Wiz alternatives for small teams: what you actually need from a CNAPP when you run a handful of Kubernetes clusters

A small team does not need a cheaper Wiz; it needs the four or five jobs inside Wiz that it actually has, each done by the cheapest tool that does it well. For most teams with a handful of Kubernetes clusters that means the cloud provider's own posture and runtime services, an open-source scanner in CI, and something that tracks the vulnerabilities of what is running. That stack costs tens to low hundreds of dollars a month instead of a contract that starts at $24,000 a year.

This post is for the team that has been sent a Wiz demo link by an investor, a customer questionnaire or a new security hire, and wants to know what the alternative is at their size. It splits a cloud-native application protection platform into the jobs it does, names the cheapest credible option for each, and ends with the cases where buying Wiz is the right call. For the like-for-like comparison of vendors, see Wiz alternatives and StackRadar vs Wiz.

What Wiz is genuinely good at

It is worth being clear about this first, because the alternatives are not better at it. Wiz connects to your cloud accounts through the providers' APIs, without agents, and builds a graph of everything it finds: virtual machines, containers, Kubernetes clusters, storage buckets, IAM roles, network paths. A vulnerability on its own is a row in a list; in the graph it is "a critical CVE in a pod that is reachable from the internet and whose service account can read the production database". That combination, across every account and every cloud you have, is the product. Nothing on this page reproduces it.

Around the graph Wiz sells posture management, workload vulnerability scanning with SBOMs and exploit intelligence including the CISA KEV catalogue, IaC and Helm scanning, an admission controller, and an eBPF runtime sensor. Google completed its acquisition of Wiz on 11 March 2026, and Wiz says it remains multi-cloud.

The price, as far as it is published

Wiz's own pricing page is a quote form. The one place its prices are written down is its AWS Marketplace listing, which on 24 October 2026 priced a 12-month contract at $24,000 per 100 cloud workloads for Wiz Essential and $38,000 for Wiz Advanced, with the runtime sensor a $28,000 add-on per 100 sensors on Advanced, and Wiz Code and Wiz Defend sold separately. Third-party estimates of real contract sizes circulate; Wiz publishes none, so we do not repeat them.

The structure matters more than the number. The smallest unit is a year and a block of 100 workloads, and runtime coverage is a second line. A team running three clusters is not buying a small Wiz; it is buying the bottom of an enterprise price list.

Split the platform into the jobs you actually have

Strip the graph away and a CNAPP is five jobs. Most small teams need three or four of them, and each has an option that costs little or nothing:

The cloud-native column is usually the cheapest place to start, because you already pay the provider and the services are pay-as-you-go with free trials. The open-source column is free in licence and costs you the time to run it. Mixing the two is normal.

Cloud posture: the provider's service, or Prowler

On AWS, Security Hub now prices its Essentials plan per resource, with a 30-day trial per account and region; AWS's cost estimator gives the figure for your account more reliably than a number we could quote. On Azure, Defender CSPM; on Google Cloud, Security Command Center. All three check your configuration against the CIS benchmarks and their own rules and put the failures in one console.

Prowler is the open-source equivalent: an Apache-2.0 command-line tool with hundreds of checks for AWS, Azure, Google Cloud and Kubernetes, mapped to CIS, NIST and other frameworks. It runs from a laptop or a CI job with read-only credentials and writes reports you can keep. What it does not do is correlate: a failed check is a failed check, with no idea which workloads sit behind it. That correlation is the part of Wiz you are giving up, and for a small estate a person who knows the architecture usually supplies it.

Vulnerabilities in what your clusters run

This is the job most Wiz evaluations at small companies are really about, and the one where "the provider's service" needs the most care.

Amazon Inspector scans images in ECR at $0.09 per image on the first scan and $0.01 per rescan, and images in CI at $0.03 each (US East, read on 26 October 2026), with a 15-day trial. Google's Artifact Analysis charges $0.26 per image digest it scans in Artifact Registry. Both are registry-centred: they know what was pushed, and they are cheap. Neither on its own tells you which of those images a pod is running right now, or about an image a pod pulled from Docker Hub. On GKE the gap is wider since 16 June 2026, when Google shut down the security posture dashboard's last workload vulnerability scanning mode; the dashboard still audits configuration at no charge.

Defender for Containers does cover running containers, on AKS natively and on EKS, GKE or anything else through Azure Arc, at a published $0.00941 per vCore-hour, about $7 per vCore a month. That is cheap for a small cluster and grows with every node.

