Wazuh vs Splunk Cost: 3 Year Total Cost of Ownership Breakdown (2026)

Most SIEM comparisons stop at the licence line. In practice, licence is only one of five cost buckets, and the cheapest licence does not always win. This guide gives you a simple model you can reuse with your own numbers.

The five cost buckets

1. 1Licensing: per GB/day or workload pricing for Splunk, zero for Wazuh (open source, GPLv2).
2. 2Infrastructure: compute for managers, indexers and search heads, on premises or cloud.
3. 3Storage and retention: hot, warm and archive tiers, often driven by compliance (PCI DSS, ISO 27001).
4. 4People: engineering time for deployment, rule tuning, upgrades and on call.
5. 5Support: vendor support, partner support or a managed SOC.

A reusable 3 year model

Where Wazuh is cheaper

• No ingest based licence, so cost grows with hardware, not with log volume.
• Agent includes FIM, SCA, vulnerability detection and active response, so fewer add on tools.
• Good fit for SMEs and mid market teams where licence is the biggest line item.

Where Splunk can still make sense

• Large organisations already paying for Splunk across IT, observability and business analytics.
• Teams without engineering capacity that prefer a fully vendor supported stack.

Hidden costs to watch

• Open source is not free to operate: budget for tuning, upgrades and indexer sizing.
• Splunk overages during incidents, when log volume spikes exactly when you need visibility.
• Migration effort: rewriting correlation searches into Wazuh rules and decoders.

Want a TCO estimate with your own numbers? Our 30-Day PoC deploys Wazuh on a sample of your endpoints so you see real ingest, real alerts and real infrastructure cost before committing.

Decision checklist

• Model 3 years, not 1.
• Include storage and staff.

How to validate with a proof of concept

1. 1Pick 10 to 20 real endpoints across Windows and Linux.
2. 2Run both tools side by side for at least two weeks.
3. 3Replay the same test attacks (failed logins, file changes, a new admin user, an EICAR file).
4. 4Compare detection, false positives, analyst time and cost per GB.

Frequently asked questions

Is Wazuh really free?

The software is free; you pay for infrastructure and people.

Biggest hidden cost?

Engineering time for tuning.