For an ecommerce SaaS company leaving Wiz, Aikido Security and Prowler fit teams where engineering owns remediation, Orca Security and Sysdig fit broad cloud and runtime estates, and Cortex Cloud or Microsoft Defender for Cloud fit organizations with an existing security operations function. Many teams should stay put.
Google closed its acquisition of Wiz on March 11, 2026. That changed the governance question for every team on the platform. It changed almost nothing about the product.
An ecommerce SaaS company carries a security responsibility a merchant does not. The merchant secures a store. The software company secures the product every store installs: a multi tenant API, an administrative surface that can act on a customer’s behalf, a set of long lived integration credentials, and whatever cloud resources sit underneath. A finding in any one of those places is a finding in all of its customers at once.
This article is for the engineering or platform lead at a company in that position comparing alternatives to Wiz. The six platforms below are listed alphabetically, not ranked, and no claim is made that any one is best. The comparison grid and the fit section near the end exist to help you work out which suits your situation; the inclusion methodology below tells you what each was judged against.
Start with the failure modes rather than the feature lists. An evaluation that begins with a vendor’s module names produces a shortlist of vendors; one that begins with what breaks in your product produces a decision. Four things break in a multi tenant commerce product in ways a cloud posture scan will not see. The first is tenant scoped data access, which comes down to scoping every database query to a tenant ID and testing that the isolation actually holds. The OWASP Multi Tenant Security Cheat Sheet is blunt about the consequence: in a shared infrastructure model, a single vulnerability can expose every tenant’s data at once.
The second is the integration credential surface. A commerce app accumulates access tokens, and a token keeps working until somebody revokes it, which makes auditing which integrations still hold a live token a recurring job rather than a launch task. The third is the administrative path, the support tooling that lets your staff act inside a customer account, which is where the OAuth and session token flows an embedded app depends on become a privilege escalation question. The fourth is data classification, because on Shopify specifically protected customer data carries its own approval regime that a log line does not.
Write those four down as a concrete evaluation set before any demo: one shared API endpoint that accepts a tenant owned object ID, one background integration holding a credential, one administrative action that crosses an account boundary, and the cloud resources all three touch. Then ask each shortlisted platform to show you a finding in that set, routed to the person who would fix it, with the evidence you would need to prove closure. Most of the difference between these six shows up in that exercise. Almost none of it shows up on their product pages.
Four criteria were applied uniformly to every platform on this list, and each platform was checked against its own current product and pricing pages in October 2026 rather than against a secondary roundup. First, the platform must cover cloud posture plus at least one of application security or runtime protection, so that it can plausibly stand in for a code to cloud platform rather than supplement one. Second, it must support more than one cloud provider, or state its provider boundary plainly. Third, it must document its own coverage publicly enough that a team can scope a trial without a sales call. Fourth, its pricing position as of October 2026 had to be verifiable, whether that meant a published rate card or a confirmed quote only model.
Two platforms were considered and excluded. Snyk covers application security well but does not carry cloud posture, so it supplements a platform rather than replacing one. Prisma Cloud was excluded because Palo Alto Networks lists it separately from Cortex Cloud under the same Cloud Security navigation without explaining the relationship, and a team should be told which of the two it is buying rather than finding both on a list.
Of these six platforms, only Aikido Security and Prowler publish a full rate card as of October 2026, Microsoft Defender for Cloud publishes a free tier with metered paid plans, and Cortex Cloud, Orca Security and Sysdig all quote. Every row below reads on its own. Pricing as of October 2026.
Aikido Security is a unified code to cloud security platform built for engineering teams that fix their own findings, and it is the only platform on this list that publishes a full rate card.
Aikido’s application security platform bundles the scanners an application team usually buys separately: dependency scanning with SBOM output, static analysis with AI AutoFix, infrastructure as code scanning for Terraform, CloudFormation and Kubernetes, container image scanning, secrets detection and malware detection in dependencies. The wider Aikido Security platform adds cloud misconfiguration checks, virtual machine scanning, data security posture management, cloud attack paths, DAST, API scanning and continuous pentests. It runs as pull request checks and CI gates with IDE plugins, which puts a finding in front of the engineer who wrote the line rather than into a security queue.
As of October 2026, Aikido Security publishes its prices. The Developer plan is free and covers 10 repositories, 2 container images, 1 domain, 1 cloud account and 10 AI AutoFixes a month, rescanning every three days. Basic is $300 a month including 10 users and 100 repositories. Pro and Advanced are both listed at $600 a month including 10 users, and Enterprise is quoted, with 10% off annual billing. Pentests are priced separately: a standard assessment is $4,000, and rightsized assessments run from $50 to $30,000 and above.
