Why pricing visibility counts in a coverage ranking, and why it carries only 8%

What do the nine publish?

From pages read in September 2026 and on 11 October 2026:

• Orca Security: AWS Marketplace lists four contract tiers by concurrent EC2 workloads: Small (up to 100) $7,000.00, Small-Medium (300) $12,000.00, Medium (500) $17,000.00, Large (1,000) $30,000.00. The listing has 1-month and 12-month tabs; we did not capture which term these figures belong to, so confirm the term on the listing. No price on Orca's own site.
• Wiz: AWS Marketplace, 12-month contract: Wiz Essential, 100 cloud workloads, $24,000.00; Wiz Advanced, 100 cloud workloads, $38,000.00. Add-ons: Wiz Sensor (100 sensors, for Wiz Advanced) $28,000.00; Wiz Code (100 licenses) $58,500.00; Wiz Defend (300 GB of logs per month, for Wiz Advanced) $18,000.00. Wiz's own site quotes custom prices.
• Microsoft Defender for Cloud: Published list prices (USD, monthly, East/Central US): Foundational CSPM free; Defender CSPM $5.11 per billable resource; Defender for Servers Plan 1 $4.906 and Plan 2 $14.60 per server; Defender for Containers $6.8693 per vCore; Defender for Storage $10 per storage account; Defender for AI Services $0.0008 per 1,000 tokens. Free for the first 30 days; 1-year pre-purchase commit units save up to 22%.
• Upwind: AWS Marketplace, 12-month contract: Upwind Cloud Security Platform $30,000.00; Upwind Managed Detection and Response 24/7 Service $6,000.00. The quantity each price covers was not captured in our read. 24-month and 36-month contracts are listed with savings. No price on Upwind's own site.
• SentinelOne Singularity Cloud: Not published. No published cloud security price.
• CrowdStrike Falcon Cloud Security: AWS Marketplace, pay as you go (listing combined with Next-Gen SIEM): runtime host protection $0.023 per hour per running host; container protection $0.054 per hour per running worker node; Fargate protection $0.01 per hour per Fargate instance. 30-day free trial with up to $500 in usage credits. CrowdStrike's own pricing page lists endpoint bundles only.
• Palo Alto Networks Cortex Cloud (formerly Prisma Cloud): Not published. No public price; the Cortex Cloud page offers only Request a Demo. CNAPP is included at no additional cost for Cortex Cloud Runtime Security customers.
• Aqua Security: Not published. No list prices. Aqua says Dev Security pricing "is based on the number of code repositories" and Cloud Security is priced by workloads (EC2 instances, Fargate containers, Lambda functions); trial and demo on request.
• Sysdig Secure: AWS Marketplace, 1-month contract: CNAPP Enterprise $72.00 per unit per month (the unit was not captured in our read); 12-month contracts listed as saving up to 17%. Sysdig's own pricing page: licensing by number of hosts, prices by quote.

Why score it in a coverage ranking?

Speed to coverage is not only technical. A platform has to be approved and bought before it connects to anything. A team that can model the cost from public pages can write the business case in a day; a team that must wait for a quote adds a sales cycle. That is why the criterion is called cost visibility before purchase, and why a free tier counts in its favor.

Why only 8%?

Because it does not change what the platform sees once connected. A buyer choosing for fast multi-cloud coverage should not pick a platform that covers less because its price is easier to find. At 8%, cost visibility moves the order only when other scores are close. Defender for Cloud scores 9.2, CrowdStrike 7.5, Wiz 7.0, Orca 6.5, Sysdig 5.5, Upwind 5.0, Aqua 4.0, and SentinelOne and Cortex Cloud 3.0.

What if budget decides?

Then weight it higher. The coverage calculator has a "Budget first" preset that puts 30% on cost visibility; with it, Wiz ranks first. That is a fair answer to a different question, and the calculator shows the formula.

How to get numbers when none are published

1. Count your billable units in the vendor's terms before the first call: workloads, hosts, resources or cloud accounts. Ask which unit the vendor uses.
2. Ask for the price per unit, the minimum, the term and what is excluded: sensors, AI modules, code scanning and additional clouds are often priced separately.
3. Ask whether the platform is available through your cloud provider's marketplace, which can count against existing commitments.
4. For Defender for Cloud, use Microsoft's list prices and calculator; for the others, compare marketplace units with your own counts before you ask for a quote.

What we will not do

We do not publish estimates of quotes we have not seen, and we do not multiply a vendor's percentage claims by anyone's spend. Where a vendor does not publish a price, this site says Not published.