Wazuh is a free, open-source platform that unifies SIEM and XDR in one place. It gives you threat detection, file integrity monitoring, vulnerability scanning, and compliance reporting across your servers and cloud workloads, with no license fees and no per-gigabyte pricing. You can deploy a production-ready Wazuh stack to your own cloud from try.direct in minutes.
Here is the uncomfortable truth about most commercial security monitoring: your bill scales with the volume of logs you ingest, not with the number of threats you actually catch. The more visibility you try to buy, the more you pay to store data you may never query. Teams end up filtering out logs to control cost, which quietly shrinks the exact coverage a SIEM is supposed to provide. You are paying more to see less.
Wazuh flips that model. The software is free, the architecture is yours, and the only thing you pay for is the infrastructure you already control.
What Wazuh actually is
Wazuh is an open-source security platform that combines two things teams usually buy separately.
The SIEM side collects, normalizes, and analyzes logs from your endpoints, servers, network devices, and cloud workloads. It correlates events in real time and raises alerts when something looks like an attempted or successful intrusion, a misconfiguration, or a policy violation.
The XDR side runs a lightweight agent on each monitored system. Instead of only reading logs after the fact, it watches what is happening on the host itself: file changes, suspicious processes, malware and rootkit indicators, and signs of compromise. When an alert fires, you do not just see a strange login, you see what happened on that machine before and after it.
Putting both in one platform is the point. A log line on its own is noise. A log line plus host context is an investigation you can actually close.
What you get out of the box
A default Wazuh deployment already covers most of what a small security team needs, and it covers it without a single license key.
On the detection side, Wazuh handles log collection and rule-based correlation across all your systems, flags attempted and successful intrusions, and watches for malware, rootkits, hidden files, and cloaked processes directly on each host. File integrity monitoring tracks changes to the files, permissions, and ownership you care about, and records which user or process made each change, which is exactly the kind of evidence you want during an incident.
On the prevention side, it continuously compares your installed software against updated CVE databases so you find vulnerable packages before an attacker does, and it runs configuration checks against hardening guides to catch risky settings early. When something does go wrong, active response can run automated countermeasures, such as blocking a source address when your criteria are met, and every detected event is mapped to the relevant MITRE ATT&CK tactics so your analysts spend less time guessing and more time responding.
Wazuh reports more than 15 million downloads per year and runs one of the largest open-source security communities in the world. It was also named a 2026 Cybersecurity Stars Awards winner for Best SIEM Platform and Best Cloud Security Platform. This is not a science project, it is a platform large organizations run in production.
The compliance angle
If you have ever sat through a PCI DSS or ISO audit, you know that "we have logs somewhere" is not an acceptable answer. Auditors want centralized log collection, file integrity monitoring, and evidence that you review security events.
Wazuh ships with dashboards and reporting aligned to common frameworks including PCI DSS, GDPR, HIPAA, and NIST. File integrity monitoring alone satisfies a specific PCI DSS requirement that many teams scramble to meet at audit time. Because you self-host, the data lives on infrastructure you control, in a jurisdiction you choose, which is exactly the posture regulated buyers increasingly need.
Self-hosted vs managed: the honest tradeoff
Wazuh is free, but it is not effortless. The platform has real depth, and getting the indexer, server, dashboard, and agents wired together correctly takes time and Linux comfort. A managed cloud SIEM hands you a login and a bill. Self-hosted Wazuh hands you full control and a setup task.
That setup task is the friction that stops most teams from switching, even when the cost savings are obvious. It is also exactly the part try.direct removes.
Deploy Wazuh the easy way
The try.direct Wazuh stack packages the platform with the pieces a real deployment needs, then deploys the whole thing to your own cloud account. You get Wazuh for detection and monitoring, Fail2ban for an extra layer of brute-force protection, Netdata for host-level performance visibility, Portainer for container management, and baseline optimization applied during setup. No manual indexer tuning, no YAML marathon, no weekend lost to install docs.
You run it on Hetzner, DigitalOcean, AWS, Vultr, UpCloud, or any VPS with Docker. The data stays yours.
Ready to start? Deploy the free Wazuh stack to your own cloud here:
➞ Wazuh
Frequently asked questions
Is Wazuh really free?
Yes. Wazuh is open source and free to download and self-host, even for large organizations. Your costs are the servers you run it on and any optional paid support, not the software itself.
Can Wazuh replace Splunk or Datadog?
For core SIEM work like log collection, correlation, detection, and dashboards, Wazuh is a credible replacement, and it avoids the per-gigabyte licensing that makes commercial tools expensive at scale. Very large enterprises with heavy advanced-analytics needs should evaluate against their specific requirements.
What does Wazuh monitor?
Endpoints, servers, virtual machines, containers, and cloud workloads. It handles log analysis, intrusion detection, file integrity monitoring, vulnerability detection, configuration assessment, and automated response.
Does Wazuh help with compliance?
Yes. It includes reporting and controls mapped to standards such as PCI DSS, GDPR, HIPAA, and NIST. Self-hosting also keeps your security data in a jurisdiction you control.
How long does it take to deploy?
With the try.direct Wazuh stack, a working deployment to your own cloud takes minutes rather than the hours a manual install can require.
What infrastructure do I need?
A VPS with Docker on a provider like Hetzner, DigitalOcean, AWS, Vultr, or UpCloud. The stack handles the rest.