Ask a SecOps lead what they want from a new SIEM this year, and you’ll hear a familiar wish list. Storage bills need to come down. AI agents should sit on top. And ideally, nobody has to migrate a single log to get there. Ingest-based pricing is the reason, since it turns every new data source into an argument with finance.
Vendors answer that brief in very different ways. Strike48™, for example, leaves your data where it already sits and queries it in place. Others push verbose logs into a cheaper tier, bundle a long retention window, or offer free ingestion to customers of products they already own. We weighed all five on data location, storage cost, retention, and AI-assisted investigation. Along the way, one question kept coming up that most shortlists ignore: how far back can an AI agent actually see?
Why Cheaper Storage Can Leave Your Agents Blind
When ingest costs climb, something has to give, and it’s usually the noisy stuff. Firewall, proxy, and DNS logs rarely drive detection rules, so teams often trim them or ship them to cold storage first.
Investigations lean on exactly those logs, though. So do AI agents. Consider a made-up but very plausible case. A phishing alert fires, and an AI triage agent wants to know whether any laptop reached the lookalike domain in the last 30 days. With proxy logs dropped, it has nothing to check. With a one-week window, it sees seven days, answers confidently, and misses the rest. In both cases, the alert closes on half the evidence.
That’s why storage price alone tells you little. What matters more is whether your agents can still reach the cheap data mid-investigation. Attackers are speeding up with AI of their own, as the AI-versus-AI security race makes clear, so an agent with a short memory becomes a real liability.
How We Built This Shortlist
In early November 2026, we went through vendor product pages, pricing pages, and documentation. We didn’t deploy any of these tools or measure detection accuracy, which means any savings will depend on your own volumes and retention choices.
Our scoring rested on five things. We looked at whether logs must be copied in or can be queried in place, and at the storage levers on offer, from cheaper tiers to bundled retention or free ingestion. Retention itself mattered too, meaning how long data stays searchable and what stretching that costs. We also checked how much data the AI layer can reach. Lastly, we noted whether pricing is public or quote-only.
| Platform | Approach | Storage lever | How far back agents can look | Public pricing |
| Strike48 | Agent layer across existing tools | Search in place; move data to S3 | Wherever your data already lives | No; request a demo |
| Microsoft Sentinel | Cloud-native SIEM | Lower-cost data lake tier | Depends on which tier holds the data | Yes |
| Google Security Operations | Cloud SIEM and SOAR | 12 months of hot retention included | 12 months by default; up to 5 years | No; contact sales |
| Elastic Security | Serverless security analytics | Per-GB ingest and retention rates | As long as you pay to retain it | Yes |
| CrowdStrike Falcon Next-Gen SIEM | SIEM inside the Falcon platform | 10GB/day free for Insight XDR customers | 7 days on the free tier; up to 5 years paid | No; contact account team |
1. Strike48: Agents Across the Stack You Already Run
Strike48 describes itself as an agentic orchestration platform for security and IT. Rather than swapping out your SIEM, it lays an agent layer across your existing tools, so agents reason over the whole environment instead of one product’s view of it.
Its core trick is search-in-place combined with real-time data federation. Through MCP or API connections, agents query logs across more than 300 tools without copying them anywhere. Consequently, you can shift data out of pricey hot storage into low-cost S3 and still use it in investigations. Out of the box, there are agent packages such as L1/L2 Triage, Threat Hunter, SIEM Administrator, and SOC Manager. For anything custom, a no-code builder called Prospector Studio fills the gap. Each agent action lands in an audit trail, and human approval can be set step by step.
On speed, the company says SaaS setups typically take about 24 hours. It also points to customer Tronox, which it says went from fully manual operations to 77.5% of cases closed by AI. Those results are company-reported, so test them on your own alerts. Keep in mind, too, that Strike48 complements a SIEM rather than standing in for one. Pricing isn’t published; you’ll need a demo to scope agents, data sources, and deployment.
Good fit if you want to cut hot storage and add agents before any migration.
2. Microsoft Sentinel: Two Tiers, Two Price Points
Sentinel divides data by value. High-value sources go to the analytics tier for real-time detection. Meanwhile, high-volume network, firewall, and proxy logs can land in the data lake tier, which costs less and suits long-term retention, forensics, and historical analysis.
Identity logs, threat intelligence and endpoint alerts naturally belong in the analytics tier. To keep that tier’s bill predictable, commitment tiers reserve between 100 GB and 50,000 GB of daily ingestion, at savings of up to 52% versus pay-as-you-go. Microsoft has also offered a smaller 50 GB commitment tier in preview at promotional pricing.
There are a few strings attached. Analytics-tier billing follows ingested volume, so someone has to watch it. You can raise a commitment anytime, yet you can only lower it after 31 days, and commitments apply per workspace rather than across them. Since the data lake is built for forensics instead of live detection, it’s also worth checking how your AI tools will query it. The data lake tier is priced separately at lower rates.
Good fit if you’re Microsoft-heavy and want verbose logs on a cheaper tier.
3. Google Security Operations: A Full Year of Searchable Data
Google sells its combined SIEM and SOAR in three packages: Standard, Enterprise, and Enterprise Plus. Each one comes with 12 months of hot data retention at no charge beyond ingestion. As a result, storage costs are much easier to forecast here than with per-GB retention billing.
