A high-quality red team engagement costs $100,000 to $300,000 or more. It requires specialized expertise, takes weeks to months, and produces findings that—if you’re being honest—often overlap with issues you already suspected.

For Fortune 500 companies facing nation-state threats, this investment makes sense. For everyone else, the calculus is harder.

This isn’t an argument that red teaming is worthless. It’s a guide for organizations that can’t justify the cost but still want to understand how an attacker would approach their environment. You have options.

What Red Teams Actually Do

Before discussing alternatives, let’s clarify what a red team engagement involves:

Reconnaissance: Mapping the organization’s attack surface, gathering intelligence from public sources, identifying potential entry points.

Initial access: Actually breaching the perimeter—phishing employees, exploiting external vulnerabilities, or finding other ways in.

Persistence and lateral movement: Establishing footholds, moving through the network, escalating privileges, avoiding detection.

Objective achievement: Reaching predefined goals—accessing specific data, compromising critical systems, demonstrating business impact.

Detection evasion: Doing all of this while avoiding or testing detection capabilities.

The value isn’t just the list of vulnerabilities. It’s understanding how an attacker chains issues together, tests your defenses in realistic conditions, and exposes gaps between your security assumptions and reality.

Alternative 1: Purple Team Exercises

Purple teaming is collaborative rather than adversarial. Your security team (blue) works with an offensive tester (red) in real-time to test detection and response capabilities.

How it works:

1. Define specific attack techniques to test (based on threat intelligence or framework like MITRE ATT&CK)
2. Offensive tester executes techniques while defenders watch
3. Observe what gets detected, what gets missed, and where
4. Tune detection and response in real-time
5. Re-test to verify improvements

Why it’s valuable:

• Immediate feedback on detection gaps
• Training for defenders who see real attack behavior
• Faster improvement cycle than traditional red team (which reports weeks later)
• Lower cost—focused scope, shorter duration

Estimated cost: $15,000-50,000 for a multi-day purple team exercise.

When to use it: When you have detection capabilities to test but aren’t sure if they work. When your team would benefit from seeing real attack techniques. When you want rapid improvement rather than a one-time assessment.

Alternative 2: Focused Penetration Testing

Traditional penetration testing is less comprehensive than red teaming but still valuable. The difference: pentests are typically scoped to specific systems, with defenders aware testing is occurring, and without the stealth and objective-driven nature of red teams.

How to maximize pentest value on a budget:

Prioritize by risk. Don’t test everything—test your crown jewels. External perimeter, critical applications, systems that would be catastrophic if compromised. A $20,000 pentest of your most critical assets beats a $100,000 comprehensive assessment of everything.

Ask for attack path analysis. Good pentesters don’t just list vulnerabilities—they chain them. Request explicit documentation of how initial access leads to lateral movement leads to objective compromise.

Focus on your differentiated risk. Generic web app pentests find generic web app vulnerabilities. If your risk is specific—unusual architecture, custom protocols, industry-specific threats—brief the pentest team on those specifics.

Estimated cost: $10,000-50,000 for a scoped penetration test.

When to use it: When you need to validate specific systems against real attacks. When compliance requires penetration testing. When you want an external perspective on your most critical assets.

Alternative 3: Breach and Attack Simulation (BAS)

BAS tools automate attack simulation, continuously testing your controls against known techniques.

How they work:

• Agent-based software simulates attacker behavior (phishing, lateral movement, data exfiltration, etc.)
• Tests run against your actual environment
• Results show which simulated attacks were blocked vs. successful
• Mapped to frameworks like MITRE ATT&CK for coverage analysis

Why they’re valuable:

• Continuous testing, not point-in-time
• Consistent methodology across tests
• Trend data on defensive improvement
• Lower cost per test (though licensing isn’t cheap)

Limitations:

• Only tests known techniques with predefined signatures
• Doesn’t find novel vulnerabilities
• Doesn’t replicate human creativity and adaptation
• The simulation isn’t the same as a real attack—some things only break when done “for real”

Estimated cost: $30,000-100,000+ annually for enterprise BAS platforms.

When to use it: When you have detection infrastructure to continuously validate. When you want to measure improvement over time. When you have the maturity to act on findings.

Alternative 4: Assumed Breach Assessment

Skip the initial access question entirely. Give a tester internal access as if they’d already compromised an employee workstation, and focus assessment on:

• What can they reach from that position?
• How far can they move laterally?
• How quickly are they detected?
• What’s the path to your critical assets?

