# Wiz alternative for startups: what a 2 to 50 person AWS team actually needs

Sabri Eddir, Founder, Secure Layer. Last reviewed: 2026-07-13.

## Is there a real Wiz alternative for a 2 to 50 person AWS team?

There is no single Wiz alternative for a 2 to 50 person AWS team. The right one depends on the job: a design-time review, a live-monitoring tool, or Wiz itself.

Wiz is a strong Cloud Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP). It watches a live, deployed cloud estate for misconfigurations, exposed secrets, and attack paths, and it does that job well for the customers it is built for.

You will not find a price on wiz.io. Every path on the site ends in "Apply now" or "Get a demo," including Wiz Go, the bundle Wiz itself markets at startups. Wiz publishes no number anywhere we could verify, on its own site or the AWS Marketplace listings we checked. Pricing is quote-based, scaled to your workload count, and arrived at through a sales call.

If your company has 2 to 50 people, you are not Wiz's customer yet. That is not a failure on your part. Wiz is built for a security team that triages a live alert queue every day. If that team does not exist at your company, the product has no one on your side to hand its findings to.

So the real question is not "what replaces Wiz." It is "what job did I actually want Wiz to do." The next section walks through the three answers, in order of how early you are.

## The real question: what job did you want Wiz to do?

If your job is watching production you already run, you want a tool that connects to your live AWS account and tells you when something drifts. Wiz is not your only option, and it is not the cheapest one.

Aikido Security covers code, cloud, and runtime scanning in one subscription, and it is genuinely good at consolidating fifteen-plus scanners under one bill instead of fifteen. Its first paid tier is $300 a month, per aikido.dev/pricing. To get that value it needs a read-only connection to your live account from day one, and you become the person triaging its findings queue.

Prowler Cloud is genuinely good at broad, multicloud checks against a live account, billed simply per account: $99 a month per cloud account, per prowler.com/pricing. It demands the same thing Aikido does: a connected live account and someone reading the output.

Prowler also ships as a free, open source command line tool. You get the same underlying checks with no bill at all, and in exchange you host it, schedule it, and read the results yourself, with no vendor on the other end when something breaks.

If you have not deployed yet, or a customer's security questionnaire is what sent you looking for Wiz, none of the tools above are the right first move. What you actually need is a review of the design before it becomes a live account with real risk in it. That is what Secure Layer does.

For the engineer who owns the AWS account at a company with no security team, Secure Layer is the design-time security workspace that gives an honest verdict on your architecture before you deploy it. Import your CloudFormation template or draw the architecture from scratch, and every resource property gets checked against AWS's own published rules. Every check lands in one of three states: clean, violated, or needs review when the answer genuinely cannot be determined from what you gave it. A guided Well-Architected questionnaire turns your answers into a maturity score, and flags it when your diagram contradicts what you claimed. When you are ready, one click generates the Infrastructure as Code (IaC) for the format your team uses. All of it runs at EUR 0, 75, or 299 a month, flat per company, with no sales call.

If you already have a security hire and a real budget, talk to Wiz or Orca Security. Both are genuinely strong at continuous detection across large, live, multicloud estates, and both assume a team on your side to act on what they find. Orca lists no public price at all: every page on orca.security ends in a demo request. That is the correct motion for the buyer they are built for. It is not yours yet, and there is nothing wrong with that.

## Wiz alternatives for startups, compared by job and cost

Every number below comes from the vendor's own page. Where a vendor publishes no number, the table says so instead of guessing.

| Tool | Built for | Cost shape | Starting price | Self-serve | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Wiz | Continuous scanning of live, deployed infrastructure, for a team with a security hire | Quote-based, scales with workloads | No public number | No, sales call or "Apply now" only | wiz.io/pricing |
| Orca Security | Continuous scanning of live, multicloud infrastructure | Quote-based, scales with workloads | No public number | No, demo request only | orca.security |
| Aikido Security | Continuous scanning of code, cloud, and runtime, for a small team already live | Flat monthly fee per company | $300/month (Basic plan) | Yes, free tier needs no card | aikido.dev/pricing |
| Prowler Cloud | Continuous scanning of one or more live cloud accounts | Per cloud account | $99/month per account | Yes, free trial, no card at signup | prowler.com/pricing |
| Prowler OSS | The same checks, self-hosted, no vendor | Free | $0 | Yes, command line, no signup | prowler.com and the Prowler GitHub repository |
| Secure Layer | Design-time review of an architecture, before you deploy it | Flat monthly fee per company | EUR 0, 75, or 299/month | Yes, no sales call | Secure Layer pricing page |

_Vendor prices retrieved 13 July 2026 from each company’s own pricing page._

## When Secure Layer is not the Wiz alternative you need

We would rather tell you this now than have you find out after signing up.

You are already running production and need to know what changed since last Tuesday. Secure Layer reads the architecture you import or draw, never your live account. It cannot see drift, because it never connects to anything that drifts. That is Prowler's job, or Aikido's, or a CNAPP's.

Your infrastructure is Terraform, not CloudFormation. You can draw your architecture on the canvas and generate Terraform as output, but you cannot import an existing Terraform state today. Checkov lints Terraform for free in your CI pipeline right now, and that is a fine answer while we do not have one.

You run more than one cloud. Secure Layer is AWS-deep on purpose, not multicloud. If Azure or Google Cloud Platform (GCP) is a real part of your estate, every tool in the top half of this page's table covers ground we do not.

You have hired a security person and have budget to match. Wiz and Orca are better tools for that team. They watch more surface, correlate more signals, and someone on your side now has the time to read what they find. Talk to them once that hire exists, not before.

## FAQ: Wiz alternatives for startups

**Q: Is Secure Layer a Wiz competitor?**
**A:** No. Wiz watches a live account after you deploy. Secure Layer reviews the architecture before you deploy it. You could use both at different points in the same company's life, and many companies eventually do.

**Q: A prospect's security questionnaire mentions monitoring my environment. Does that mean I need Wiz right now?**
**A:** Usually not yet. Most early questionnaires ask what you decided at design time: encryption, network exposure, access control. Secure Layer's questionnaire and generated evidence answer that part directly. Live monitoring becomes the next step once you have production traffic and a reason to watch it continuously.

**Q: Does Secure Layer connect to my AWS account?**
**A:** No. Secure Layer never holds your AWS credentials, and there is no role for you to create. Only the CloudFormation template or the diagram you draw ever reaches us. That is a deliberate boundary, not a missing feature.

**Q: Can I use Secure Layer alongside Prowler or Aikido?**
**A:** Yes, and it is a reasonable setup. Secure Layer catches design mistakes before you deploy. Prowler or Aikido catch drift after you deploy. They check different moments in the same architecture's life, so nothing about running both is redundant.

**Q: What happens when I outgrow Secure Layer?**
**A:** You hire security, or your live footprint grows past what a design-time review can see. At that point Wiz and Orca are the honest next step, and this page will still be here to remind you why you started somewhere cheaper.

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