Even the Standard package is generous. It includes 700+ parsers, 300+ SOAR integrations, and room for up to 1,000 single-event and 75 multi-event detection rules. Enterprise layers on user and entity behavior analytics (UEBA), richer threat intelligence and generative AI assistance. Above that, Enterprise Plus brings Google Threat Intelligence, advanced data pipeline controls and BigQuery storage for exported data. For AI-led threat hunting, having a whole year searchable is a genuine edge.
Need more than a year? Retention can stretch to five years, but only through your purchase order. Also note that retention covers every log type in an instance equally, so there’s no per-source setting. All three packages are priced on ingestion through Google Cloud sales or partners.
Good fit if you want a long, predictable retention window baked into ingest pricing.
4. Elastic Security: Published Rates, Granular Control
Elastic runs its SIEM and security analytics on Elastic Cloud Serverless, charging for data ingested and retained, with no per-endpoint fees. Separately, in August 2025, it launched the Elastic AI SOC Engine (EASE). EASE adds AI triage to tools you already use, including Splunk, Microsoft Sentinel and CrowdStrike.
Rates are public, which is rare in this market. Security Analytics Essentials starts as low as $0.09 per ingested GB and $0.017 per retained GB each month. The Complete tier, at as low as $0.11 and $0.019, adds UEBA and AI-driven features. Egress includes 50 GB free, then costs $0.05 per GB. EASE, for its part, pulls in alerts from third-party SIEM and EDR tools through agentless integrations. Elastic’s Attack Discovery then correlates and ranks them.
Still, read the fine print. Those “as low as” figures are volume-tiered, and in Elastic’s own example, a Complete customer pays $0.60 per GB for the first 50 GB. Smaller teams therefore pay quite a bit more per GB. Because EASE works from alerts, also confirm your agents can reach the raw logs behind them.
Separate Bills for AI Usage
AI usage sits on its own meter at Elastic. Workflows come with 10,000 free executions, after which each costs as low as $0.0108. The Elastic Managed LLM, meanwhile, runs $4.50 per million input tokens and $21 per million output tokens. Token spend like this has a habit of creeping, as the wider AI sprawl problem shows, so budget for it up front.
Good fit if you want transparent per-GB pricing and tight control over retention spend.
5. CrowdStrike Falcon Next-Gen SIEM: A Free Start for Falcon Shops
CrowdStrike’s next-gen SIEM extends the Falcon platform to third-party data. It ties that data to the endpoint, identity, and cloud telemetry Falcon already gathers.
The headline offer targets existing customers. Anyone on Falcon Insight XDR can ingest up to 10GB of third-party data a day at no extra cost. Correlation, dashboards and AI-generated parsers all work on that data, while Charlotte AI helps with investigations. On the response side, Falcon Fusion SOAR brings more than 125 prebuilt actions across Falcon and third-party tools.
That free tier keeps data for just seven days, though. For AI investigations, the limit bites hard, because an agent looking two weeks back comes up empty. Bigger volumes and longer retention, up to five years, mean buying a Falcon Next-Gen SIEM subscription through your account team. Unsurprisingly, the best value lands with teams already running Falcon Insight XDR.
Good fit if you’re a CrowdStrike customer wanting to add third-party logs cheaply at first.
Picking the Right Option for Your Team
Begin with a map of where your data sits today. Logs scattered across several SIEMs, data lakes and cloud buckets point toward a search-in-place layer, which spares you from paying to store the same data twice. If you’re consolidating onto one platform anyway, however, a SIEM with a cheaper tier or bundled retention may prove simpler.
After that, split detection data from investigation data. Sources that feed real-time detections earn premium storage. Verbose network and proxy logs can usually move to a cheaper tier or object storage, provided your agents can still query them there.
Then put the AI layer through its paces with your own alerts. Feed a representative alert to each shortlisted tool and note how much history it can search. Before any automated action runs, check exactly where the human approval checkpoints sit.
The Bottom Line
Your best option hinges on what you’re really after: replacing the SIEM, reworking its storage, or adding agents across tools you already own. Strike48 suits teams keeping data in place and adding agents on top. For fine-grained control over tiers and rates, look at Microsoft Sentinel and Elastic Security. Google Security Operations bundles a year of retention, whereas CrowdStrike Falcon Next-Gen SIEM gives Falcon customers a cheap way in.
Whatever lands on your shortlist, price ingest, retention and AI usage separately before you sign. Most importantly, put one question to every vendor: when my agent investigates an alert, how much history can it actually see?
FAQs
Q.1 What is a SIEM alternative?
It’s any platform that takes on part or all of a SIEM’s work, including log analytics, detection and investigation, through a different architecture or pricing model. Some replace the SIEM entirely. Others simply reduce how much it has to store.
Q.2 Can you cut SIEM storage costs without migrating data?
You can, provided the platform queries data where it already lives. Search-in-place tools read from your existing stores, so lower-value logs can sit in cheap object storage and still be available for investigations.
Q.3 Do SIEM alternatives include AI agents?
Most now do, though reach varies widely. Some offer an assistant inside a single product, while cross-tool agent layers can pull evidence from several systems at once. Either way, retention limits set how far back an agent can look.
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