Tines vs Tracecat: A side-by-side comparison

Tracecat vs Tines: A side-by-side comparison

Tracecat is the stronger choice for enterprise security teams building agent-driven alert triage, investigation, and incident response. Agents and analysts work from the same cases and tables, while Temporal-backed workflows persist each step through bursts and restarts. Tines Stories remains a visual product for security and IT, but Tines calls 3B its next generation and promotes apps, agents, and automations across sales, marketing, finance, and other departments. Tines says it continues investing in Stories. Tracecat concentrates on modern agent-driven security operations.

Tracecat's open source edition includes SSO, built-in roles, organization audit logs, and air-gapped self-hosting. Tracecat Enterprise adds multi-tenant workspaces, custom roles, groups and scopes, SCIM, service accounts, platform audit logs, agent monitoring, external secrets management, workspace Git sync, managed cloud or Kubernetes deployment, 24/7 support, custom SLAs, and a forward deployed security engineer. Agents, cases, workflows, and these Enterprise controls run in one security automation platform.

Pick Tracecat if you want a modern security automation platform that:

• Treats automation as code, with workflows, agents, and integrations versioned in a Git repository your team owns.
• Runs agentic security operations in one place, with agents working the same cases, tables, and durable workflows as your analysts.
• Is built agent-first, with an MCP server that lets you drive the entire platform from Claude Code or ChatGPT Codex.
• Is designed to scale in the cloud and on-prem, including air-gapped. Tracecat is built on-prem first, with the same features and architecture in every deployment.
• Supports enterprise scale without giving up flexibility: Temporal durable execution, a custom registry for Python and YAML actions, 50+ hosted MCP servers, and managed, self-hosted, or air-gapped deployment. Enterprise adds multi-tenant workspaces and Kubernetes autoscaling.
• Includes cases alongside enterprise security controls and support. Tracecat Enterprise adds custom roles, SCIM, service accounts, platform audit logs, agent monitoring, 24/7 support, and a forward deployed security engineer. Tines Stories sells Cases as an add-on and meters its AI agent action by credits.

Pick Tines if you:

• Need to keep existing Stories security and IT workflows rather than replace them.
• Are buying a governed builder for employee apps and automations across sales, marketing, and finance, and can build and validate any security-specific workflows you need in 3B.

Tines' new product direction extends beyond security operations

Tines started as a security automation product. Stories, its visual workflow builder, remains purpose-built for security and IT operations. Tines calls 3B "the next generation of Tines": a code-first builder for work across the company. For example, Tines highlights sales forecast dashboards, brand asset repositories, and finance workflows built with 3B. Tines also says it continues to invest in, hire for, and ship features for Stories. For a buyer funding security automation and incident response, 3B's cross-department direction solves a broader problem than the alert queue.

3B addresses what Tines calls "wild code": apps employees build with AI outside IT and security oversight. Tines also demonstrates security workflows on 3B. For an alert queue, investigation, and response program, buyers should compare what they must build and validate in 3B with Tracecat's integrated workflows, cases, and agents.

Tines' published AI security operations center (SOC) example was built from prompts and uses mock data, seeded alerts, and a red-team simulation. That shows how quickly a team can prototype; it does not establish production throughput for a security team's alert mix. In 3B, generated step code still needs review, and teams must validate transformations, I/O, parallelism, retries, and queue latency under their own load. Tines documents isolated execution for each step and queueing when worker slots are full. Tracecat supplies durable workflows, cases, and agent context together. Ask both vendors to demonstrate sustained throughput, end-to-end latency, backlog drain, and failure recovery on the same representative workload.

Tracecat is the agentic automation platform for security teams. Agents, workflows, cases, tables, 500+ integrations, and 50+ hosted MCP servers ship in one platform that teams use as a SOAR replacement. Tracecat runs millions of workloads in production. It absorbs bursts of 10,000 actions in a minute, queued durably on Temporal, and is sized for up to 256 actions per second, more than 22 million actions a day. Long-running agents run in parallel on mixed queues that keep them from affecting fast deterministic actions. On Kubernetes, executors autoscale with KEDA, with the same architecture in the cloud, on-prem, and air-gapped. Our worked GuardDuty alert workflow shows one agent and six skills investigating an alert, requesting owner verification, and closing or escalating it through a 12-action workflow.