The open-source options run inside the cluster. Trivy Operator scans each workload's image and writes the results as Kubernetes resources; it is free and the right first install, but it keeps no history and stores its reports in etcd. Kubescape adds configuration checks and, with its node agent, marks which vulnerable packages were actually loaded.

StackRadar does this one job. Its scanner runs in the cluster, builds one SBOM per running image digest, and the server keeps them, re-matching every stored SBOM against OSV.dev hourly so a new CVE shows up without a rescan, and ranks findings with EPSS and KEV rather than CVSS alone. Each finding carries the namespace, workload and Helm release it came from. The Community Edition is AGPL-licensed, free and one Helm command for one cluster:

helm install stackradar \
  oci://ghcr.io/lockdep/helm-charts/stackradar \
  --namespace stackradar --create-namespace

The cloud edition covers up to five clusters on Pro for $59 a month at the beta price ($99 standard), and fifteen on Business for $199, with critical and KEV alerts and a year or two of history, after a 14-day trial. Both prices are per cluster, not per node or per image. The self-hosting docs list what the Community Edition needs to run.

Kubernetes configuration

Privileged containers, pods running as root, missing resource limits and service accounts with cluster-admin are the findings that turn one vulnerable container into a cluster compromise. Kubescape and Trivy Operator both check them against the NSA, CIS and their own rule sets, free and in-cluster. On GKE the security posture dashboard audits pod specifications at no extra charge and is on by default for new clusters on 1.27 or later. Pick one; running two configuration scanners mostly produces duplicate findings.

Runtime threat detection

This is the job a small team is most likely to skip, and the one where a managed service earns its price, because a detection nobody reads is worth nothing. GuardDuty EKS Runtime Monitoring costs $1.50 per vCPU per month for the first 500 vCPUs, and its EKS audit-log monitoring $1.60 per million events, both with a 30-day trial; findings land where the rest of your AWS security findings already do. On Azure the Defender sensor does the same job inside the plan you pay for per vCore.

Falco, a CNCF graduated project, is the open-source equivalent: an eBPF DaemonSet with a rule set for the suspicious behaviour you would expect (a shell in a container, a write to /etc, an unexpected outbound connection). The software is free; the cost is tuning the rules until the alerts are worth reading, and deciding who reads them at three in the morning.

Code, IaC and secrets in CI

The cheapest job to cover. Trivy scans images, Terraform, Kubernetes manifests, Helm charts and secrets in one binary; Checkov is the IaC specialist with the larger policy library; Gitleaks finds credentials in Git history. All three are free, run in any CI system, and fail a build on a policy you set. The only thing you lose against Wiz Code is the link from a finding in code to the running resource it became, which is again the graph.

What it adds up to

An example, to make the arithmetic concrete rather than to stand for anyone's bill: a team on AWS with two EKS clusters totalling 48 vCPUs, pushing 200 new image digests to ECR a month. Using the published US East prices above:

• GuardDuty EKS Runtime Monitoring: 48 vCPUs × $1.50 = $72 a month, plus audit-log events.
• Amazon Inspector on ECR: 200 new images × $0.09 = $18 a month, plus $0.01 per rescan.
• Security Hub: per resource; use AWS's estimator for your account.
• Prowler, Trivy in CI, Kubescape or Trivy Operator: free, plus your time.
• Running-image vulnerability tracking: StackRadar Community Edition at no cost per cluster install, or Pro at $59 a month for both clusters in one dashboard.

That is low hundreds of dollars a month at most, against an entry contract of $24,000 a year before runtime coverage. The trade is real: you get five consoles instead of one, and nothing that tells you a vulnerable pod also has a dangerous IAM role. For a team that knows its own architecture, that is usually a trade worth making until the estate grows.

When to just buy Wiz

• You have many cloud accounts and nobody holds the whole picture. The graph earns its price when the risky combinations span accounts and teams.
• A customer or auditor asks for attack-path or exposure analysis. Building that evidence from five tools takes longer than a procurement cycle.
• You are consolidating, not starting. If you already pay for three security tools and a person to glue them together, one platform can be cheaper.
• You have no one to run open-source security tools. Then lean on the managed services above or a platform; free software that nobody operates is not free.

If none of those is true yet, start with the jobs, and revisit the platform question when the estate outgrows one person's head. For other vendors in the same space, see the full list of Wiz alternatives and Kubernetes security tools by job.

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