Originally published November 2024. Substantially revised July 2026, because the answer changed.
Yes and no, and the distinction is the whole point.
The SOAR authoring model is obsolete. Pre-writing a static playbook for every incident you can imagine, then maintaining that library forever against changing tools and changing APIs, lost to systems that reason over live evidence at runtime. Nobody is buying that model in 2026.
The SOAR execution layer is not obsolete and never will be. Something still has to isolate the host, revoke the session, and block the domain, with an audit trail, a rollback path, and an approval gate. Reasoning without execution is a very articulate ticket.
When we first published this article in November 2024, we argued the answer was better SOAR. We were half right. The half we got right is that the execution layer survives, and any replacement that skips it leaves you running two systems. The half we got wrong is that a better authoring experience was the fix. It was not. The authoring model itself was the problem.
What Actually Died: the Authoring Model
SOAR made a trade. In exchange for automated response, it asked humans to predict every incident shape in advance and encode each one as a playbook. Then maintain that library forever.
The trade stopped paying. Playbook libraries plateaued at a few dozen covered scenarios while alert types kept multiplying. Automation engineers spent their weeks maintaining what already existed, and coverage stopped growing. And every time an integrated vendor shipped an API change, coverage degraded silently, which teams discovered mid-incident.
None of that is a failure of any one vendor. It is arithmetic. A model where coverage equals what your team hand-authors cannot keep pace with a threat landscape that does not consult your backlog.
So when someone says “SOAR is dead,” this is the part they are right about. Be precise, because the imprecise version of this idea leads to bad purchases.
What Survived, and Why It Is Not Optional
Here is the part the “SOAR is dead” crowd tends to skip.
Every credible replacement still has to act. It needs governed, audited, reversible execution: the ability to take a real action against a real system, record why, and undo it if the call was wrong. Legacy SOAR, for all its faults, did this well. It was the authoring burden that broke, not the orchestration engine underneath.
The commercial consequence is the one that bites. A reasoning layer that investigates brilliantly and then hands you a recommendation has replaced your triage queue. It has not replaced SOAR. You will keep paying for SOAR underneath it, and you will own the integration between them.
That is the most common purchasing mistake in this market right now, and it is entirely avoidable. The five-question test below catches it in about ten minutes.
Gartner Said “Obsolete Before Plateau.” Here Is What Actually Happened.
In its 2024 Hype Cycle for Security Operations, Gartner moved SOAR’s benefit rating from high to moderate and marked it obsolete before plateau, with essentially unchanged supporting text from the prior year. At the time we argued the critiques described a particular kind of SOAR, not the category.
Two years of market events have now settled the question more clearly than any analyst note could.
| Platform | What happened |
|---|---|
| Palo Alto Cortex XSOAR | Cortex AgentiX named its next-generation successor on 28 October 2025, delivered inside Cortex XSIAM/XDR. XSOAR professional-services SKUs reached end-of-sale 1 February 2026. |
| Google Siemplify | Absorbed into Google SecOps as its SOAR layer. The standalone product no longer exists to renew. |
| IBM QRadar SOAR | IBM sold the QRadar SaaS assets to Palo Alto in 2024, with migration paths pointing at Cortex. |
| Splunk SOAR | Inside Cisco’s post-acquisition portfolio consolidation. Agentic capabilities arriving incrementally, several still pre-GA. |
| Swimlane | Repositioned from classic SOAR to low-code hyperautomation with a layered AI tier. |
| FortiSOAR | Continues inside the Fortinet Security Fabric. Stable for Fortinet estates, rarely shortlisted outside them. |
Read the column. Standalone SOAR is over as a product category. It is being absorbed into platform ecosystems, repositioned as workflow automation, or formally succeeded.
What did not happen is the thing the obituaries predicted. The orchestration and response function did not disappear. It got absorbed into something larger, which is a very different outcome from being obsolete. Your organization still needs it. You will just buy it inside a different kind of product.
The 2024 debate about whether hyperautomation was a genuinely new category or SOAR wearing a new label has resolved itself the same way. Gartner classified those vendors as representative SOAR vendors, and in 2026 most of them describe themselves as agentic. The label moved twice. The underlying question, who decides what happens next, is the one that separates products.
XDR Is Still Not a SOAR Replacement
This prediction has now failed twice, so it is worth restating briefly.
XDR settled into the market alongside SOAR, not in place of it. It is closer to a SIEM alternative than a SOAR alternative, and most large organizations run both: XDR for detection and predictive insight, an orchestration layer for triage and response.
The gap is specific. XDR platforms detect well within their telemetry and stop short of cross-stack triage, risk reduction, and governed response across tools they do not own. Nothing since 2024 has closed that gap.
How to Evaluate a SOAR Replacement
Most evaluation guides in this market compare feature grids. Feature grids do not predict which platform will fail you in production. Five questions do.
Run these against any product positioned as a SOAR replacement:
- Act. Can it execute response actions, meaning isolate, revoke, block, and reset, directly through integrations? Or does it only recommend?
- Audit. Does every autonomous action emit one complete, replayable decision trail covering evidence, logic, and confidence? One artifact, not a stack of per-agent logs an auditor has to assemble.
- Reverse. Can actions be rolled back, and is the rollback itself audited?
- Govern. Can you set command-risk policy, so you control which actions run unsupervised, which need approval, and at what confidence threshold?
- Survive. When an integrated vendor changes an API, does the connector heal, alert, or fail silently?
A platform that fails questions 1 and 2 is a triage layer. It may be an excellent one, and you are still keeping an execution system somewhere, so price both.
A platform that fails 3 through 5 will eventually execute you into an incident of its own making.
Legacy SOAR mostly passed 1 through 4 and failed 5. That is the bar a replacement has to clear, and a surprising number of well-funded products do not.