Published pricing is the first real strength, and in this category it is not a small one, because the other five platforms will not show you a number without a conversation. The second is that the free tier is large enough to scan a genuine service repository rather than a toy project, so the evaluation set above can be run before any budget approval.
Three limitations matter. Pro and Advanced both read $600 a month on the pricing page as of October 2026, which is either a page error or a distinction the page does not explain, so get it in writing before you budget. Runtime and forensic depth is thinner than Sysdig or Cortex Cloud: a team that needs to reconstruct what a process did inside a container during an incident will find the evidence trail shorter here. And the cloud, offensive testing and runtime capabilities sit across the wider product line rather than inside the code platform, so confirm which products a quote actually covers and where the coverage boundaries fall before you treat it as a single purchase.
Best fit for ecommerce SaaS companies where engineering owns remediation end to end, with a handful of cloud accounts and no dedicated security operations function, from a first paying merchant through a few hundred merchant accounts.
Skip if a security operations team rather than engineering is asked to produce evidence during an incident, or if runtime forensics is a first class requirement.
Cortex Cloud is Palo Alto Networks’ code to cloud platform, and it suits ecommerce SaaS organizations whose security work already runs through a security operations function rather than through engineering alone.
Cortex Cloud covers three areas plus exposure management. Application security aims to stop risks reaching production across code, software supply chains and runtime. Cloud posture security applies code and runtime context to findings, using SmartGrouping to consolidate related signals into cases and SmartScore to prioritize by real world exposure. Cloud runtime security provides real time protection and behavioural telemetry, feeding a cloud detection and response capability. The stated selling point is integration with security operations workflows, unifying cloud native application protection with the work a detection and response team already does.
Palo Alto Networks does not publish a list price for Cortex Cloud as of October 2026. The product page routes pricing to a demo request and does not state the licensing unit, so a direct comparison against Prowler at $99 per cloud account or Aikido Security at $300 a month cannot be made until you are in a sales process.
Its strengths are specific. If your organization runs a detection and response program, Cortex Cloud is one of the few platforms here designed so a cloud posture finding and a runtime event land in the same case rather than in two tools, and SmartGrouping addresses the real operational problem that cloud tools generate many signals for one underlying issue. For a company already standardized on Palo Alto Networks, the consolidation argument is as strong as it gets.
Three limitations. Pricing opacity is the first, and it is worse here than for Orca Security or Sysdig, both of which at least publish their licensing units. The second is product ambiguity: Palo Alto Networks lists Prisma Cloud separately under the same Cloud Security navigation and the Cortex Cloud page does not explain whether Cortex Cloud replaces it, extends it, or sits beside it. Ask explicitly which product your quote covers and what happens to it at renewal. The third is that Cortex Cloud’s value is tied to a security operations function existing. A twelve person engineering team with no security operations group is paying for coordination between teams it does not have.
Best fit for ecommerce SaaS organizations with a named security operations function or an existing Palo Alto Networks standard, past the point where one engineering lead carries security as a side responsibility.
Skip if you need a price before you commit calendar time to a demo cycle, or if engineering is the only team that will ever look at a finding.
Microsoft Defender for Cloud is Microsoft’s cloud native application protection platform, and it is strongest for ecommerce SaaS companies whose production estate is already centred on Azure and whose identity and endpoint tooling is already Microsoft.
Microsoft Defender for Cloud has three components: cloud security posture management, DevSecOps, and cloud workload protection. Foundational posture management is free and provides centralized policy management against the Microsoft cloud security benchmark, a secure score, multicloud coverage and a posture dashboard. The paid Defender CSPM plan adds regulatory compliance, a cloud security explorer, data security posture management, attack path analysis and AI security posture management. Workload protection is bought as separate plans covering servers, containers, resource manager, storage, app service, databases, key vault, APIs and AI services. DevSecOps gives code pipeline insights for Azure DevOps, GitHub and GitLab, and is available on the free tier.
Foundational posture management is free, and there is a 30 day free period on the paid plans. As of October 2026, the Azure pricing page for Microsoft Defender for Cloud renders its rate cells as placeholders rather than figures, so current per resource rates have to come from the Azure pricing calculator or from a quote. Billing is based on resource counts across servers, storage accounts, databases and serverless resources.
