The Best MDR for Small Business UK
The best MDR for a small UK business is Precursor Security, from £900 per month with no minimum seat count and full incident response included. Six other providers are relevant to a UK SMB buyer: Huntress and Blackpoint Cyber (US platforms sold through your MSP, not direct), Sophos MDR (UK-headquartered, Thoma Bravo-owned, tiered incident response), e2e-assure (UK-run SOC, IR scope varies by tier), and Arctic Wolf and Secureworks (built and priced for mid-market and up). This guide compares all seven on the criteria that differ from enterprise buying.
A small business cannot staff a 24/7 SOC, and cyber insurers and client contracts increasingly expect one anyway. Seven MDR providers compared on what actually differs for a business of 10 to 250 staff: entry price you can budget, no enterprise minimums, incident response included rather than a retainer you will never buy, and humans on nights and weekends.
We are Precursor Security, and we have ranked ourselves first on this list.
We publish the selection criteria in full and describe every provider fairly, marking how each one actually reaches a small business, direct or through an MSP or channel partner, so you can weigh it yourself. Two of the platforms below (Huntress, Blackpoint Cyber) do not sell direct to a business at all; we say so plainly rather than implying otherwise. The firms here are genuinely good at what they do; the differences for a 10 to 250 staff buyer are in entry price, minimums, and whether incident response is included. Confirm any CREST claim in the independent CREST member directory.
Seven providers, sized for an SMB budget
| Provider | HQ / ownership | SOC region | Pricing published | From |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Precursor Security | UK (Newcastle) | UK, physical | Published | From £900/mo |
| 2. Huntress | US (Ellicott City, Maryland) | US, MSP-delivered | Partial | ~$3-9/endpoint/mo (via MSP) |
| 3. Sophos MDR | UK (Abingdon), owned by Thoma Bravo (US) | Global, channel-delivered | No | On application |
| 4. Blackpoint Cyber | US (Ellicott City, Maryland) | US, MSP-channel only | No | Via MSP only |
| 5. e2e-assure | UK | UK, 100% UK-operated | Partial | From ~£6/user/mo (G-Cloud listed) |
| 6. Arctic Wolf | US (Eden Prairie, Minnesota) | US / UK | No | On application (~$80k-$200k+/yr) |
| 7. Secureworks | US (Atlanta), owned by Sophos | US / global | No | On application |
Verified against each provider's public website and public corporate records, September 2026. "Partial" means indicative or partner-channel pricing exists publicly but no direct SMB rate card was published at the time of writing. Ownership reflects public records: Sophos is owned by Thoma Bravo; Secureworks is owned by Sophos.
The 7 best MDR options
for a UK small business in 2026
1. Precursor Security
Direct servicePrecursor runs a physical, CREST-accredited SOC in Newcastle with UK-based, DBS-checked analysts and no offshoring. MDR and managed SOC both start from £900 per month, published on the website and genuinely sized for a small organisation, with fixed monthly pricing after a free scoping call, no enterprise minimum seat count, and most businesses fully operational in 2 to 3 weeks. Critical alerts get human analyst investigation within 10 minutes, 24/7/365, and a named L3 incident response lead is paged for any Critical or High severity alert. Full incident response is included with no separate retainer an SMB would otherwise never buy, and monitoring is vendor-agnostic, so it works with what you already run, including Microsoft Defender, rather than requiring you to rip and replace it.
Trade-off: A UK mid-market specialist rather than a global brand name, with a smaller analyst pool than the largest providers on this list, though sized appropriately for a business that does not want to be one of thousands of accounts on someone else’s platform.
2. Huntress
Platform, via MSPHuntress is a US-headquartered security platform, not a direct-to-business managed service: it is sold almost entirely through MSPs and IT partners, so a small business buying Huntress is really buying it through its existing IT provider, who sets the price, the billing, and the escalation path. The platform combines a lightweight EDR agent, Microsoft 365 identity monitoring, and a 24/7 SOC that investigates alerts, which is genuinely useful for a small footprint. Third-party pricing trackers put per-endpoint rates at roughly $3 to $9 a month depending on module and reseller, but Huntress does not publish a direct UK rate card, and how much of "incident response" you actually receive depends on what your MSP has configured.
Trade-off: Works well if you already trust an MSP to own the relationship. If you want to buy monitoring directly from the company doing the analysis, or you do not have an MSP, Huntress is not built to sell to you that way.
