--- title: Ossec Reviews meta_title: 'Ossec Reviews 2026: Details, Pricing, & Features | G2' meta_description: Filter 10 reviews by the users' company size, role or industry to find out how Ossec works for a business like yours. aggregate_rating: rating_value: 4.6 review_count: 10 scale: '5' date_modified: '2026-06-21' parent_category: name: Network Security url: https://www.g2.com/categories/network-security --- # Ossec Reviews **Vendor:** Ossec **Category:** [Intrusion Detection and Prevention Systems (IDPS)](https://www.g2.com/categories/intrusion-detection-and-prevention-systems-idps) **Average Rating:** 4.6/5.0 **Total Reviews:** 10 ## About Ossec Ossec is an open source host-based intrusion detection system that performs log analysis, file integrity checking, policy monitoring, rootkit detection and process monitoring. ## Ossec Reviews ### 1. Open Source, Highly Configurable, Actively Maintained Linux Endpoint Security **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Stephen G. | Security Engineer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 18, 2018 **What do you like best about Ossec?** The highly active community maintaining and support the product, as well as the price! The community around OSSEC is highly active on forums and other sites and more than willing to help with any configuration issues that come up. Also, OSSEC maintains regular to fix bugs and improve features. Since there is a very high cost associated with other commercial products in the same space, many other companies seem to have also decided to invest resources in this excellent open source product **What do you dislike about Ossec?** The high configuration overhead of the system. Be ready to have engineers spend time to debug and validate the configurations and systems that are a part the system. As with any open source system, sometimes the documentation and other internet research tend to lead down the wrong path. Having quality engineers be able to handle, maintain, test the configs are a ciritical part of making OSSEC work in production. **Recommendations to others considering Ossec:** Make sure that you can maintain be configuration overhead of the product **What problems is Ossec solving and how is that benefiting you?** Compliance needs for endpoint security without the ever-scaling costs of per box pricing. Also, by free ourselves from our previous vendor, we've been able to use the same budget to invest more in log rentention and other critical aspects of the business. ### 2. A great tool, available for free! **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Religious Institutions | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 06, 2020 **What do you like best about Ossec?** This tool gives us the ability to monitor our point of sale systems for intrusion and log this important data in order to remain in compliance with PCI-DSS standards. The ideal aspects of this tool are that you can easily deploy this to many clients and manage the monitoring for these clients centrally on the server. The best part is this software is free and open source. So all you have to supply is the hardware required to run this virtually. **What do you dislike about Ossec?** There isn’t a dashboard for this software. There used to be long ago when it was originally developed. Unfortunately there aren’t many options for data visualization, so you’re relying on email notification and log files on the server to look into potential threats. There was a plug-in for Splunk, but with recent version of OSSEC it appears that it’s no longer supported. Supposedly you can do some visualization with Loki, Prometheus, and Grafana (other open source tools). **Recommendations to others considering Ossec:** As long as you’re okay with creating your own dashboard or using the command line to view logging, then it’s an excellent product. **What problems is Ossec solving and how is that benefiting you?** The only issues we’ve had is the lack of a dashboard. Otherwise the product functions as it should. The benefits of the product were simply that it gives us some visibility into potential threats on point of sale machines and makes us compliant. ### 3. An easy to install Log monitoring and Intrusion detection tool **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer & Network Security | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 10, 2020 **What do you like best about Ossec?** This is an easy to install login monitoring tool , which is very helpful for all organization for intrusion detection and log analysis, as a personal user of this tool, i like all the features this tool provides **What do you dislike about Ossec?** i personally doesn't feel any dislike or drawback for this tool because being an opensource tool it provides all features as a security professional needs, only thing have to focus more is to implement a User- interface for this tool **Recommendations to others considering Ossec:** Currenly ossec is doing great job as ann open-source tool, in future please implement User interface too, it will be more helpful for professionals or individual who doesnt familar with command line **What problems is Ossec solving and how is that benefiting you?** As a Security company , We have to first protect our networks from malicious intruders, this tool basically helps us for log analysis and host-based intrusion detection as well ### 4. Increase security and good log monitor on windows and check registry **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Apparel & Fashion | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 11, 2020 **What do you like best about Ossec?