Two strengths stand out. The free foundational tier is genuinely useful rather than a lead magnet, and for an Azure centred team it produces a posture baseline in an afternoon. The identity integration is the larger one: if administrative access already flows through Microsoft Entra, the cross account privilege path in your evaluation set is visible in the same place as everything else.
Three limitations. Coverage is not symmetrical across providers: Microsoft Defender for Cloud connects AWS and Google Cloud agentlessly, and Microsoft publishes a multicloud support matrix precisely because the plans differ by provider, so an estate genuinely spread across three clouds will get three different pictures. Repository and application security is thin relative to Aikido Security or Cortex Cloud, because DevSecOps here is pipeline insight rather than a full static analysis, dependency scanning, DAST and secrets program. And metering across nine or more separate plans makes the cost of a change hard to predict for a product whose resource count grows with its customer count.
Best fit for ecommerce SaaS companies with Azure as the production centre of gravity and Microsoft identity in place, at any stage, because the free tier makes early adoption cheap.
Skip if repository and application security is your main gap, or if AWS or Google Cloud carries the majority of your production workload.
Orca Security is an agentless first cloud security platform, and it suits ecommerce SaaS companies whose primary problem is understanding risk across a cloud estate that grew faster than the team documenting it.
Orca Security describes itself as workload deep, context aware and agentless, securing multi cloud environments from build through runtime. Its core technology is SideScanning, which assesses workload contents without deploying an agent, alongside Orca Sensor for runtime observability and protection. The platform covers cloud security posture management, cloud infrastructure entitlement management, vulnerability management, compliance, API security and data security posture management, and its ecosystem listing names Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, Oracle Cloud, Alibaba Cloud and Tencent Cloud. Orca Security sells the whole platform as a single product rather than as modules.
Orca Security does not publish list pricing as of October 2026. It describes one product covering the full platform, priced on the number of cloud workloads you need to protect, with unused workload credits applicable toward runtime protection, and routes pricing questions to a one to one demo.
Two strengths. Agentless assessment covers things nobody remembered to instrument, which is exactly the estate shape this platform is for: the forgotten nonproduction account, the service somebody stood up during an incident two years ago. The second is entitlement management, because for a multi tenant product the question of which role can reach which customer’s resources is a first order concern, and Orca Security treats it as one.
Three limitations. There is no published price, and a per workload unit is the hardest unit to forecast for a SaaS product whose workload count scales with customer count, so model it against the next twelve months of growth rather than today’s inventory. Agentless first is both the architecture and the trade off: SideScanning sees what is in a workload without an agent, but behavioural runtime depth comes from Orca Sensor, which is a separate deployment decision and a separate conversation. And the cloud provider names appear on the site as partner and technology links rather than as a stated support matrix, so confirm the depth of coverage for your specific providers instead of reading the logo row as parity.
Best fit for ecommerce SaaS companies running production across two or more cloud providers where a platform team owns assessment, once the estate has passed the point where one person can list every account from memory.
Skip if you need budget certainty before a sales cycle, or if your cloud estate is one or two accounts, where agentless breadth is solving a problem you do not have yet.
Prowler is an open source cloud security posture tool with hosted and self hosted commercial editions, and it fits ecommerce SaaS companies with platform engineers who want to own their own checks.
Prowler ships as a command line tool, a Python SDK and a self hostable application, licensed Apache 2.0. It covers Amazon Web Services, Azure, Google Cloud, Kubernetes, Microsoft 365 and GitHub, and maps its checks to CIS, NIST, PCI DSS, ISO 27001, SOC 2 and HIPAA among other frameworks, describing hundreds of checks without stating an exact count. Prowler Cloud is the managed hosted platform, and the self hosted Prowler App carries the same feature set. Because the check code is inspectable and extensible, Prowler is the only option here where a team can read exactly what a control tests and change it.
As of October 2026 Prowler publishes both halves of its pricing. The open source command line tool, SDK and local server are free. Prowler Cloud is $99 per cloud account per month billed monthly, or $79 per cloud account per month billed annually, after a 15 day trial with no credit card and no account cap. A cloud account means an AWS account, a Google Cloud project, an Azure subscription, a GitHub repository or a Microsoft 365 tenant. Prowler Private Cloud, deployed in your own environment including air gapped, is quoted. Add ons are published too, including custom check development at $10,000 per check and a dedicated technical account manager at $50,000 a year.
