Buyer's Guide Practical By Samson Tanimawo, PhD Published Apr 17, 2025 4 min read

Buying SOAR

Buyer's guide.

Evaluation criteria

Integration breadth. SOAR depends on connecting to your existing security stack: SIEM, EDR, ticketing, communication tools.

Playbook flexibility. Pre-built playbooks vs custom logic. Most teams need a mix; the platform should support both.

Operational fit. SOC team's existing workflow versus what the platform demands. Big mismatches break adoption.

Splunk Phantom (now part of Splunk SOAR): mature; deep Splunk integration; broad ecosystem.

Palo Alto Cortex XSOAR: enterprise-focused; rich playbook library; expensive but full-featured.

Tines, Torq: newer entrants. Modern UX; YAML-driven workflows; growing rapidly.

Triage automation: alert enrichment, classification, severity assignment. High value; low risk.

Investigation automation: pulling context, running playbooks, surfacing findings. Reduces analyst time.

Response automation: containment actions (isolate host, disable account). High risk; requires careful approval gates.

Start with triage and investigation. Low-risk automations build trust and surface integration issues.

Move to response automation gradually. Each automated response is a deliberate decision; review per automation.

Monthly review of automation outcomes. False-positive rate, missed cases, time savings. Tune accordingly.

Per-action pricing common. High-volume automations can be expensive; tune to avoid runaway costs.

Implementation cost beyond licence. Building useful playbooks takes weeks per integration.

Vendor-managed playbooks vs custom. Some vendors maintain playbook libraries; others provide platform only.