Choosing an approach
Three ways to automate a SOC. One honest comparison.
Playbook SOAR, AI SOC analyst tools, and agentic SOAR solve different slices of the same pain. Here is where each wins and where each breaks, including ours.
Playbook SOAR
AI SOC analyst tools
Agentic SOAR
Core idea
Humans encode procedure as flowcharts; the platform executes them.
An AI investigates and summarizes alerts; humans act on the conclusions.
Agents investigate and respond; humans set the gates and approve the consequential moves.
The thinking
Stays with your analysts. Branches only cover what someone predicted.
Automated for triage. Stops at the verdict.
Automated end to end, with the reasoning shown and the evidence cited.
The acting
Automated, but rigid. Most teams disable the risky half.
Yours. The alert is summarized; the queue is still your queue.
Automated within limits you set. Reversible by preference, gated by design.
Maintenance
The permanent backlog: every tool change breaks a flow someone has to fix.
Light. Tuning prompts and integrations.
Light. Plain-language instructions instead of diagrams; agents adapt to tool drift.
Auditability
Execution logs: what fired, not why.
Varies. Summaries often without the full reasoning trail.
The receipt: every step, tool call, confidence, and approver on one replayable trail.
Where it wins
Stable, high-volume, fully predictable procedures you never want improvised.
Fast relief for triage overload without touching response.
The full loop: triage relief and the response labor, with control intact.
Honest risk
You become a playbook shop. The backlog is forever.
Labor moves from reading alerts to reading summaries.
Newer category. Demand receipts and start gated; distrust anyone who says otherwise.
Naming names
Weighing us against one specific agentic SOAR vendor?
These approach-level tradeoffs hold generally. For a head to head against a named platform, sourced from that vendor's own materials, see the companion pages below.
Settle it with evidence
Watch the difference on a real case.
Three minutes, ungated. Then bring your own alerts and compare for real.