Two strengths. The compliance framework mapping is the practical one: a software company answering a customer security questionnaire against SOC 2 or PCI DSS can produce evidence from the same tool that found the gap. Transparency is the second, and no commercial platform here offers it, because you can read the check and decide whether you agree with it.
Three limitations. Prowler is a posture tool, not a code to cloud platform. There is no static analysis, no dependency scanning and no DAST, so pairing it with something that covers the repository is the design rather than an upgrade path. The per cloud account unit is cheap until your account structure fans out, and a company running one AWS account per customer environment will find the account count, not the resource count, is the whole bill. And ownership is the real cost: checks, credentials, exceptions and reporting are yours to maintain, and your coverage baseline is something you establish rather than something you are handed.
Best fit for ecommerce SaaS companies with at least one platform engineer who wants control over posture assessment, building a deliberately assembled stack rather than making a single platform purchase.
Skip if nobody on the team has capacity to own check maintenance, or if you are trying to cover application and cloud security with one purchase.
Sysdig is a cloud native application protection platform for ecommerce SaaS companies whose product runs on containers and Kubernetes and whose security decisions depend on what a workload is actually doing.
Sysdig unifies prevention, detection and response across containers, Kubernetes, identities, workloads and cloud services. It covers cloud security posture management, entitlement management, vulnerability management, workload protection, data security posture management, cloud detection and response and AI workload security, with an attack graph for mapping paths. Runtime insights are powered by Falco, the open source project Sysdig originated, and real time detections combine drift control, machine learning and Falco rules maintained by the Sysdig Threat Research Team. The agent analyses active processes in real time, which lets Sysdig filter out vulnerabilities in packages that are present but never loaded. Both agentless and agent based deployment are supported.
Sysdig does not publish list pricing as of October 2026. Its pricing page reads “Prices tailored to your needs” with a quote request, and no free tier is listed. It does publish its licensing units, which is more than Cortex Cloud does: the platform is licensed by number of hosts, with compute instances used for posture management, detection and response is licensed by hosts with cloud log billing charged per event processed, and monitoring is licensed by host or by time series.
Two strengths. Runtime based vulnerability filtering is the one that changes a team’s week, because a container image carrying, say, 300 findings in packages that never execute is a triage problem rather than a security problem, and Sysdig is built to tell the difference. Falco heritage is the second: the detection rules are an open standard your team can read and extend, which is unusual in a commercial runtime product.
Three limitations. The headline figures on the Sysdig Secure page, under two seconds to detect, six to one tool consolidation and 20% time savings, carry no stated measurement method or comparison baseline, so treat them as vendor claims rather than benchmarks. Source code and business logic testing is out of scope: Sysdig tells you what a running workload did, not that an endpoint forgot to check which tenant owns the record it just returned. And per host licensing combined with per event cloud log billing means two separate meters, so a chatty audit log can move your bill independently of your host count.
Best fit for ecommerce SaaS companies running a container or Kubernetes based product where a platform team makes runtime decisions, once the service count has outgrown what one person can reason about.
Skip if your product runs on managed services rather than containers, or if application security testing is the gap you are trying to close.
The right platform follows from who fixes a finding in your company, not from which vendor has the longest capability list. Four situations cover most ecommerce SaaS companies, and the fourth is the one most lists leave out.
If engineering owns remediation end to end and you have one or two cloud accounts, Aikido Security and Prowler are opposite bets on the same problem. Aikido Security gives you one bill, one login and a published price that starts free, in exchange for less runtime depth. Prowler gives you a cheaper posture layer and full transparency over what each check tests, in exchange for owning maintenance and buying application security separately. The trade off is about your team, not the products: if nobody has time for check maintenance, Prowler’s lower price is not a saving.
If your cloud estate has outgrown the team documenting it, the comparison is Orca Security against Sysdig. Orca Security wins when breadth is the problem and nobody is sure what is running where. Sysdig wins when the estate is container heavy and the bottleneck is deciding which findings in an image actually matter. Both quote rather than publish, and both price on a unit that grows with your customer count, so model twelve months forward before you sign.
If a security operations function already exists, Cortex Cloud and Microsoft Defender for Cloud carry the consolidation argument. Choose Microsoft Defender for Cloud when Azure is the production centre of gravity and Microsoft identity is in place, where the free foundational tier makes the first step nearly free. Choose Cortex Cloud when the detection and response program, rather than the cloud estate, is what the security budget serves.
