Top 9 SOAR Platforms and Vendors

When end users report suspected threats, security teams must analyze them to separate the real ones from false alarms. And end users send an overwhelming number of alerts daily, resulting in alert noise. Security teams have turned to technologies such as security, orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR) to help them manage alert noise. SOAR platforms correlate, classify, and analyze alerts to identify the false alarms and log true threats as tickets.

While SOAR platforms automate many manual processes in a SOC, they do not support advanced automation. Thus, advanced security automation solution alternatives have emerged, which we'll discuss in this article. But first, we'll cover what SOAR is, the top platforms, and how to choose the best vendor.

What Is Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR)?

SOAR is a cybersecurity approach that integrates various security tools and processes in a single platform, allowing you to collect and aggregate data from various sources and automate and orchestrate incident response with minimal or no human intervention. It uses information from security tools such as SIEM and takes action based on standardized procedures and playbooks.

What Is a SOAR Platform?

A SOAR platform is a central command center that collects security threat data and alerts from various security tools. It analyzes the alerts and executes incident response actions based on predefined workflows, runbooks, and playbooks.

SOAR uses a legacy approach, offering automation and orchestration. However, security teams need solutions that can reduce threat detection (MTTD), investigation, and response (MTTR) times. Cybersecurity solutions that combine automation and artificial intelligence have this capability and can replace legacy SOAR.

Key SOAR platform concepts and capabilities include the following:

• Security incident response: Provides workflows and playbooks for incident management, helping you automate threat detection and remediation tasks.
• Threat intelligence management: Enriches incident data and improves response actions through data collection, threat analysis, threat prioritization, real-time threat updates, and automated incident correlation.
• Security orchestration: Helps manage your inventory of security tools and technologies and integrates and coordinates actions across these security tools.
• Automation: Automates tasks so that security teams don’t have to engage in repetitive processes like logging incidents, creating tickets, and alerting the relevant parties.
• Incident response: Helps organize, analyze, and respond to alerts. When a security threat is detected, SOAR playbooks execute automated responses.

Top Nine SOAR Platforms and Vendors

Below are the nine best SOAR platforms with descriptions of how they work, what they're good for, and known weaknesses.

1. Splunk

Splunk SOAR employs playbooks to help you automate IT and security actions. It provides workbooks for case management and custom functions, allowing you to share custom code across playbooks. Splunk’s Visual Playbook Editor provides prebuilt code blocks that allow you to create and edit playbooks without advanced coding knowledge.

It supports a wide range of integrations (over 300 third-party tools, with the app model supporting more than 350 tools) and more than 2,800 automated actions.

Integrating Splunk SOAR with tools outside the Splunk ecosystem can be a challenge.

2. Cyware

Cyware is a low-code security automation platform that enables you to automate security processes without writing complex code. It uses ML and AI to correlate data and initiate proactive threat hunting and faster incident response. It allows you to connect workflows using more than three hundred app integrations.

As a vendor-agnostic SOAR platform, Cyware provides Cyware Orchestrate, which allows you to orchestrate across multiple deployment environments, including hybrid, cloud, and on-premises environments.

3. Microsoft Sentinel

With Microsoft Sentinel, you can create security automation rules directly from the Azure portal while leveraging the powerful integration and orchestration capabilities of Azure Logic Apps. Playbooks are based on automated workflows built in Azure Logic Apps.

Microsoft Sentinel is highly scalable and secure due to its cloud-native architecture and its integration with Azure security services.

Since Microsoft Sentinel relies on Kusto Query Language (KQL), you need to learn KQL to run technical queries.

4. Rapid7’s InsightConnect

InsightConnect provides a no-code workflow builder and prebuilt security workflows, allowing you to automate faster. It provides a library of over three hundred plugins and integrates with solutions like Recorded Future, Office 365, VirusTotal, Gmail, and Palo Alto Wildfire to inspect phishing emails and report malicious files and links.

InsightConnect incorporates human decision points in automation workflows, allowing you to add expert insights when responding to security incidents.

5. Google Security Operations

Google SecOps leverages Google Cloud's infrastructure and machine learning to help you detect, analyze, and respond to security threats faster.

