a chatty firewall or a few Linux servers and it tracks volume. One more thing: the Azure portal experience for Sentinel goes away in 2027 in favor of the Defender portal, so start there.
- Microsoft 365 and Defender sources ingested free
- 90 days of retention included
- 31-day trial at 10 GB a day
- ✓Fast start if you are all-Microsoft
- ✓Huge connector catalog
- ✓Commitment tiers smooth the bill
- ✗No per-GB rate on the pricing page
- ✗Bill grows with non-Microsoft volume
- ✗Azure automation billed separately
The first trial to run for a Microsoft 365 shop. It will not read alerts for you: plan on an MSP if you have no IT person.
Elastic Security
Elastic Security is the security layer of the Elastic stack. Its serverless version is pay-as-you-go with public prices, which is rare in this market. At 5 GB a day, the math fits on one line: 5 × 30 × $0.09 is $13.50 of ingestion a month, plus $2.55 to retain those 150 GB in month one. Retention then adds up month after month.
The listed price is a floor ("as low as"); the Complete tier is $0.11 per GB. Serverless projects run in regions from several cloud providers, European ones included, picked at creation.
The real cost sits elsewhere. Elastic expects in-house skills to write rules, build dashboards and triage alerts. Without that person, a low ingestion bill means very little.
- Public per-GB prices
- Choice of hosting regions
- Complete tier for more depth
- ✓Very low bill at small volumes
- ✓Easy to estimate yourself
- ✓Strong log search
- ✗Needs a technical owner
- ✗Retention adds up monthly
- ✗No analysts included
The cheapest on paper at low volume. Only pick it if someone on staff will tune and watch it.
Blumira
Blumira was built for small and midsize companies from day one. Its billing is the easiest on this list: you pay per employee (anyone with a work email and a computer), regardless of log volume. For 50 employees that is $600 a month on Detect, $800 on Respond and $1,050 on Automate, before onboarding.
The tier choice matters. Detect comes with support from 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. Eastern. Respond and Automate add 24/7 incident support from Blumira's SecOps team, which is what a company with no one on call actually needs. Respond and Automate include one agent per employee. One year of retention is included on every plan.
In user reviews, admins praise ease of use and the support team. The recurring complaint is limited customization: custom rules go through support, and some alerts and reports lack detail.
- Unlimited log ingestion
- 1-year retention included
- 24/7 incident support from Respond up
- ✓Simple public price
- ✓Quick to get running
- ✓Well-liked support
- ✗Custom rules go through support
- ✗Annual contract required
- ✗Detect support is business hours only
The best pick for a small business with no specialist and a fixed budget. Choose Respond over Detect if no one can answer an alert at night.
Huntress Managed SIEM
Huntress sells a managed SIEM: the platform plus human analysts watching alerts 24/7, in one price. That is exactly what most small businesses are missing. List price is $4 per data source per month, with discounts at volume, so 20 sources come to $80 a month at list.
Two caveats before you run the numbers. Buying direct carries a 50-license minimum per product, which can raise the entry ticket for a very small company. Deployment and integration are not included; partners handle them. The commitment is 12 months.
In MSP communities, Huntress comes up again and again as the option for clients who are not security experts.
- 24/7 human SOC included
- Public list price per source
- Pooled retention with no overage
- ✓Lowest staffing burden on the list
- ✓Easy-to-read bill
- ✓Built for non-experts
- ✗50-license minimum per product direct
- ✗Deployment through a partner
- ✗12-month commitment
The most direct answer to "who watches the alerts at night." Get a partner quote for deployment and check the license minimum before comparing.
Wazuh
Wazuh is open source and free if you run it yourself. An agent on each machine sends events to a central server. Admins recommend it more than anything else as a starting point, with one warning that never goes away: someone has to read what it surfaces.
One longtime user put it this way after about ten months across roughly 70 clients: it is "fairly easy to deploy and maintain if you read the docs." For a small deployment of 10 to 25 agents, a practitioner tutorial gives a rough sizing: 4 vCPUs, 8 GB of RAM and 50 to 100 GB of disk for 90 days, on a dedicated server.
If you would rather not run servers, Wazuh Cloud costs $571 a month up to 100 agents ($6,852 a year), with one month searchable and three months archived, then $923 up to 250 agents. Reviews flag advanced documentation that could be better and no built-in case management.
- Free license when self-hosted
- Hosted regions in Frankfurt and London
- Agent also monitors endpoints
- ✓No license cost
- ✓Large admin community
- ✓Public hosted tiers
- ✗Long tuning to cut false positives
- ✗No built-in case management
- ✗Only one month searchable on Small
The best start if you have the time. Without a named owner, free turns into tuning hours and ignored alerts.
