Cyber Essentials on a budget: the tools that actually get you certified
Cyber Essentials is the UK's baseline security certification — increasingly demanded by insurers, clients and public-sector tenders. The good news: you don't need a five-figure platform to get there.
What Cyber Essentials actually asks for
Five technical controls: firewalls, secure configuration, user access control, malware protection, and patch/update management. Most small businesses already do most of this — the hard part is proving it and finding the gaps before an assessor does.
Where the expensive platforms overshoot
Enterprise vulnerability-management suites (Qualys, Tenable) can absolutely support certification — but they're priced and built for organisations far larger than a typical CE applicant. For a 5–50 person business, that's a lot of tool for a baseline goal.
How Solvbeat fits
- The external scan flags misconfigured headers, weak TLS, exposed services — the "secure configuration" gaps.
- The server agent reports patch state and access settings from inside — the "patch management" and "access control" evidence.
- Findings come in plain English with fixes, and our Cyber Essentials consulting can walk you through the self-assessment. We hold ISO 27001 and Cyber Essentials ourselves.
The budget path to certified
Start with a free scan to see your gaps, close them (yourself, or let us fix them remotely), and use the evidence for your self-assessment — from £38/mo, not thousands.
See your Cyber Essentials gaps free — run a free scan → · see the full comparison table →
Pricing and capabilities are taken from each vendor's publicly available information as of September 2026 and can change — always check the vendor's own site for the latest. This comparison reflects our reading of what each product is documented to do, written to help you choose, not to disparage anyone. Intruder™, Detectify™, Aikido™, UpGuard™, Qualys™, Tenable™ and Snyk™ are trademarks of their respective owners.