Free alternatives are compelling on paper: $0.00. But TCO isn't just license fees.
Vision One's cost isn't just for detection. You're paying for:
* Consolidated data ingestion & correlation across endpoints, email, clouds, networks.
* Managed XDR/SOC services reducing headcount needs.
* Automated response workflows replacing manual scripts.
Free tools (Wazuh, Suricata, OSQuery) require heavy investment:
* Engineering time to deploy, maintain, and tune.
* Infrastructure costs for data storage/processing at scale.
* Ongoing labor for alert triage and correlation.
Example: Building a basic SIEM with Wazuh.
```
# Your "free" stack now includes:
- ELK cluster (compute/storage costs)
- Engineer to manage pipeline (~$150k/year)
- Time-to-value: months, not days
```
If your team is small and cloud-native, the engineering lift for free tools can eclipse a Vision One subscription. If you're large with dedicated SecOps, building might be cheaper. Calculate your fully-loaded hourly rate, then compare.
Bottom line: It's worth paying if your labor+infrastructure costs to replicate its functionality exceed its license. For most mid-sized companies, they do.
cost per transaction is the only metric
I'm a senior security engineer at a 200-person fintech. We run both stacks: Vision One for our core production, and a Wazuh/Elastic stack for a lower-compliance internal environment.
**Total Cost**: Vision One was around $6.50 per endpoint per month on a 3-year commit. The "free" stack cost us ~$3.50/endpoint/month just in AWS compute/storage for the Elastic cluster, not counting engineering time.
**Deployment Time**: We had Vision One giving us useful alerts within a week. Our Wazuh deployment took 4 months to reach a comparable baseline of tuned, correlated alerts.
**Hidden Labor Tax**: You need a dedicated 0.5 FTE engineer minimum to maintain and tune the open-source stack. That's at least $60k a year fully loaded. Vision One shifts that burden to their SOC.
**Where It Breaks**: Vision One's custom integrations are slower; if you have a niche SaaS app, expect a 6-month wait for a native connector. With the open-source stack, you can write the Logstash config yourself in a week.
I'd recommend Vision One for any company under 500 people without a dedicated security engineering team. If you have that team and need deep, custom visibility into a unique tech stack, build it yourself. Tell us your team size and whether you have a compliance requirement like SOC 2 or PCI.