The 2026 Global Pricing Guide: Vulnerability Scanning & Microsoft 365 Security Audit Services

Security services have a transparency problem. Ask ten providers what a vulnerability scan or a Microsoft 365 security audit costs and nine will answer "it depends — contact sales." We benchmarked the global market in mid-2026 to replace that vagueness with real numbers: what the tools cost, what the delivered services cost, and what a fair price looks like across Asia-Pacific, Europe, the UK and the Middle East.

This guide is written for IT and finance decision-makers who need to budget, benchmark a quote, or decide between running a tool in-house and buying a managed service. All figures are cited market ranges or published list prices as of July 2026; treat them as planning benchmarks, not fixed quotes.

The two buying motions you are actually pricing

Before comparing numbers, separate the two things the market sells, because they are priced completely differently:

• Self-serve SaaS tools — scanners and posture dashboards you run yourself. Priced per asset, per IP, per web app, or per user per month. This is software, not an outcome.
• Delivered services — a one-time assessment or an ongoing managed service where a provider runs the scan, interprets it, and hands you a report plus a remediation plan. Priced as a fixed fee or a monthly retainer.

The distinction matters because a tool licence does not produce an audit an insurer or regulator will accept — a person does. Buyers routinely discover that a delivered assessment costs less than the annual licence of the enterprise tool they were about to run themselves.

Part 1 — Vulnerability scanning pricing

What the tools cost (self-serve)

The global scanner market is dominated by a handful of platforms. Published or well-sourced 2026 pricing:

• Tenable Nessus Professional — US$4,790 per year, per scanner (flat licence you operate).
• Qualys VMDR — roughly US$199–250 per asset per year (enterprise tiers are quote-only).
• Rapid7 InsightVM — about US$23 per asset per year, with a ~512-asset minimum.
• Intruder.io — a SaaS scanner at roughly US$99–240 per month depending on tier.
• Astra, Acunetix, Invicti — per-web-app or per-target pricing from ~US$2,000 to US$37,000+ per year.

Note the pattern: the enterprise leaders — Qualys, Invicti, Cobalt — have stopped publishing list prices entirely. Transparent, fixed pricing has become a genuine differentiator at the SME and mid-market level.

What a delivered assessment costs

For a point-in-time engagement performed and reported by a provider, the global bands are remarkably consistent:

• External / network vulnerability assessment — roughly US$1,500–5,000 per engagement.
• Network penetration test (adds manual exploitation) — US$5,000–20,000.
• Web-application / API test — US$5,000–30,000 depending on complexity.

An important buyer warning surfaced repeatedly in the research: anything priced below ~US$1,500 and marketed as a "penetration test" is almost always just an automated scan. A scan and a pen-test are not the same product.

What managed (recurring) scanning costs

• Standalone managed vulnerability scanning — clusters at roughly US$95–190 (£75–£150) per month for continuous external scanning with reporting.
• Full-service MSSP vulnerability-management programmes — US$50,000–200,000 per year for large environments, or ~US$15–75 per user per month on a retainer.

Part 2 — Microsoft 365 security audit pricing

The free-score trap

Microsoft Secure Score is free and automated — and it is not an audit. It only reads settings visible to Microsoft’s API, and no auditor or cyber-insurer accepts it as formal evidence. It cannot see manual-only controls such as break-glass emergency-access accounts, Entra admin-role restrictions, Teams external-app policies, or Power BI sharing.

The recognised standard is the CIS Microsoft 365 Benchmark, which covers 100% of controls — including those manual ones — and sits behind most compliance frameworks. The free heavyweight for running a defensible baseline is CISA’s open-source ScubaGear tool, which many providers run under the hood before charging for interpretation and remediation.

What the tools and services cost

• Microsoft Secure Score / ScubaGear — free (not audit-grade on their own).
• Posture-monitoring SaaS (Octiga, Syskit Point) — US$1–3 per user per month.
• CoreView (enterprise governance platform) — from roughly US$20,000 per year.
• SMB one-time M365 audit (e.g. Adelia Risk, 80+ points) — a rare published flat fee at US$999.
• Enterprise hardening projects (e.g. EPC Group) — around US$20,000–25,000, with comprehensive consulting engagements reaching US$15,000–50,000.

The striking finding: almost no provider publishes a headline price for a Microsoft 365 security audit. That opacity is precisely why a transparent, CIS-benchmark-based pricing sheet stands out.

Regional price bands at a glance

The same service carries very different price tags and demand drivers by region:

• Global / US (USD) — vuln scan US$1.5k–5k; M365 audit US$999 (SMB) to US$20k–50k (enterprise); managed vuln US$95–310/mo.
• UK / EU (GBP / EUR) — external test from £2,500, typical £4,800–£7,200; CREST day rate ~£1,200; Cyber Essentials Plus £1,500–£3,000 (bundles scanning). NIS2 and GDPR are driving M365-audit demand.
• China (RMB) — cloud vendors bundle scanning at near-zero marginal cost; the paid category is MLPS/等保 assessment (Level 2 ¥30k–60k, Level 3 ¥60k–120k per system, per year).
• APAC / SEA — Singapore VAPT S$2,000–30,000; Malaysia RM5k–100k; India ₹40k–850k per scan. MAS and CSA mandates drive demand.
• Middle East — UAE VAPT AED 9,000–180,000; Saudi SAR 25,000–200,000+. SAMA CSF and NCA ECC mandate regular assessment.

How much should you actually pay?

Synthesising the benchmarks into practical guidance:

1. For an SME (under ~20 assets / one tenant): expect US$1,200–1,800 for a one-time external scan and US$800–1,200 for a Secure Score + baseline M365 review. Managed scanning from ~US$150/month is well-priced.
2. For a mid-market business: a Professional-grade scan (external + internal + authenticated + web-app) runs US$3,500–6,000 one-time; a full CIS Microsoft 365 Benchmark audit runs US$2,500–4,500.
3. For a compliance-driven or multi-site organisation: budget US$8,000–15,000 for a full-scope vulnerability programme mapped to PCI/ISO/等保, and US$6,000–12,000 for an M365 audit-plus-hardening engagement.

Two rules of thumb hold everywhere: a "pen-test" under US$1,500 is a scan, and a Microsoft 365 "audit" that only cites Secure Score is not an audit.

How Brocent prices these services

We built our own pricing to sit in the defensible middle of this market: enterprise methodology — CIS, OWASP, PCI-DSS, ISO 27001, and China MLPS (等保) — delivered by a named engineer, at mid-market prices, with every number published up front.

Our vulnerability scanning sheet runs three tiers from an Essential external scan (from US$1,200 one-time / US$150 per month managed) up to a full compliance programme. See the complete breakdown on the vulnerability scanning pricing page.

Our Microsoft 365 audit sheet spans a fast Secure Score + ScubaGear snapshot (from US$800), a full CIS Microsoft 365 Benchmark audit (US$2,500–4,500), and an audit-plus-hardening tier that lifts your tenant to Secure Score 80+. See the Microsoft 365 security audit pricing page.

Methodology & caveats

This report synthesises public vendor pricing pages, reputable reseller and review sources, and regional cybersecurity-firm published rates, gathered in July 2026 and adversarially cross-checked. Enterprise tools including Qualys, Invicti, Holm Security, Cobalt and CoreView are quote-only; figures for those are third-party estimates. Regional VAPT and 等保 pricing varies significantly by scope, city and province. All prices are time-sensitive — verify current figures before relying on them for procurement.