Why this works:

• Initial access is increasingly a matter of “when” not “if”
• Focuses resources on post-compromise detection and containment
• Faster and cheaper than full red team (no time spent on reconnaissance and initial access)
• Answers the question “if someone gets in, how bad is it?”

Estimated cost: $20,000-50,000 depending on scope and duration.

When to use it: When you’re confident in perimeter security but worried about lateral movement. When you want to test internal segmentation and detection. When you’ve already done external pentests and want to go deeper.

Alternative 5: DIY Atomic Testing

For organizations with some internal security expertise, you can conduct basic adversary simulation yourself.

Resources available:

• Atomic Red Team: Open-source library of test scenarios mapped to MITRE ATT&CK. Execute specific techniques and check if detection fires.
• Caldera: Open-source adversary emulation platform from MITRE. Runs automated attack scenarios.
• MITRE ATT&CK Navigator: Map your coverage, identify gaps, prioritize testing.

How to approach it:

1. Pick 5-10 high-priority techniques based on your threat model
2. Run atomic tests for each technique in a controlled environment
3. Verify whether detection triggered
4. Tune detection, re-test
5. Document coverage and gaps

Why this works:

• Free (beyond your team’s time)
• Builds internal capability
• Continuous improvement rather than point-in-time assessment

Limitations:

• Requires internal expertise
• Only tests what you think to test
• No external perspective

Estimated cost: Internal time only.

When to use it: When you have security team members with offensive skills. When you want ongoing testing between formal assessments. When budget is extremely constrained.

Alternative 6: Tabletop Exercises

Not all security testing requires actual exploitation. Tabletop exercises walk through attack scenarios hypothetically, revealing gaps in people and process without touching technology.

How they work:

1. Scenario presented: “An attacker has phished a credential and logged in from an unusual location at 2 AM”
2. Participants discuss: What alerts fire? Who gets notified? What’s the response?
3. Facilitator introduces complications: “Now they’ve moved to a server. You’re still investigating the first alert.”
4. Continue until scenario concludes
5. Debrief on what worked, what didn’t, what needs improvement

Why they’re valuable:

• Tests people and process, not just technology
• Reveals assumptions about response that may not hold
• Builds team readiness for real incidents
• Very low cost

Limitations:

• Doesn’t test whether technical controls actually work
• Participants may overestimate their capabilities
• Requires good scenario design and facilitation

Estimated cost: Can be done internally for free; professional facilitation $5,000-15,000.

When to use it: When you want to test incident response readiness. When you’re training new team members. When budget allows nothing else.

When You Actually Need a Red Team

These alternatives don’t fully replace red teaming. Some situations genuinely require the full engagement:

Advanced threat actors in your threat model. If nation-states or sophisticated criminal groups target your industry, testing against basic attack techniques isn’t sufficient. You need testers who replicate advanced adversary behavior.

High-value targets with complex defenses. If you’ve invested heavily in security and want to validate that investment, a red team that finds creative paths around your controls is valuable.

Board or regulatory expectation. Some boards and regulators expect red team assessments for critical organizations. Explaining that you did purple team instead may not fly.

Security program maturity validation. If you’ve built a security program over years and want a comprehensive evaluation, red team provides that.

Merger, acquisition, or major transformation. Major changes create opportunities for attackers. A red team assessment of the combined/new environment validates security posture.

Building Your Testing Program

For most organizations, the right approach combines multiple alternatives:

Annual cycle:

• Quarterly purple team exercises focused on detection improvement
• Annual penetration test of critical external assets
• Continuous BAS running in background
• Tabletop exercises after incidents or major changes

Biennial red team:

• If budget allows, a full red team engagement every 2-3 years
• Validates that the incremental improvements from other testing are working
• Provides comprehensive assessment by external experts

Continuous DIY testing:

• Internal atomic testing between formal engagements
• Response validation after detection improvements
• Ongoing coverage mapping and gap analysis

This approach costs a fraction of annual red team engagements while providing broader coverage and faster improvement cycles.

The Honest Trade-off

Alternatives to red teaming aren’t as comprehensive. They won’t find everything a skilled red team would find. They won’t replicate the full adversary experience.

But “perfect security testing” isn’t the goal—”good enough security testing given constraints” is. Most organizations get more value from regular purple teams and targeted pentests than from occasional expensive red teams that produce reports nobody acts on.

Match your testing to your maturity. As you improve, your testing should evolve. The goal is continuous improvement, not checking a box.