A Wazuh alternative for small businesses and agencies

Where Wazuh is stronger

• Breadth. Wazuh collects and analyses logs from servers, workstations, network devices and cloud services, on Linux, Windows and macOS. InfraFence covers Linux servers only.
• Compliance. Its ruleset maps alerts to PCI DSS, HIPAA, GDPR, NIST 800-53 and TSC, with a dashboard for each. InfraFence drafts NIS2 and GDPR incident reports, which is a narrower job.
• Depth for analysts. Custom decoders and rules, configurable file integrity monitoring, configuration assessment and threat hunting: the tools a security operations team works with every day.
• Open source and self-hosted. It is free to run on your own servers, and can stay fully inside your network.

What a small team takes on with Wazuh

Wazuh's central stack is a server, an indexer and a dashboard. Wazuh's own quick start puts them on one host with 4 vCPU and 8 GiB of RAM for up to 25 agents, and 50 GB of disk for 90 days of alerts; larger fleets need more, or a cluster. Someone has to install it, update it, back it up, secure it and watch its disk. Wazuh Cloud removes that work, from $571 a month for up to 100 agents as of November 2026.

Then come the alerts. Wazuh is built to detect and tell an analyst; blocking is active response that you configure rule by rule. That is the right design for a security team. For an agency with twenty client servers and no analyst, it is a lot to take on.

Where InfraFence is different

• One command per server and no server to run. The agent installs after a read-only check, and the dashboard is hosted.
• It blocks by default. SSH and service brute-force attackers and web attackers that reach the ban level are banned at the firewall from the first day, on every plan.
• It fixes, and checks the fix. 40–50 hardening checks, depending on the server; after every change the agent checks that SSH and your monitored sites still answer, and rolls back by itself if they do not.
• What leaves the server. Every DNS query is tied to the program, process ID and user that made it.
• AutoMode and NIS2 reports. Safe fixes from a fixed catalogue around the clock, and drafts of the NIS2 early warning, notification and final report.
• A price per server: the first is free, then $8.90 per server per month on Basic.

Running Wazuh and InfraFence together

They do different jobs and can run on the same server. The Wazuh agent reads logs and files and sends them to its manager; InfraFence keeps its firewall rules in its own INFRAFENCE chains and does not touch rules it did not create, so a Wazuh active response that drops an address works next to it.

Expect Wazuh to notice InfraFence at work: its file integrity monitoring may report the files an InfraFence fix writes, such as an SSH drop-in, and its rules may see the bans in the logs. That is the two tools doing their job.

A possible split: Wazuh where a security team needs the whole picture and compliance mappings, InfraFence on the Linux servers that need blocking and fixing without someone watching the alerts.

Try InfraFence next to Wazuh, or instead of it

If Wazuh is already installed, its agent keeps running. A read-only check runs before anything is installed.

1. 01

   Create the install token

   In the dashboard, open Servers › Add server. The token works once and expires after one hour.

2. 02

   Install the agent as root

   One command per server. Nothing to install centrally.

   curl -fsSL https://github.com/infrafence/infrafence-agent/releases/latest/download/install.sh | sudo bash -s -- --token <TOKEN>

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3. 03

   Watch first, in monitor mode

   Monitor mode detects everything and blocks nothing. See what InfraFence reports and what it would fix, server by server.

4. 04

   Then decide what each tool does

   Turn on blocking where you are happy with what you saw. Keep Wazuh where a security team or an auditor needs it.