The Real Cost of Running Four Security Tools Instead of One

What a typical SMB security stack looks like

A company with 20 employees trying to take security seriously usually runs something like this: an EDR tool for endpoint threat detection, a monitoring service for alerts, a vulnerability scanner for code and infrastructure, and a SaaS tool for compliance documentation. Some have added an IAM solution on top.

Here is a rough monthly cost for that stack at 20 people:

• Threat detection (Huntress or SentinelOne): $120 to $200
• Monitoring / SIEM (Datadog or Sumo Logic): $80 to $150
• Vulnerability scanning (Snyk or Veracode): $100 to $200
• Compliance automation (Drata or Vanta): $150 to $300
• Identity and access (JumpCloud or Okta): $60 to $150

Total: $510 to $1,000 per month, before implementation costs, training time, or the hours spent switching between dashboards.

The coordination tax

The financial cost is the visible part. The hidden cost is coordination.

Four tools generate four streams of alerts that do not share context. A phishing attempt that triggers your endpoint tool may also represent a compliance event, a failed access control, and a vulnerability in your email client, but you will only see the connection if someone is manually correlating events across platforms. Most 20-person companies do not have that person.

Security tools built in silos produce alerts built in silos. Teams in that situation report the same pattern: alert fatigue. Everything looks urgent, so nothing gets prioritized. Real incidents get missed.

What consolidation actually costs

A single platform covering all four categories at $199 per month represents $300 to $800 per month in savings for a 20-person team, plus the time saved from working in a single dashboard with correlated alerts.

The math is straightforward. The harder question is whether a consolidated platform matches the depth of four specialized tools.

For the majority of small and mid-market teams, it does. The specialized tools were built for security teams with the expertise to configure and tune them. A platform built for teams without that expertise trades some configurability for usability, and for most buyers that trade is worth making.

When four tools still make sense

Consolidation is not always the right call.

If your team includes dedicated security engineers who rely on the specific capabilities of best-in-class tools, a consolidated platform may not match their workflow. Large organizations with compliance requirements across multiple frameworks simultaneously often need the depth that specialized tools provide.

For teams under 200 people without dedicated security staff, the coordination cost of a fragmented stack usually outweighs the capability difference. The question to ask is not which tool is best at a specific thing, but which setup you are actually going to maintain and respond to.