Sekoia Defend
Sekoia Defend comes from a French vendor. Small businesses usually meet it through a managed security provider that runs it for many clients, which is the use case Sekoia highlights. You are buying a service built on it rather than a tool to run yourself.
On compliance, Sekoia's trust center lists ISO/IEC 27001:2022, PCI DSS and SOC 2 Type 1, with references to GDPR, NIS2 and DORA. The SaaS platform runs in several regions, but the hosting country is not shown, so ask in writing if that matters to you. A self-hosted version exists.
There is no public price, which pulls down its pricing score and makes a solo comparison hard. For a US company it makes sense mainly if your MSSP already runs it or a European customer asks for a European platform.
- European vendor
- Self-hosted option
- Built for managed security providers
- ✓ISO 27001 and SOC 2 Type 1 listed
- ✓Strong support score
- ✓Fits the managed-service model
- ✗No public price
- ✗Hosting country not shown
- ✗Not built for direct purchase by a small team
Worth asking your MSP about if you want a European platform under your monitoring. Ask for the full quote, service included.
ManageEngine Log360 Cloud
Log360 Cloud is the hosted SIEM from ManageEngine, Zoho's IT division. Its pricing is public and detailed, which sets it apart. On Professional, 25 log sources cost $2,695 a year, and 10 sources cost $120 a month on monthly billing.
Searchable storage is extra: $10 per GB per year on Professional, $13 on Enterprise, with three times that volume provided as archive ($0.25 per GB beyond). A free edition exists; check its limits on the vendor's site.
The catch is the licensing math. It mixes several units: log sources, domain controllers, file servers, cloud accounts, workstations. Pricing your exact environment takes time, and no analysts are included.
- Detailed public price grid
- Monthly billing available
- Free edition to start
- ✓Price known before a sales call
- ✓Affordable entry tier
- ✓Good Windows log coverage
- ✗Many licensing units
- ✗Searchable storage billed separately
- ✗No human monitoring included
A solid choice if you want a public price and will run the tool yourself. List every source by type before you pick a bundle.
Graylog Security
Graylog started as a log management platform, and its Open edition is free with no volume cap. For a small business it is a good way to centralize and search logs without a license. Support is community-only.
The Security edition, which adds real SIEM features, starts at $18,000 a year, or $1,500 a month. It is licensed on daily volume (from 10 GB a day) and does not depend on devices or users. The hosted version goes through AWS Marketplace, with 90 days online and one year of retention by default.
The jump from Open to Security is steep for a small company. And Open is not a full SIEM: you build detection yourself.
- Free Open edition, no cap
- Pricing independent of device count
- 1-year default retention when hosted
- ✓Free starting point
- ✓Fast log search
- ✓Public paid-tier prices
- ✗$18,000 a year floor for security
- ✗Detection to build on Open
- ✗Community support only on Open
Useful to centralize logs for free. For security, the annual floor puts it above most small-business budgets.
Rapid7 Incident Command
Rapid7 Incident Command is the new name for InsightIDR. It comes in three packages, Essential, Advanced and Ultimate, priced per monitored asset. No figure is public, so you need a quote.
Retention is spelled out: 90 days of logs on Essential, 180 days on Advanced and Ultimate, and 13 months of alert history across the board. If you need a year of logs, that drives the package choice.
Managed detection and response (MDR) exists but is sold separately. Without it you are back to the first question: who reads the alerts. Ask for both quotes, software alone and software plus MDR.
- Three packages by retention
- 13 months of alert history
- MDR from the same vendor
- ✓Strong detection
- ✓Clear retention terms
- ✓Path to a managed service
- ✗No public price
- ✗MDR costs extra
- ✗Only 90 days of logs on Essential
A serious option if you are willing to negotiate. Compare the quote with MDR against Huntress or Blumira Respond.
What a SIEM really costs a small business
The license is only part of the bill. A small business also pays for someone's time, log retention and often an MSP. These six points separate a useful project from a dashboard nobody opens.
Convert every price to your environment
Time is the real cost
Software only or monitoring included
Compliance and your insurer
Decide retention up front
What we left out, and why
- Cover the basics first: backups, patching, endpoint protection and an incident plan.
- List your sources by type: email, directory, firewall, endpoints, servers, cloud apps.
- Measure your daily volume during a free trial before asking for a quote.
- Set your retention period before comparing prices.
