What is SOAR?

SOAR in plain terms

SOAR stands for Security Orchestration, Automation and Response. It's a category of software that helps security teams handle the flood of alerts, threats, and incidents they deal with every day — without needing to do everything manually.

Think of it this way: your SIEM (like Splunk or Elastic) collects logs and fires alerts. Your EDR (like CrowdStrike or SentinelOne) detects threats on endpoints. Your firewall blocks traffic. But who connects all of these together? Who decides what to do when an alert fires at 3 AM?

That's what SOAR does. It sits in the middle, connecting your security tools and automating the response workflows that analysts would otherwise do by hand.

The three parts of SOAR

Orchestration

Orchestration means connecting your security tools so they can work together. Instead of an analyst manually copying an IP address from a SIEM alert, pasting it into VirusTotal, then checking AbuseIPDB, then updating a ticket — orchestration does that automatically.

A SOAR platform integrates with your existing tools (SIEMs, EDR, threat intel platforms, ticketing systems, communication tools) and lets you build workflows that span all of them.

Automation

Automation is the engine that runs those workflows without human intervention. When a phishing alert comes in, automation can:

• Extract URLs and file hashes from the email
• Check them against threat intelligence feeds
• Quarantine the email if it's malicious
• Block the sender domain at the email gateway
• Notify the affected user
• Create an incident ticket

All of this can happen in seconds, compared to the 20-30 minutes it might take an analyst to do manually.

Response

Response is the action taken to contain, remediate, or escalate a threat. SOAR platforms can take automated response actions (like isolating a compromised host) or route decisions to a human analyst when the situation requires judgment.

The best SOAR platforms let you define exactly when automation should act on its own and when it should pause for human approval.

Why security teams need SOAR

The average SOC receives hundreds of alerts a day, from different — sometimes unstandardized — systems. Analysts spend most of their time on repetitive tasks: enriching alerts with context, triaging low-priority noise, and copy-pasting between tools.

This leads to:

• Alert fatigue — analysts start ignoring alerts because there are too many
• Slow response times — critical threats sit in a queue behind hundreds of false positives
• Inconsistent handling — different analysts handle the same alert type differently
• Burnout — repetitive manual work drives experienced analysts out of the field

SOAR addresses all of these by automating the repetitive parts and letting analysts focus on the threats that actually require human expertise.

SOAR vs SIEM vs XDR

SOAR doesn't replace your SIEM or XDR — it works alongside them. Your SIEM detects. Your SOAR responds.

How SOAR playbooks work

A playbook is a defined workflow that runs when certain conditions are met. In traditional SOAR platforms, playbooks are built with drag-and-drop visual editors. In OpenSOAR, playbooks are written in Python — giving you the full power of a programming language instead of a limited visual builder.

from opensoar import playbook, action

@playbook(trigger="alert.created", condition={"severity": "critical"})
async def triage_critical_alert(alert):
    # Enrich with threat intelligence
    vt_result = await lookup_hash(alert.iocs.get("file_hash"))
    abuse_result = await check_ip(alert.source_ip)

    if vt_result.malicious or abuse_result.confidence > 80:
        await isolate_host(alert.host)
        await notify_slack("#critical-alerts", alert)
    else:
        await update_alert(alert, severity="medium")

This is a real OpenSOAR playbook. No YAML. No drag-and-drop. Just Python.

Open-source vs commercial SOAR

Commercial SOAR platforms like Splunk SOAR (formerly Phantom), Palo Alto XSOAR (formerly Demisto), and Swimlane can cost $100,000+ per year. They're powerful but expensive, and they lock you into proprietary playbook formats and vendor ecosystems.

Open-source SOAR platforms like OpenSOAR give you the same core capabilities — alert ingestion, playbook automation, orchestration, case management — without the licensing costs. You own your playbooks, your data, and your deployment.

Getting started

If you're evaluating SOAR for your team, start by identifying your most repetitive alert handling workflows. Phishing triage, IP reputation lookups, and user account lockout responses are common starting points.

OpenSOAR is free, open-source, and takes less than a minute to deploy:

View on GitHub →