Wazuh

Wazuh grew out of the OSSEC open-source host intrusion detection project and has become one of the most widely deployed open-source security monitoring platforms, combining log analysis, file integrity monitoring, vulnerability detection, and incident response into a single free agent-and-manager architecture. The company behind it, Wazuh Inc., sells enterprise support, managed cloud hosting, and services on top of the freely available core.

Its pitch to security teams is straightforward: get SIEM- and XDR-class visibility without per-endpoint licensing costs, and retain full control over deployment, data residency, and customization since the source is open. That has made it popular with mid-market organizations, MSSPs building their own detection stacks, and cost-constrained public sector teams, alongside a large community of individual practitioners.

The tradeoff is that Wazuh asks more of the operator than a fully managed commercial SIEM does — tuning, scaling, and rule curation are largely the customer’s responsibility unless they pay for the managed cloud offering. Its innovation velocity is tied to community and core-team development cadence rather than large enterprise R&D budgets, which shows up as steady, incremental feature growth rather than frequent category-redefining launches.