OSSEC is the open-source HIDS that started it all in 2004. Wazuh was forked from OSSEC in 2015 to address its limitations, and it has since become a full XDR/SIEM platform. If you are still on OSSEC, here is what you are missing.
Active development
OSSEC development slowed dramatically after 2017. Wazuh ships major releases multiple times per year with a paid team and a large community of contributors.
Feature comparison
- Web dashboard: Wazuh has a full Kibana/OpenSearch-based dashboard. OSSEC has none in the official project.
- Vulnerability detection: Wazuh correlates installed packages with CVE feeds. OSSEC does not.
- MITRE ATT&CK mapping: built into Wazuh rules. Not present in OSSEC.
- SCA (CIS benchmarks): native in Wazuh. Not in OSSEC.
- Cloud integrations (AWS, Azure, GCP, M365): native wodles in Wazuh.
- Container monitoring (Docker, Kubernetes): supported in Wazuh.
Migration path
OSSEC rules and decoders are syntactically compatible with Wazuh, you can lift and shift custom content. The agent enrollment model is different (Wazuh uses authd and a register flow); plan one weekend for a clean cutover.
Verdict
In 2026 there is no real reason to run OSSEC on new deployments. Migrate to Wazuh, the same philosophy, vastly more capability. We run zero-downtime migrations for production fleets.
Official reference
Commands and configuration in this guide are based on the official Wazuh documentation. For the canonical source, see: