What is SOAR and which platforms lead in 2026?
Quick Answer: SOAR (Security Orchestration, Automation and Response) is a category of platforms that connect security tools and automate analyst workflows like triage, enrichment, and containment. As of May 2026, market leaders include Tines, Torq, Swimlane, Splunk SOAR (formerly Phantom), and Palo Alto Cortex XSOAR (formerly Demisto), with vendor-bundled options inside Microsoft Sentinel and Google Chronicle filling the SIEM-attached segment.
What SOAR Is
SOAR stands for Security Orchestration, Automation and Response. The acronym was coined by Gartner in 2017 to describe platforms that combined three previously separate categories: orchestration (multi-tool API calls), automation (playbooks for repetitive analyst tasks), and response (case and incident management).
A SOAR platform connects to SIEM, EDR, threat intelligence feeds, ticketing, identity providers, and cloud APIs, and runs playbooks that triage alerts, enrich them with context, decide on a response, and write back to the case management system.
Why Organisations Adopt SOAR
Three drivers dominate adoption:
- Analyst capacity: a tier-1 analyst spends most of their day on repetitive enrichment that can be automated
- Mean time to respond: SOAR playbooks can execute containment actions in seconds rather than minutes
- Standardisation: every incident follows the same playbook, reducing error and supporting audit
Market Leaders (May 2026)
The current category leaders cluster into three groups:
- Modern, low-code-first SaaS: Tines, Torq
- Enterprise, integration-deep, dual SaaS/on-prem: Swimlane, Palo Alto Cortex XSOAR, Splunk SOAR
- SIEM-attached: Microsoft Sentinel + Logic Apps, Google Chronicle SOAR (formerly Siemplify)
Choosing Between Them
Selection typically comes down to:
- SecOps maturity (early-stage SOCs over-buy and end up with shelfware)
- Integration depth on the tools already in the stack
- Case management style (built-in vs lightweight vs BYO ticketing)
- Pricing model (per-execution, per-analyst, bundled with SIEM)
- Deployment requirements (FedRAMP, sovereign cloud, on-prem)
Mid-market SOCs with cloud-friendly stacks typically shortlist Tines and Torq. Large enterprises with multi-vendor environments shortlist XSOAR, Swimlane, and Splunk SOAR.
Pricing Visibility
SOAR pricing in 2026 remains opaque relative to most SaaS categories. Vendors usually require a discovery call before publishing list pricing. As a baseline, mid-market SOAR contracts in 2026 typically fall in the $50,000-$250,000 ARR range; large-enterprise contracts run to seven figures depending on integration count and analyst seats.
Related Questions
Related Tools
Tines
No-code security automation and SOAR platform
Workflow AutomationTorq
No-code SOAR and security hyperautomation platform for SOC, MDR, and security engineering teams.
Workflow AutomationSwimlane
Low-code security automation platform for SOC, MDR, and regulated-industry security operations.
Workflow AutomationActivepieces
No-code workflow automation with self-hosting and AI-powered features
Workflow AutomationRelated Rankings
Best Human-in-the-Loop Automation Platforms 2026
Eight platforms are ranked here on a single mechanism: how a person enters an automated path, and what the system can prove afterward about the decision they made. Moxo scores 7.7 and ranks first; Camunda 8 scores 7.2, Microsoft Power Automate 7.1, Pega 6.9, n8n 6.7, Zapier 5.9, Kissflow 5.8 and ServiceNow 4.8, scored 22 September 2026 on the five weighted criteria. Those criteria cover the step type, the approver's account or licence, the routes available on a rejection, the audit record, and the meter that charges for the decision, and none of them can tell a review from a rubber stamp, so the methodology adds a check readers can run on any product in a few minutes: whether the decision record tells a considered approval from an instant one. Every figure was read from a vendor-owned surface and carries its own date.
Best Automation Platforms for AI Orchestration 2026
This ranking answers one question: how many real business applications can an AI agent act on out of the box? It evaluates nine platforms as of August 2026 on the reach they give an agent, not on the workflow logic they can express. That boundary is deliberate, because two neighbouring pages on this site answer different questions. Best Process Orchestration Platforms 2026 scores multi-step process control, error handling and state management. Best AI Agent Platforms 2026 scores building and hosting the agent itself. This page scores the layer between them: the connective tissue that lets an agent already built elsewhere reach the applications a business actually runs on. A platform that leads one of those pages can place low here, and two of them do. Scores derive from application and action catalogue counts, the exposure model each platform uses to publish those catalogues to an agent, setup effort, failure handling and cost per agent action. Every figure was retrieved from a vendor-owned surface on 11 August 2026 unless an earlier date is stated against it.
Dive Deeper
Moxo vs Lindy in 2026: Who Presses Approve When the Agent Asks
Lindy, founded in 2023, sells an AI teammate that lives in Slack and in each person's inbox; Moxo, whose predecessor Moxtra was co-founded in 2012, runs multi-party processes where approvals are steps only a person can close. Moxo wins three rounds to two: who closes the step, work across companies and the record. Lindy wins reach and testing. Vendor pages and docs read 28 September 2026.
Moxo vs Kissflow in 2026: What an Outside Approver Costs, and What the Record Proves
Moxo and Kissflow both sell approvals to people who do not write code, and each wins one round outright: Moxo's Web and Headless SDKs run the approval inside the buyer's own product, under the buyer's own sign-in. Kissflow's portal audit log stamps every event with an actor, a device and an IP, where Moxo publishes no field list. Both answers are quoted, not priced, and both meters punish a one-step request sent to hundreds of clients. Cost, the decision record, rejection routes, AI metering and governance, verified 14 to 23 September 2026.
Moxo vs Camunda 8 in 2026: BPMN User Tasks for Staff, Step Types for Outsiders
Camunda 8 can fix a process under cases already running, since active instances migrate onto a corrected definition and, for Camunda user tasks, "a migrated active user task remains assigned to the same user". Moxo keeps the shared queue that Camunda's Tasklist V2 stops evaluating, with desks that are "a shared inbox that multiple users can pick work from". Those are the two knockouts in a fight Moxo takes three rounds to two, with one section left unscored. Portability, AI review gates and a published price decide the rest, verified 14 to 23 September 2026.