BuyingVerified 19 Jun 2026
Open-Source SOAR 2026: Shuffle and Friends, the True Cost
Shuffle is genuinely $0 in licence. The total cost is real. This page is the honest accounting.
$0
Licence cost (open-source self-host)
$60-$500/mo
Infrastructure (single-VM to HA cluster)
8-16 wk
Initial engineering to first production playbook
0.25-0.5 FTE
Ongoing operator load
The honest ledger (illustrative example, not a real company)
Year-one open-source SOAR (mid-market on Shuffle)
01
Shuffle licence
$0
running $0
02
Cloud VM + storage (HA pair)
$400/mo
$4,800
running $4,800
03
Initial engineering
12 weeks of senior security engineer
$60,000
running $64,800
04
Integration build-out
10 integrations averaged ~45 hours
$45,000
running $109,800
05
Playbook development
8 playbooks averaged ~50 hours
$30,000
running $139,800
06
Operator coverage (0.3 FTE)
$48,000
running $187,800
(Illustrative.) Year-one total ~$188K. Licence is genuinely $0; the rest is real.
When open-source wins
- You have a senior security engineer who wants to own the platform.
- You have data-residency requirements no SaaS SOAR can satisfy.
- You are MSSP-curious and want to test multi-tenancy patterns.
- You want a no-licence sandbox before committing to Cortex XSOAR or Splunk SOAR.
When it breaks
“Open-source SOAR breaks the day your owning engineer leaves. Build for handover or accept the risk.”
- Key-person risk: if the engineer who built it leaves, internal handover is steep.
- No vendor support: when something breaks at 2am, your runbook is your runbook.
- Integration polish: community connectors are community-quality.
- Compliance: some auditors expect named vendor-support contracts.