Short answer: A red team acts like a real-world cyber attacker, launching targeted intrusion attempts against your systems, employees, and processes; a blue team's job is to detect and block those attacks while continuously strengthening your defensive infrastructure. Buying a red team exercise when you don't already have baseline defensive monitoring, centralized log management and incident response workflows in place is an absolute waste of budget.
To understand the practical difference look at what each role is designed to achieve. While a standard pen test reports known vulnerabilities in your software, a red team tests your organization's actual defensive reflexes; they'll send phishing emails try social engineering, and quietly pivot through your network trying to reach client databases. A blue team on the other hand operates within a Security Operations Center (SOC) monitoring firewall alerts, server logs and abnormal user activity 24/7 to stop intrusions on the spot.
As a 35-person software company weighing quotes in the 75,000 to 180,000 AED range, your priority should definitely be blue team capabilities. If you don't have a blue team, the red team will run wild inside your network, grab your data and hand you a report; but because your defense side is flying blind, you won't learn at what stage or how that attack could have been caught.
First set up centralized log collection, endpoint protection, and basic alert monitoring. Do a standard pen test once or twice a year to patch vulnerabilities. Once your defensive operations reach a solid level of maturity then allocate budget for red team services to see if those defenses actually hold up.