Why this case is common
SOAR products arrived when security teams had enough engineers to write and maintain playbooks. Many small teams never reached that point. They triage in the SIEM or EDR console, investigate by hand and act by hand. For them, an AI SOC is not a SOAR replacement; it is the first automation they have.
What changes in the evaluation
Three things change when there is no SOAR to keep or replace: native response becomes a must-have, playbook migration stops mattering, and approval design becomes your job.
Native response becomes a must-have
Without a SOAR, a platform that only investigates leaves every action to your team. That still saves investigation time, but the actions remain manual. Most platforms here run response themselves:
- Mate Security runs response at three levels: Recommend only, Supervised and Auto-run.
- Prophet Security runs scoped Agent Actions, autonomously or with your sign-off.
- 7AI runs actions such as revoking a session or isolating a host against your existing tools, behind approval gates.
- Conifers added remediation within set limits in May 2026.
- Torq runs response through its own Hyperautomation workflows.
- Intezer executes remediation plans automatically or manually.
- Exaforce runs response through Exabots behind approval gates, with Slack confirmations.
- Artemis Security runs 300+ response actions, alone only where you have pre-authorised them.
Dropzone AI is one exception: it hands response to a connected SOAR such as Cortex XSOAR, Splunk SOAR or Tines. For a team without one, Dropzone's verdicts would be acted on by hand, or a SOAR would have to be bought alongside. Vega is a second exception: it recommends prioritised next actions for analysts to carry out and does not state that it executes response.
Playbook migration stops mattering
Our hand-off score gives 10% to bringing SOAR playbooks along. With nothing to bring, that weight should be zero. The scoring page shows a sensitivity row for exactly this case, and the top of the ranking does not change; the calculator lets you set it yourself.
Approval design becomes your job
Teams with a SOAR already decided, playbook by playbook, which steps need approval. Without one, you make those decisions for the first time inside the AI SOC. Start with every action on sign-off, move reversible, low-impact actions to unattended first, and keep account suspensions and network blocks on sign-off longest.
What to check first
These five questions are worth asking in the first call, before any demo, because the answers decide whether a platform can work for a team without a SOAR at all.
- Which response actions does the platform support natively for your tools: identity, endpoint, mail, cloud?
- Can each action be set separately to recommend, sign-off or unattended?
- How does the platform record who approved what, and when?
- What happens when an action fails halfway?
- Can actions be tested safely, for example against a test account, before you rely on them?
A sensible first month
Week one: connect sources and confirm each can be queried. Weeks two and three: shadow mode on your three busiest alert types, recording agreement. Week four: move one reversible action in one category to sign-off-only execution, so the platform prepares the action and a person approves it with one click. That alone removes much of the manual work without granting any unattended autonomy.
How to use this site
Open the analyst hours calculator, set Brings SOAR playbooks along to zero, and tick the must-have for response actions with sign-off. The ranking that remains is the one that fits a team without a SOAR. Then use the side-by-side page to compare the top three on their autonomy rungs.
Should you buy a SOAR first?
Probably not, if your goal is to reduce investigation time. A SOAR automates what you already know how to do; it needs playbooks written and maintained by someone. A lean team without that capacity gets more from a platform that investigates and proposes actions it can approve. If you later find a set of fixed, audited responses that must always run the same way, both Torq's deterministic workflows and Mate's Gamebooks describe a place for them inside the AI SOC, and Dropzone AI remains an option if you do add a SOAR.