3. Sophos MDR
Service, via channelSophos itself is headquartered in Abingdon, UK, though it has been owned by the US private equity firm Thoma Bravo since 2020, which took it private off the London Stock Exchange. Sophos MDR is sold in two tiers, Essentials and Complete, typically through Sophos’s reseller and MSP channel rather than direct, with per-user or per-endpoint pricing that Sophos does not publish on its own site; third-party channel pricing trackers estimate roughly $7 to $17 per endpoint per month, but treat that as indicative, not a quote. The tier matters more than the headline name: full incident response with a defined SLA is a feature of the higher Complete tier, not the entry Essentials tier.
Trade-off: Comparing on price alone is a trap here: Essentials and Complete cover meaningfully different levels of incident response, so confirm which tier a quote refers to before comparing it to anything else on this list.
4. Blackpoint Cyber
Platform, MSP-onlyBlackpoint Cyber is a US-headquartered platform built purpose-for the MSP channel: it does not sell direct to a business at all, only white-labelled through your MSP, who sets the price and terms. It reports a 24/7 SOC with a stated 15-minute response commitment and includes incident response in the base service under most partner agreements, which is a genuinely SMB-friendly structure where it applies. Tiered volume pricing applies from 50 endpoints with a minimum one-year term at that scale, though its smaller Essentials tiers are marketed month-to-month with no annual commitment.
Trade-off: As channel-only, you have no direct relationship with Blackpoint: your MSP is the contract, the invoice, and the escalation point, so the MSP’s competence matters as much as Blackpoint’s does.
5. e2e-assure
Direct servicee2e-assure is a UK-headquartered managed SOC and MDR provider running its own detection platform, and it states its SOC is 100% UK-operated with UK-based, security-cleared analysts, which matters if you want your telemetry to stay onshore. Its public-sector G-Cloud pricing lists a wide range depending on service and device count, and it also offers a Microsoft Defender for Business-based package reported at roughly £6 per user per month, subject to a minimum spend, so the entry point can suit a smaller organisation. Whether full incident response is included, or scoped as a separate package, varies by the commercial tier, so confirm that in writing before you sign.
Trade-off: Packaging is more configurable than a simple buy-online SMB product, closer to a scoped commercial engagement, so budgeting needs a conversation rather than a self-serve quote.
6. Arctic Wolf
Service, direct + partnerArctic Wolf is a privately held, US-headquartered provider (Eden Prairie, Minnesota) that pairs a security operations platform with a named-team "Concierge" model, and states it serves organisations from small (51 to 200 employees) through enterprise. In practice, third-party reviews put typical deployments at $80,000 to $200,000 or more a year on annual contracts, well above what most sub-100-employee businesses on this list are budgeting monthly. For a business at the very top of the SMB range, or already spending mid-market money, it is a credible large-scale option; for a 15-person firm shopping on a monthly budget, it is likely oversized.
Trade-off: Built and priced for mid-market and up. The entry cost and annual contract structure put it out of reach for most businesses under about 150 staff.
7. Secureworks
Service, via SophosSecureworks is a long-established, Atlanta-headquartered provider built around its Taegis platform, majority-owned by Dell for over a decade before Sophos completed its acquisition in February 2025 for roughly $859 million. It is a serious, mature platform, but its pricing structure and enterprise-oriented sales process are built around larger organisations, and it does not market an SMB-specific entry tier. Its relevance here is mostly as context: two providers on this list, Sophos and Secureworks, are now the same company, following one of the larger consolidations in this market.
Trade-off: Not built or priced for a 10 to 250 staff business. Included for completeness because it is commonly shortlisted, and because its 2025 absorption into Sophos is directly relevant if you are also evaluating Sophos MDR above.
How this differs from an enterprise MDR comparison
A 250-seat business buys differently to a 5,000-seat one. Six criteria, weighted for what actually changes the answer at SMB scale.
Published pricing from hundreds, not thousands, a month, so you can put a number in a spreadsheet before a sales cycle. Most providers on this list quote on application.
A small business will never sign a separate incident response retainer it does not use day to day. If containment activates a second contract mid-incident, the cost lands at the worst possible moment.
Vendor-agnostic monitoring that sits on top of Microsoft Business Premium, Defender, and your existing tooling, rather than requiring you to rip and replace an EDR you cannot afford to swap out.
A genuine entry tier scoped for 50 to 100 endpoints, not a package that technically exists but is priced and structured for a 1,000-seat buyer.