The fourth situation is staying where you are, and for a lot of teams reading this it is the correct answer. Google completed its acquisition of Wiz on March 11, 2026, and Google’s own announcement of the close commits to retaining the Wiz brand and to Wiz products continuing to work across Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Oracle Cloud Platform. An acquisition is a governance question, and three conditions turn it into a real reason to move: renewal terms you cannot live with, a requirement that your tooling not be operated by your cloud provider or a competitor, or a module you have stopped using. Absent one of those, switching costs real engineering attention to arrive at roughly the same coverage.
There is a better use for that quarter. None of these six platforms tests whether your API checks which tenant owns the record it is about to return. OWASP is specific that object level authorization has to be validated in every function that uses client input to reach a record. That is a test suite your team writes, not a platform you buy, and the surface you are judged on is wider than your cloud estate anyway, from the PCI DSS requirements that apply specifically to multi tenant service providers through to the Built for Shopify quality standards an App Store listing is judged against.
There is no single best Wiz alternative for an ecommerce SaaS company, which is why this list is unranked and alphabetical. All six platforms earn their place in the category and none of them covers everything. The variable that actually decides the answer is who in your company fixes a finding: engineering, a platform team, or a security operations function. Pick the platform built for that person and the capability comparison mostly resolves itself.
Two practical notes. Four of these six will not give you a number without a sales conversation, so run the cheap options first: Aikido Security’s free tier and Prowler’s open source edition both let you test against real repositories and real accounts this week, which gives you a baseline to judge the quoted platforms against. And whichever way the decision goes, keep tenant isolation and business logic testing as your own program. That is the part of a multi tenant commerce product no cloud security platform covers, and the part where one mistake reaches every customer at once.
There is no single best Wiz alternative, because the right choice depends on who fixes a finding inside your company. If engineering owns remediation, Aikido Security and Prowler are the two to compare. If a platform team owns assessment across a broad or container heavy estate, Orca Security and Sysdig fit better. If a security operations function already exists or a vendor standard is already set, Cortex Cloud and Microsoft Defender for Cloud carry the stronger consolidation argument. Work out which of those three descriptions matches your team before you compare capability lists, because the capability overlap between these platforms is larger than the difference in who they are built for.
Google completed the acquisition on March 11, 2026, and its own announcement says the Wiz brand is retained and Wiz products continue to work across Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Oracle Cloud Platform. On the published commitments, the product and its multicloud availability are unchanged. What did change is a governance question: your cloud security platform is now operated by a hyperscaler, which may matter to your own customers, to your security questionnaire answers, or to your renewal terms. Three things make it a real reason to move: terms you cannot live with at renewal, a customer or compliance requirement about who operates your tooling, or a module you have stopped using and are still paying for.
Only two of these six platforms publish prices as of October 2026. Aikido Security lists a free Developer plan, Basic at $300 a month including 10 users, and Pro and Advanced both shown at $600 a month, with 10% off annual billing. Prowler is free as open source, with Prowler Cloud at $99 per cloud account per month monthly or $79 annually. Microsoft Defender for Cloud has a free foundational posture tier, with paid plans metered on resource counts whose current rates come from the Azure pricing calculator. Cortex Cloud, Orca Security and Sysdig all quote: Orca Security prices per cloud workload and Sysdig licenses per host, while Palo Alto Networks does not publish a licensing unit for Cortex Cloud.
Aikido Security starts from the repository and Orca Security starts from the cloud estate, and that difference decides which one fits. Aikido Security bundles dependency scanning, static analysis, infrastructure as code, container, secrets and API scanning into pull request checks and CI gates, so findings reach the engineer who wrote the code. Orca Security uses agentless SideScanning to assess every workload in a multi cloud estate without deploying agents, so findings reach the team responsible for the infrastructure. Aikido Security publishes a rate card starting at zero; Orca Security quotes per cloud workload. Pick Aikido Security when engineering fixes things, and Orca Security when nobody is certain what is running where.
Yes, and tenant isolation is the clearest example of why. A cloud native application protection platform assesses configuration, workloads, identities and runtime behaviour. None of these six platforms tests whether a given API endpoint confirms that the authenticated user is entitled to the specific record it is about to return. OWASP is explicit that object level authorization must be validated in every function that uses client supplied input to reach a record, and that checking a session user ID against an ID parameter covers only a narrow subset of cases. For a multi tenant commerce product, that is the failure that reaches every customer at once, and it is a test suite your team writes rather than a platform you buy.