- Name the person who will read alerts, or choose a plan with analysts included.
- Compare options on the same scenario over three years, onboarding included.
Six tips for a small-business SIEM that actually helps
Small-business SIEM projects rarely fail because of the tool. They fail because everything gets ingested, nobody tunes it, and the bill surprises you in month three. These tips come from admin feedback and vendor terms.
Drain the free sources first
BudgetOn Microsoft 365, start with Office 365 audit logs and Defender alerts: Sentinel ingests them at no charge. You see what the tool adds before you pay for a single gigabyte.
- Free sources
- Office 365 audit, Defender alerts
Use the trial to measure volume
QuoteFree trials are mainly for measuring: 31 days on Sentinel, 14 on Wazuh Cloud, 30 on Blumira. Write down volume per source per day. It is the number a sales rep will ask for and the one that drives the bill.
- Trials
- 14 to 31 days by vendor
Filter at the source
BillOn per-GB pricing, every useless line costs money and every useless alert wears people out. Drop debug logs and duplicates before shipping. On per-employee or per-source pricing, filter anyway: noise is what burns out whoever reads the alerts.
- Payoff
- Lower bill, fewer false positives
Name an owner, even part time
ProcessA SIEM with no one triaging alerts protects nothing. Give the job to a person, with a weekly slot to tune rules. If nobody has that slot, that tells you to buy a plan with analysts.
- Suggested rhythm
- One tuning slot a week
Read the minimums and onboarding
TrapsList prices often hide a floor. Huntress has a 50-license minimum per product when buying direct, Blumira charges onboarding on Detect and Respond, and most require a one-year term. Add those lines before comparing.
- Typical term
- 12 months
Pick the region at creation
ResidencyOn Wazuh Cloud, the region (Frankfurt or London) is set at creation and cannot change later. Elastic also offers several regions. For the others, ask in writing before signing, especially if a customer asks where your data lives.
- Wazuh Cloud EU regions
- Frankfurt, London
SIEM picked, now what
A SIEM works best on top of protected endpoints and a known inventory. If you are past small-business size or want enterprise tools, our general ranking takes over.
Splunk, Google, Guardsix and high-volume platforms.
Your endpoints are not protected yetThe best antivirus and EDR for businessProtection on every device, before the SIEM.
You do not know how many machines to monitorThe best IT asset management softwareInventory of devices, licenses and updates.
SIEM for small business · FAQ
Does a small business really need a SIEM?
Not always, and not first. Start with backups, patching, endpoint protection and an incident plan. A SIEM earns its place when a customer, your insurer or a regulation asks you to show how you detect incidents, or when your environment outgrows what one person can watch by hand.How much does a SIEM cost a small business per month?
Using public prices, the range runs from a few dollars to over $1,000 a month. Elastic is about $16 in month one at 5 GB a day, Wazuh Cloud is $571 up to 100 agents, and Blumira is $600 to $1,050 for 50 employees depending on the plan. Add the time of whoever runs it.Is there a free SIEM for small business?
Yes: self-hosted Wazuh and Graylog Open, with no volume cap. ManageEngine also offers a free edition of Log360 Cloud. Free still needs a server, updates and regular rule tuning, so count that time before choosing it over a paid plan.SIEM or managed SOC: which one with no security staff?
With no one to read alerts, a plan with human monitoring is more realistic. Huntress Managed SIEM includes a 24/7 SOC, and Blumira adds 24/7 incident support from Respond up. With an MSP, always ask for the price of the full service, not just the software.Is Microsoft 365 enough, or do I need Sentinel?
Microsoft 365 produces logs but does not correlate them with your firewall or servers. Sentinel ingests Office 365 audit logs and Defender alerts free, then bills the rest per gigabyte. For an all-Microsoft small business, it is often the cheapest first trial.How long should a small business keep its logs?
It depends on your contracts and your regulator, so decide it before comparing prices. Plans differ a lot: 90 days included with Sentinel and Rapid7 Essential, 180 days on Rapid7 Advanced, one year with Blumira and by default on hosted Graylog, one month searchable on Wazuh Cloud Small. Longer storage usually means an archive line on the bill.Do cyber insurers require a SIEM?
Insurers do not publish a single rule, so read your own policy and questionnaire. If it asks how you detect and respond to incidents, a SIEM with someone watching it, or a managed SOC, gives you a concrete answer.How long does it take to deploy a SIEM in a small company?
Getting first sources into a hosted plan takes days. Tuning never really stops: you cut false positives every week. Self-hosted Wazuh also needs a dedicated server sized and installed before anything else.