Monthly reporting and monitoring evidence you can hand to an insurer or a client’s procurement team at renewal, without commissioning a separate audit.
A committed time for a human analyst, not an automated rule, to investigate a critical alert outside office hours, which is when an opportunistic attack against a small business actually lands.
Red flags for a small business
choosing MDR
Whichever provider you choose, including us, walk away if you see these.
Enterprise minimums dressed as an SMB package
A 50 or 100-seat "starter" minimum that still prices out most sub-100-employee businesses. Ask for the actual entry tier and endpoint count, not the marketing name of the package.
A portal with no humans behind it
A dashboard that emails you alerts is monitoring, not detection and response. Ask what a human analyst actually does when a critical alert fires, and how fast, at 2am on a Saturday.
Incident response sold as a paid extra
A small business will not buy a separate IR retainer it may never use. If containment activates a second contract mid-incident, confirm in writing what that costs before you sign anything.
Rip-and-replace tooling you cannot manage
If onboarding requires swapping your existing EDR or email security for the provider’s own product, a small IT team may not have the capacity to run the migration. Vendor-agnostic monitoring avoids this.
Per-seat teaser pricing with mandatory add-ons
A low headline per-endpoint rate that becomes unaffordable once threat hunting, reporting, or incident response are added as compulsory extras. Ask for the fully-loaded monthly price, not the teaser.
Multi-year lock-in
A small business’s needs, headcount, and tooling change faster than an enterprise’s. A multi-year contract with no reasonable exit removes the flexibility a growing SMB actually needs.
MDR pricing for a UK small business in 2026
Most providers on this list price on application or through a channel partner. Precursor publishes an entry price of £900 per month, scoped for 50 to 100 endpoints, with full incident response included and fixed monthly pricing after a free scoping call.
Full SOC cost guide with worked examplesResearching MDR for a small business? These guides go deeper on the service, pricing, insurance, and compliance angles referenced above.
See what MDR built for your size actually looks like.
A UK-based SOC in Newcastle. Published pricing from £900 a month, no enterprise minimums, and full incident response included. Operational in 2 to 3 weeks.
MDR for a small business
The questions small business buyers ask most when comparing UK providers.
Precursor publishes an entry price of £900 per month for a small UK business (50 to 100 endpoints), scaling with the number of endpoints and users as you grow, with fixed monthly pricing after a free scoping call. Elsewhere, US MSP-channel providers such as Huntress and Blackpoint Cyber price per endpoint, typically $3 to $18 a month depending on the source and MSP markup, while Sophos MDR, e2e-assure, Arctic Wolf, and Secureworks are largely quote-based. Ask for pricing in writing before you commit, and confirm whether incident response is included or billed separately.
Increasingly, yes. Cyber insurers are tightening underwriting requirements and asking for evidence of continuous monitoring at renewal, and larger clients are pushing security requirements down their supply chain into contracts with smaller suppliers. A 10 to 250 staff business rarely has the headcount to staff a rota covering nights and weekends itself, which is exactly when opportunistic attacks land, so an outsourced 24/7 service closes a gap most small businesses cannot close by hiring.
Yes. Antivirus and Defender are detection tools: they generate alerts based on signatures and behaviour rules, but nobody is watching those alerts at 2am unless you have paid someone to. MDR wraps a 24/7 human analyst team around that tooling, including Defender, which most MDR providers can monitor rather than replace, to investigate each alert, distinguish real threats from noise, and contain confirmed incidents. A small business running Defender alone has the sensor but not the analyst watching it.
This is the single biggest gap between providers on this list. Precursor includes full incident response in its monthly fee with no separate retainer, and a named L3 lead is paged for any Critical or High severity alert. Some providers here include IR in their entry tier, some only in a higher tier, such as Sophos MDR’s Complete tier, and some leave IR scope to be agreed contractually, such as e2e-assure. Confirm whether IR is included in writing before you need it, because the moment of an active incident is the worst time to discover it costs extra.
This guide compares seven providers relevant to a UK small business: Precursor Security, Huntress, Sophos MDR, Blackpoint Cyber, e2e-assure, Arctic Wolf, and Secureworks. The right choice depends on whether you want a direct relationship with the provider doing the analysis or a service delivered through your existing MSP, whether the entry price fits a monthly SMB budget rather than an enterprise contract, and whether incident response is included.