Keep Splunk. Un-seat your SOAR.
Cisco has made the agentic SOC the story of 2026, and routed Splunk customers to it through ES Premier’s workload meter, with most agents still in alpha.¹ ² Morpheus delivers autonomous investigation and deterministic SOAR on one engine, today, beside the Splunk you keep. It is governed to a standard a regulator can read, at or under what you pay for SOAR seats now.
See Morpheus in Action
Morpheus AI implements the Unified Intelligence Model architecture: one purpose-built cybersecurity LLM performing complete autonomous investigation within a single reasoning context, producing one unified audit trail per incident. Where playbook flexibility is needed, Morpheus’s Agentic Task nodes run bounded agentic reasoning, autonomous reasoning with explicit iteration, cost, tool-scope, and approval-gate limits, inside the parent workflow’s audit trail. This is architecturally distinct from Splunk SOAR’s playbook-only approach, which routes work through static decision branches without autonomous reasoning at the node level. For regulated environments under NIS2, DORA, or the EU AI Act, the UIM produces one audit trail per incident, mapping structurally to Article 20 and Article 14 oversight obligations without additional governance tooling.
Splunk SOAR → ES Premier route vs. Morpheus + D3 SOAR
| Capability | Morpheus + D3 SOAR | Splunk SOAR → ES Premier route |
|---|---|---|
| Your Splunk SIEM | Stays as a first-class integration; no edition change, no new meter | Stays, and becomes the AI’s host meter (workload-priced ES)³ |
| Agentic SOC availability | Autonomous investigation shipping today, in production | Six agents announced Sep 2025; five in alpha/prerelease as of Jun 2026; Triage Agent alpha 1H 2026² |
| Where the AI lives | Same engine as the SOAR; no edition gate | ES Premier, a separately priced, workload-based edition¹ |
| SOAR roadmap | One platform, one roadmap; SOAR and autonomy on one substrate by design | “Splunk SOAR is now a native capability within Splunk Enterprise Security” (vendor banner)⁴ |
| Pricing model | Two platforms, one price, at or under what you pay today | Seats (SOAR) + workload/ingest (ES) + Premier edition gate¹ ⁵ |
| Ownership history | One vendor, one engine, since day one | Phantom → Splunk (2018) → Cisco (2024)⁶ |
| AI governance | Every LLM step boxed in deterministic playbooks, validation gates before/after; command-risk tagging auto-drives approval gates | Agent guardrails per edition; agents in alpha |
| Audit trail | One audit trail, identical to a regulator across all four autonomy modes | SOAR + ES, two products’ trails |
| Compliance mapping | SEC 1.05, NYDFS 500, HIPAA, NERC CIP, NIS2, DORA, EU AI Act Art. 14 | General certifications |
| Integrations | 800+ self-healing; 18-min mean repair against the 4–6-week norm | “300+ third-party tools” (vendor-published) |
| Learning | Reasoning Graph learns from your analysts’ decisions + your TI and vuln feeds | Playbooks improve when your people rewrite them |
See the full feature-by-feature comparison: Morpheus vs Splunk SOAR
¹ Splunk/Cisco press release, Sep 2025 (vendor-published): ES Essentials/Premier editions; AI features in Premier; workload-based pricing. ² Vendor blog, 2025–26 (vendor-published): six agents (Detection Builder, Triage, Guided Response, SOP, Malware Threat Reversing, Automation Builder); alpha/prerelease statuses as of Jun 2026; Triage Agent alpha 1H 2026. ³ Splunk pricing page, fetched Jun 11, 2026 (vendor-published): ES ingest/workload pricing. ⁴ Splunk SOAR product page banner, fetched Jun 11, 2026 (vendor-published). ⁵ Splunk pricing page, fetched Jun 11, 2026: “Pricing based on number of user seats”; SOAR not in ES Essentials. ⁶ Splunk PR/SEC 8-K, Feb 2018; Cisco/Splunk PR, Mar 18, 2024.
Bring us your SOAR renewal. Seats, ES tier, ingest. We’ll show you the open, governed agentic SOC on your real numbers, beside the Splunk you keep.
Frequently Asked Questions
Cisco’s agentic SOC announcements look strong. Why not wait for the agents?
They are strong, and mostly in alpha: five of the six named agents are alpha or prerelease as of June 2026, with the Triage Agent targeting alpha in 1H 2026 (vendor blog/PR). Waiting costs three things: the ES Premier uplift when they arrive, the workload meter they ride on, and every quarter of analyst time between now and GA. Morpheus ships governed autonomous investigation today, beside the Splunk you keep. When their agents reach GA, you’ll still own the comparison. Nothing about Morpheus locks you out of it.
We’re a Splunk shop. Doesn’t staying inside the suite simplify things?
For the SIEM, yes; keep it, we mean that. But check what “inside the suite” costs for the SOC layer: SOAR seats that scale with headcount, ES workload pricing that scales with telemetry, and a Premier edition gate in front of the AI. Three mechanisms, and the thing you actually manage is alert outcomes. Morpheus adds the agentic layer beside Splunk for one price, and your Splunk data stays exactly where it is.
We’ve invested years in Phantom/SOAR playbooks. Doesn’t switching torch that?
Morpheus runs deterministic, governed playbooks, the operating model your team already thinks in. Migration translates what your team already knows, and our self-healing integrations remove the connector-maintenance tax. Ask us to scope your playbook inventory; we’ll show you the plan with a calendar on it.
Is Morpheus’s autonomy safe enough for our auditors?
Every action auto-tiered by command risk, automatically driving approval gates. Every LLM step between validation gates inside deterministic playbooks. One audit trail identical across all four autonomy modes, mapped to seven frameworks including DORA and EU AI Act Article 14. The Reasoning Graph learns from your analysts’ decisions, and it acts only inside its gates.
D3 Security is not affiliated with Splunk or Cisco. Splunk SOAR, Splunk Enterprise Security, and Phantom are trademarks of their respective owners. This comparison reflects publicly available information and our team’s evaluation as of June 2026.