Best SIEM solutions for small/medium businesses in 2025?

We’re a 50-person company looking to implement our first SIEM. Budget is around $2-5K/month. Looking at Wazuh (open source), Elastic Security, Microsoft Sentinel, and Splunk Cloud. Anyone have experience with these at a similar scale? What would you recommend?

At your size and budget, I’d strongly recommend Wazuh + Elastic. Here’s why:

• Wazuh is open source – no licensing costs
• Built-in file integrity monitoring, vulnerability detection, compliance checking
• Elastic provides excellent visualization and search
• Total cost is just infrastructure (~$500-1000/month for cloud hosting)

We run this stack for a 75-person company and it handles everything we need. The learning curve is steeper than commercial solutions but the community support is excellent.

If you want something more turnkey, Microsoft Sentinel is hard to beat if you’re already in the Microsoft ecosystem. The integration with Defender, Entra ID, and Office 365 is seamless. Pricing can be unpredictable though – it’s based on data ingestion volume.