The platform uses AI to help prioritize alerts, contextualize threats, and recommend rapid responses. It integrates Gemini, a gen-AI model providing natural language interaction, allowing you to search data, contextualize data, and iterate on threat hunting.

Its Applied Threat Intelligence feature collects threat intelligence from VirusTotal, Mandiant, and Google Cloud and applies it to events to enrich and contextualize them.

It has extensive API access and easily integrates with many other security tools. However, setting up and learning the technology may require some effort initially.

6. Sumo Logic Cloud SOAR

Cloud SOAR offers a supervised active intelligence feature that recommends relevant playbooks based on the characteristics of incidents. It integrates natively with Sumo Logic solutions and supports integration with more than two hundred third-party security tools. This SOAR platform leverages the Open Integration Framework, allowing you to create integrations with various tools.

Cloud SOAR's multi-tenant engine is designed to support MSSPs and complex corporate environments.

7. IBM Security QRadar

IBM QRadar uses automation to correlate, enrich, and investigate threats as well as prioritize cases. It uses Playbook Designer to orchestrate and automate response processes and provides a dynamic playbook to guide you throughout the incident response processes. The IBM App Exchange allows you to use integrations from IBM, the security community, and third-party vendors.

It provides support for data breach compliance and integrates privacy reporting tasks into incident response playbooks. The platform can be complex, especially during initial setup and configuration, potentially requiring a high level of expertise.

8. KnowBe4 PhishER

PhishER is a lightweight SOAR platform that helps you detect phishing attacks and initiate incident response faster. It analyzes, prioritizes, and manages emails reported to contain malicious files or links.

Its machine learning module, PhishML, analyzes messages and provides relevant information to enable you to prioritize suspicious messages faster and more accurately. PhishML learns from messages tagged by users, improving its decision accuracy over time.

Due to its lightweight architecture, PhishER is easy to deploy. It is not a comprehensive SOAR platform but a specialized platform focused on email-based threats.

9. n8n

n8n is a fair-code security workflow automation platform with built-in AI capabilities. You can use no-code and write JavaScript or Python code to create automations. It offers multiple deployment options—you can run n8n via npm, Docker, or n8n cloud.

It allows you to use LangChain to build AI agent workflows and integrate them with over four hundred apps and services. To use n8n effectively, you need to be familiar with command line tools, Linux, and Docker.

How to Choose a SOAR Platform

Here are some factors to consider when choosing a SOAR platform for your organization.

• Functionality: The platform should allow you to create automated playbooks and workflows based on your security and operational procedures.
• Integration: It should provide integration support for diverse security products by default and allow you to create integrations that it doesn’t support by default.
• User-friendliness: Look for a simple user interface that allows security teams to perform their functions easily and take feedback seriously.
• Pricing: Whether the SOAR vendor changes based on the volume of data, number of playbooks, or number of events per day, the cost should be fair and predictable.

Security Automation as an Alternative To SOAR

Gartner’s Hype Cycle for Security Operations, 2024 says that SOAR cannot fully meet the needs of modern security operations because it has the following problems:

• Attracts high costs
• Requires continuous updates to keep up with new security threats
• Requires advanced coding skills and knowledge of various security tools
• Faces integration issues preventing organizations from achieving full interoperability
• Requires human intervention to deal with complex threats

Generative AI solutions have markedly improved in many of their use cases, especially automation. Not surprisingly, modern platforms are leveraging gen-AI capabilities to drive security automation. Gen-AI solutions might be a perfect replacement for SOAR platforms. They can automate data enrichment, analysis, and processing. Further, they can continuously learn from data, improving the accuracy of incident response.

Wrapping Up.

SOAR platforms combine threat intelligence, workflow automation, incident response, and security orchestration functions into one system. These platforms are capable in many ways, but security teams today are looking for solutions that offer more advanced security automation capabilities that go beyond SOAR.

Blink Ops is your partner to help you take security automation to the next level beyond the capabilities of SOAR. It leverages AI and LLM to improve security automation. Book a demo session with our team to learn how we can help you automate security workflows.

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‍This post was written by Caroline Wanjiru. Caroline is a software developer and a technical writer. In her work, she has developed interests and worked on many machine learning and artificial intelligence projects.