** – Agent runs on Windows, Linux, and macOS this is amazing – Server and agent communicates via encrypted messages increase security comunication - Can be integrated with Slack and PagerDuty for alerting - Can be integrated with ELK **What do you dislike about Ossec?** - Upgrade system. The upgrade is very painful - When you upgrade the old rule will disappear for default. **Recommendations to others considering Ossec:** Please improve the upgrade system. **What problems is Ossec solving and how is that benefiting you?** Checking my authentication logs and sent the same to the ELK System. Putting Firewall (CheckPoint) logs in ELK system with Dashboards and real time monitor. ### 5. Ossec g2 recommend **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Retail | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 12, 2020 **What do you like best about Ossec?** It is open source based and easy to use. **What do you dislike about Ossec?** We have to build our own rpm packages so we can use ossec on centos or rhel based systems. **Recommendations to others considering Ossec:** Ossec is a good and easy start for security compliance when you want to deploy log analysis. **What problems is Ossec solving and how is that benefiting you?** Log analysis and file integrity checking. ### 6. Log Management f OSSEC is the Highlight **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Aviation & Aerospace | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 13, 2020 **What do you like best about Ossec?** Log Management, Rules syntax, the detection mechanism of the OSSEC are very great and it made me learn more about IDPS **What do you dislike about Ossec?** There is no Metrics Dashboard to moniter the events **What problems is Ossec solving and how is that benefiting you?** user monitoring, file system modifications ### 7. Open source FIM tool **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Accounting | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 16, 2020 **What do you like best about Ossec?** File integrity monitoring Logs review Attacks identification **What do you dislike about Ossec?** web ui need to improve windows agent should be more effective **What problems is Ossec solving and how is that benefiting you?** file integrity logs attacks scanning preventions etc ### 8. OSSEC is very capable but mgmt is not the easiest. **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Tony M. | Director, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 13, 2019 **What do you like best about Ossec?** I like the file modification monitoring. It can do hashes of files like tripwire and periodically checks the files for modification. **What do you dislike about Ossec?** The management is very command line oriented. **Recommendations to others considering Ossec:** This is a low cost and effective file integrity monitoring tool. It also can do various levels of host level protection including log monitoring, root kit checks and active responses. **What problems is Ossec solving and how is that benefiting you?** File integrity monitoring is what we use it for. ### 9. Great for log monitoring **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Jose Antonio B. | Seguridad Informatica, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 31, 2019 **What do you like best about Ossec?** i like the easy way to configure ossec, and how it helps to monitoring and keep tracking of everything on a server. **What do you dislike about Ossec?** i would like to have an easy deployment in linux like the windows deployment. **Recommendations to others considering Ossec:** its easy to deploy and its open source. **What problems is Ossec solving and how is that benefiting you?** log management, log analysis, its pretty good tool to monitoring your servers ### 10. OSSEC - A must have for server's administrators **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Jean F. | CTO, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** September 12, 2018 **What do you like best about Ossec?** First that is an open source project! Second is how the product interacts with my servers, protecting and alarming at every time something or someone does wrong. **What do you dislike about Ossec?** The web interface is no longer maintained so at the moment, there's no web interface. But you always send your data to Kibana and have graphs available. **Recommendations to others considering Ossec:** Use and install in all your servers and workstations, get all the logs needed in a central location! **What problems is Ossec solving and how is that benefiting you?** We're solving security problems by using OSSEC as our Intrusion Detection System. - [View Ossec pricing details and edition comparison](https://www.g2.com/products/ossec/reviews?section=pricing&secure%5Bexpires_at%5D=2026-07-01+15%3A01%3A14+-0500&secure%5Bsession_id%5D=9a80e822-eed8-42b0-8e10-7acf471a219e&secure%5Btoken%5D=41c149c3ec376fe5fd5e0afebbc2ac4425f822d13f3a9e9ad14f6aee86d8c34f&format=llm_user) ## Ossec Features **Prevention** - Intrusion Prevention - Firewall - Encryption - Security hardening - Cloud Data Protection **Detection** - Intrusion Detection - Security Monitoring - Anti-Malware / Malware Detection **Administration** - Compliance - Administration Console - - API / integrations **Generative AI** - AI Text Summarization **Agentic AI - Intrusion Detection and Prevention Systems (IDPS)** - Autonomous Task Execution - Proactive Assistance ## Top Ossec Alternatives - [Snort](https://www.g2.com/products/snort/reviews) - 4.0/5.0 (18 reviews) - [LevelBlue USM Anywhere](https://www.g2.com/products/levelblue-usm-anywhere/reviews) - 4.4/5.0 (102 reviews) - [Palo Alto Networks Next-Generation Firewalls](https://www.g2.com/products/palo-alto-networks-next-generation-firewalls/reviews) - 4.5/5.0 (163 reviews)