Blumira Free and Graylog SMB are gone. Now what?

Within the last eight months, two of the most accessible security monitoring options for small IT teams quietly disappeared. Blumira retired the free SIEM tier that CISA itself recommended for small organizations. Graylog discontinued its Small Business license on December 31, 2025. If you were relying on either one, you already know: the options left behind are expensive, complex, or both.

What you lost

Blumira Free gave you cloud SIEM coverage for Microsoft 365 and up to three integrations, with two weeks of log retention and automated detections — all at no cost. It was genuinely useful, and CISA listed it alongside free tools from major vendors. Blumira now starts at $12 per employee per month on the Detect tier. For a 50-person organization, that’s $600/month — $7,200 a year — for what used to be free.

Graylog Small Business offered enterprise-grade log management features (alerting, correlation, reporting) to organizations that qualified for the free license. When the program retired, existing holders got one final 12-month renewal before rolling back to Graylog Open — which strips out alerting, correlation, and scheduled reports. What’s left is a log viewer that still requires you to stand up and maintain OpenSearch infrastructure.

The gap neither one ever filled

Even when they were free, Blumira and Graylog solved only half the problem. They gave you log collection and basic alerting. They never gave you compliance mapping — the part where your auditor asks for evidence that you’re monitoring the specific controls your framework requires.

That’s a separate purchase. And the compliance automation market prices accordingly.

A county sheriff’s office that needs CJIS log monitoring and a dental practice that needs HIPAA audit evidence face the same problem: buy a SIEM for detection and a compliance platform for evidence, or use Event Viewer and hope for the best. Blumira Free and Graylog SMB addressed the first half. The second half — the part the auditor actually asks about — was always out of reach.

What Arden does differently

Arden combines both in a single tool. Arden Security handles threat detection — the same attack patterns that real breaches follow, analyzed from native Windows event logs. Arden Comply maps those same logs to compliance controls across six frameworks: HIPAA, PCI DSS, CMMC, CJIS, SOX, and FERPA. Or run Arden Complete and get both.

Three things set it apart from what Blumira and Graylog offered, even at their best:

Everything runs locally. A single executable on hardware you already own. Your logs never leave your network — which means there’s no cloud security review, no vendor questionnaire, no data residency conversation. For CJIS environments and healthcare practices, that’s not a feature — it’s a requirement.

Compliance evidence is built in. Arden Comply maps controls across six frameworks with exportable evidence your auditor can review. Platforms like Vanta charge $10,000 base plus $5,000 per additional framework to get there. Sprinto starts around $6,000 for a single framework. Arden Comply covers six out of the box, at a fraction of what compliance automation vendors charge for one.

Flat-rate pricing that stays flat. Blumira moved to per-employee billing. Graylog’s paid tiers scale with data volume. Arden charges a flat monthly rate — every endpoint included, every log source, every compliance framework. Enable more audit policies, add more servers, your bill stays the same.

For a deeper look at what SIEM pricing actually adds up to, see our breakdown of hidden SIEM costs or the full 2026 SIEM pricing comparison. If compliance mapping is your primary need, read how small teams handle audits without a GRC platform.