Two practical notes for buyers. Start from your own playbook library: count how many playbooks actually ran in the last 90 days, because if it is a small fraction of the library, you have been paying maintenance on shelf-ware and the authored model never fit your team. And start six to nine months before your renewal, which is long enough for a real proof-of-value on your own alerts and short enough that the renewal date forces a decision.
For the full vendor-by-vendor breakdown, see our comparison of the best SOAR alternatives in 2026.
What a SOAR Replacement Costs
This is the question buyers ask third and vendors answer last.
The honest starting point is that the sticker price is the smaller half. Legacy SOAR’s real cost was never the license. It was the automation engineer maintaining the playbook library, the professional-services engagement to implement it, and the coverage you never built because the backlog was full.
Then a second cost arrived with agentic products: metered AI. Usage-priced AI turns the one number you most want to forecast, next quarter’s spend, into the one number you cannot see. Worse, it inverts the incentive. Every assist, action, and agent run raises the bill, so the tool costs you more precisely when it is working hardest, and your team learns to use it less.
Three questions worth putting to any vendor:
- What moves this bill between now and next quarter?
- What happens to it during a major incident, when investigation volume spikes?
- Is the AI cost inside the subscription, or metered on top of it?
Note the answers. They vary far more than the license quotes do.
Your SOAR Renewal Already Covers an Agentic SOC
Here is the part most teams have not priced out, and it changes the shape of the decision.
The blocker to adopting an agentic SOC is rarely belief. It is budget. There is no line item called “agentic SOC,” so the project waits for the next planning cycle. But there is a line item called SOAR, and it comes up for renewal on a date already in your calendar.
Morpheus is priced at or under what teams pay for a SOAR today. The AI is in the price, not on a meter. Because it is a modern deterministic SOAR and an agentic SOC on one engine, both come out of the SOAR line item you are already renewing.
To be straight about it: this is not a free product. You are not getting something for nothing. You are getting more from the same number, at the moment that number is already open for decision.
D3 migrates your playbooks and integrations free on a 60-day plan, timed to your renewal. You keep your existing SIEM, EDR, and identity tools, so there is no re-platform attached.
Where D3 Landed
We helped define this category. Gartner coined the SOAR term shortly after D3 demoed incident-response automation at RSA in 2016, integrated with ArcSight, QRadar, and Splunk. So when we say the authoring model is finished, it is not a competitor’s talking point. It is us retiring our own.
What we built instead is Morpheus, the accountable agentic SOC platform. Three things define it against the five questions above.
Investigation is fully autonomous. One reasoning engine investigates every alert at L2+ depth on its own, with no pre-processing playbooks to write. Up to 95% of alerts are triaged in under two minutes at L2+ depth. When Morpheus is uncertain, it defers to a human.
Response stays a dial, not a doctrine. Teams generate playbooks from natural-language prompts in minutes or build them visually, and keep them deterministic and under their own control. Teams at the highest autonomy levels can hand response composition to the engine. Four autonomy modes, per-action approval gates, one audit trail.
Execution survived intact. Morpheus acts through 800+ Self-Healing Integrations that detect API drift and regenerate connector code autonomously. Median repair on integration drift is 18 minutes against an industry baseline of four to six weeks. That is question 5, the one legacy SOAR failed.
So: is SOAR obsolete? The playbook library is. The engine that acted on the playbook is now doing considerably more, under governance, on the same budget line.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Is SOAR obsolete in 2026?
The SOAR authoring model is obsolete. Hand-writing and maintaining a static playbook for every scenario lost to systems that reason over live evidence at runtime. The SOAR execution function, meaning governed, audited, reversible response actions, is permanent, and every credible replacement includes it. Standalone SOAR is also over as a product category, since the major platforms have been absorbed, repositioned, or formally succeeded.
Is SOAR dead?
No, but the standalone SOAR product category is ending. Cortex XSOAR has a named successor, Siemplify was absorbed into Google SecOps, QRadar SOAR moved to Palo Alto, and Splunk SOAR sits inside Cisco’s consolidation. The orchestration and response function did not disappear. It moved inside larger platforms.
How do I evaluate a SOAR replacement?
Run five questions against every candidate: can it act through integrations, does it emit one replayable audit trail per action, can actions be rolled back, can you set command-risk policy, and does the connector heal when a vendor changes an API? A product that fails the first two is a triage layer, so you will keep an execution system underneath it. Start the evaluation six to nine months before your renewal.
What is the cost of a SOAR replacement compared to SOAR?
The license is the smaller half. Legacy SOAR’s real cost was the automation engineer maintaining the playbook library plus the professional services to implement it. With agentic products, ask specifically whether the AI cost is inside the subscription or metered on top, because usage-metered AI makes next quarter’s spend unforecastable and charges you more when the tool works harder. Morpheus is priced at or under current SOAR spend with the AI cost included.
Can I replace SOAR without new budget?
Yes. Morpheus is priced at or under what teams pay for a SOAR today, and because it is a modern deterministic SOAR and an agentic SOC on one engine, both come from the SOAR line item you are already renewing. It is not a free product. It is more capability from the same number. D3 migrates playbooks and integrations free on a 60-day plan.
Is XDR a SOAR replacement?
No. XDR is closer to a SIEM alternative. It detects well inside its own telemetry and stops short of cross-stack triage and governed response across tools it does not own. Most large organizations run both.
Do I have to replace my SIEM to replace SOAR?
That depends on the replacement. Choosing a vendor successor such as Cortex AgentiX means adopting XSIAM, which is a SIEM-replacement decision with its own economics. A vendor-agnostic agentic platform replaces only the orchestration and investigation layer and runs across your existing SIEM, EDR, and identity tools.
