Cisco XDR vs Wazuh
A side-by-side comparison on deployment model, data residency, licensing basis and security coverage. Structural facts are verifiable against vendor documentation; the scored dimensions are our assessment.
Cisco XDR
Cisco
7.1
Average across eight dimensions
- Deployment
- SaaS only
- Licensing
- Per endpoint
- Time to value
- Medium
- Segment
- Enterprise
- G2
- 4.7 (3)
Wazuh
Wazuh Inc.
8.0
Average across eight dimensions
- Deployment
- Self-hosted
- Licensing
- Free; paid support available
- Time to value
- Complex
- Segment
- SMB / mid-market
- G2
- 4.5 (72)
Score by dimension
| Dimension | CI | WZ |
|---|---|---|
| Data residency control | 3 | 10 |
| Pricing value | 5.5 | 9.8 |
| Detection accuracy | 8 | 8 |
| Response speed | 8 | 7 |
| Ease of setup | 7 | 6 |
| Management UX | 7.5 | 6.5 |
| Integration depth | 9 | 8 |
| Security coverage | 8.5 | 8.5 |
What the comparison says
Cisco XDR is SaaS only and Wazuh is self-hosted. Where your obligations dictate residency, that difference tends to settle the choice before any score is read.
Cisco XDR licenses on per endpoint, Wazuh on free; paid support available. Neither bills on data volume, so the comparison is about what each licence includes rather than how much you send it.
Cisco XDR leads on response speed, ease of setup, management UX and integrations. Wazuh leads on residency and pricing value.
Cisco XDR
- +Strongest network telemetry story of any platform in this table.
- +Talos threat intelligence is among the largest research operations in the industry.
- +Natural fit where Cisco networking is already the standard.
- −SaaS delivery with no on-premises option for the XDR control plane.
- −Full value depends on owning a broad amount of Cisco infrastructure.
Best for Cisco-standardised enterprises wanting network and endpoint correlation.
Watch out Assess how much of the value is contingent on further Cisco purchases.
Wazuh
- +Genuinely free and open source with no licence cost at any scale.
- +Mature rule engine, file integrity monitoring and configuration assessment.
- +Fully self-hosted and air-gap capable with a large community rule base.
- −The surrounding stack is where the real cost lands: indexer, dashboards and storage.
- −Operational burden falls entirely on your team unless a support contract is bought.
Best for Teams with platform engineering capacity and a strong preference for open source.
Watch out Budget for the indexing layer and the engineer who maintains it.
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Data last verified 2026-10-06. nPro publishes this comparison. Where nPro appears as one of the platforms listed, its card is marked and its scores are our own assessment. Third-party review scores are sourced from public vendor profiles. Structural facts are verifiable against each vendor's documentation: deployment model, licensing basis and residency.