Suricata vs Wazuh

Suricata is a free, open-source engine for network analysis, intrusion detection and prevention, and security monitoring. It uses signature rules to match known threats, policy violations, and malicious behavior, and can also detect traffic anomalies. A single instance can inspect multi-gigabit traffic using multi-threading and hardware acceleration. It logs HTTP requests, DNS queries and responses, TLS certificate and exchange data, and can extract files from network flows. Suricata automatically detects protocols such as HTTP on any port and applies relevant detection and logging. Its EVE output provides JSON event and alert data for Logstash and similar tools. The Open Information Security Foundation owns the code and supports the project. Suricata is licensed under GPLv2; OISF offers non-GPL licensing for organizations that want to use it in their products. Listed platforms include Linux, macOS, and Windows; downloads also include source for FreeBSD and UNIX and a Windows 64-bit installer. The listed stable release is 8.0.7, released September 15, 2026. Community support is available through a forum and Discord.

Wazuh unifies XDR and SIEM to analyze security data across endpoints, clouds, and networks for threat detection, incident response, and compliance work. Its rules identify errors, misconfigurations, malicious activity, and policy violations in operating system and application logs. File Integrity Monitoring tracks changes to content, permissions, ownership, and other file attributes. Vulnerability detection compares endpoint software inventories with updated CVE databases. Built-in active responses can take countermeasures, including blocking network access from a threat source. Wazuh can monitor AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Microsoft 365, and GitHub services, virtual machines, and activity. Its integrations guide also covers Elastic Stack, OpenSearch, Splunk, and Amazon Security Lake. Default rulesets provide mappings for PCI DSS, HIPAA, NIST 800-53, TSC, and GDPR, but those mappings do not themselves certify compliance. Wazuh runs on API, Linux, macOS, self-hosted, web, and Windows platforms. Its self-hosted open-source plan is free; paid plans start at $571 a month, and a 14-day trial is listed. Agents support Linux, Windows, macOS, Solaris, AIX, and HP-UX and require an average of 35 MB of RAM.