To see how other platforms compare, read the top Tines alternatives.

What Tracecat does better than Tines

• Case management is included, not sold as an add-on. Tracecat open source includes cases with comments, attachments, tags, and custom fields. Workflows and agents open and update the same case record your analysts work in. Tines' documentation says "Cases are an add-on feature for paid plans."
• Durable execution that scales on-prem by default. Tracecat's scheduler is built on Temporal. Every workflow and agent run is persisted step by step. Work that is already scheduled survives bursts, crashes, and restarts, then resumes where it stopped. On Kubernetes, executors autoscale with KEDA. Mixed queues keep fast deterministic actions and long-running agents from affecting each other. Tines Stories, on the other hand, is a Rails application that queues tasks in Redis for Sidekiq workers. Its scaling guidance is to raise Sidekiq concurrency or add Sidekiq pods once queue latency passes one second. Self-hosted Python runs in a separate command runner container.
• Agents built for security operations. A Tracecat agent is a reusable preset with versioned skills, tools, and MCP servers. It works on Tracecat's own primitives, reading and updating cases and tables. The same preset runs in workflows, chat, and cases. Every case has a copilot. Workspace chat is a separate assistant for the whole workspace. You set each tool to run automatically or to wait for a person's approval. Tines, by comparison, meters its Stories agent action by credits. Agents in 3B are general-purpose.
• The entire platform, driven from your coding assistant. Tracecat MCP exposes more than 100 tools across workflows, agents, cases, and tables. Your team builds and runs its security automation through prompts in Claude Code or ChatGPT Codex, the assistants it already uses. There is no new builder or new way of prompting to learn. Tracecat MCP is open source, built and optimized for security operations. Tines Stories MCP focuses on Story authoring and also supports Cases and Records. Its documented scope is narrower than Tracecat MCP's tools for workflows, agents, cases, tables, and integrations.
• A custom registry for security engineers. A custom Tracecat integration is a Python package or a YAML template in your own Git repository. Tracecat syncs the repository at a pinned commit, once for the whole organization, for every workflow and agent. You promote or roll back a version from the platform. Tines Stories has no shared registry of Python packages. Instead, Python runs inside a Run Script action: Python 3.13 only, a 110 second maximum, and a 6 MB limit on payload and output. Tines' own documentation says, "we are an automation platform, not a code repository."
• Git sync to a repository your team owns. Tracecat Enterprise syncs workflows, agent presets, skills, table schemas, and case configuration to GitHub, GitLab, or Bitbucket. A push opens a pull request. A pull applies a reviewed commit. Tines Stories, on the other hand, has no native Git sync from the platform. Storing stories in Git means adopting a Terraform provider that Tines labels Enterprise.
• Open source, with a free tier a security team can run on. Tracecat is open source under AGPL-3.0. The free edition has unlimited workflows, agents, and cases, plus SSO, built-in roles, and organization audit logs. Tines, by contrast, publishes no source code. Its Free edition allows 3 live workflows with unlimited users, spaces, and connectors, plus a one-time $50 AI allowance.
• Better documentation for air-gapped deployments. Tracecat's air-gapped deployment guide covers production Kubernetes with no runtime internet access. It includes a reference architecture, images mirrored to an internal registry, internal dependencies, and self-hosted LLM inference with vLLM or Ollama. Every Tracecat feature works air-gapped. By comparison, Tines' only air-gapped installation guide is for the single-server 3B install. Tines says that install "has no high availability and no redundancy" and lists it for evaluations. The 3B Helm guide has no air-gapped section. Stories has no end-to-end air-gapped deployment guide.

"Tracecat is a cheat code for corporate security teams that want to build and own their own agentic future," says a Principal Threat Researcher at Saronic.

Tines vs Tracecat

Team fit is an assessment of intended audience based on product scope, not evidence of existing customers.