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Expel vs. Arctic Wolf

Arctic Wolf hands your team a ticket. Expel hands you a closed incident.

Head-To-Head

Why orgs choose Expel over Arctic Wolf

		Arctic Wolf
Transparency Can you see what your MDR is doing, in real time?
24x7 direct access to SOC analysts	Direct 24x7 access to analysts via Slack or Teams included, and full visibility into their word via Workbench	Arctic Wolf customers don’t connect directly with the SOC. Arctic Wolf provides a Concierge Security® Team (CST) to work with customers as an interface to the Arctic Wolf SOC team²
Forrester Wave™ Q1 2025 MDR Services: Dashboards and reporting	Rated 5/5³	Rated 1/5³
Coverage Are all your attack surfaces protected?
Total coverage areas	160+ coverage areas across endpoint, cloud, identity, SaaS, and network, with 2,450 proprietary detections	77 integrations documented: 15 endpoint, 9 identity, 28 network, 7 email, and 18 SaaS⁴
Cloud security tool coverage	Broad cloud ecosystem, including cloud-native security platforms	No documented support for Orca or FortiCNAPP (Lacework)⁴
Humans + AI Does your MDR cut noise or just pass it along?
What the clock measures	Expel averages an MTTT of 5 minutes, with remediation (MTTR) in 14 minutes, and differentiates itself with a quantifiable promise: a guaranteed 15-minute SLA for critical events and 30 minutes for high-severity events	Arctic Wolf does not publish MDR response-time SLAs publicly. Arctic Wolf markets a “Detect and investigate critical events with five minutes” metric, but it does not guarantee actual triage, containment, or resolution⁵
Expertise and Partnership Does your MDR partner make you better over time?
Who knows your environment	Expel offers regular strategic touchpoints, real-time ChatOps with our expert D&R professionals, and delivers tailored security recommendations to proactively improve your posture. This goes beyond basic monitoring, providing continuous support and insights from analyzing hundreds of diverse environments.	The use of a CST as an intermediary can create a black box effect, where customers have limited visibility into the raw findings and thought process of the SOC analysts. This lack of transparency can result in a loss of control and insight for the customer.⁶
Forrester Wave™ Q1 2025 MDR Services: Analyst experience	Rated 5/5³	Rated 3/5³

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Questions to ask Arctic Wolf

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How do you detect and respond to threats in cloud environments?

Do you commit to a service level objective for issue remediation?

Do I need agents or sensors in order to make this solution work?

Am I able to test the solution with a POC prior to purchase?

Am I able to communicate directly with your SOC?

No compromises

The Expel difference

Fast & flexible

Agentless onboarding with 160+ integrations across endpoint, cloud, identity, SaaS, and network. No proprietary agents or extra vendor tooling required.

Transparency

Full real-time visibility into every detection, investigation, and response via Expel Workbench™—with direct 24×7 SOC analyst access through Slack or Teams, included.

Humans + AI

Ruxie™ AI surfaces only what matters with context-based recommendations, driving a 14-minute mean time to remediate with automated response across 8 attack surfaces.

Expertise

Direct SOC access via Slack or Teams around the clock—not a ticketing queue—backed by a Forrester Wave™ 5/5 rating for Managed Investigations in Q1 2025.

"When evaluating MDR providers, I wanted one that would slot in on top of our existing best-of-breed stack. I also craved transparency, because I hate trying to navigate a black box to know whether we're protected. We found this partner in Expel. They expose their detection logic, integrate cleanly with our tools, and can trigger automated responses when needed."

Jason Waits

Chief Information Security Officer

You're in good company

Frequently asked questions

How does Expel MDR compare to Arctic Wolf?

Both run 24×7 security operations, and the difference is where the work stops. Arctic Wolf’s Concierge Delivery Model describes its Triage Security Team as providing “guided remediation,” and the customer deliverable as “Actionable Tickets” that “reveal what happened, and decide what to do about it.” Expel analysts execute the response with your authorization, across cloud, endpoint, identity, network, and SaaS, and then report what we did. That distinction decides how much of your own team you need on standby overnight.

Who will I actually talk to during an incident with Expel vs Arctic Wolf?

With Expel, the SOC analysts working your environment, directly through Slack or Teams, 24×7. Arctic Wolf’s delivery model has four teams: Deployment gets you set up, the Concierge Security Team handles strategic advice, the Triage Security Team does event triage and investigations, and Incident Response engages when a severe incident is declared. Each handoff is a place where context gets summarized. Worth asking which team picks up a 2am page and how much they already know about your environment.

How many integrations do Expel and Arctic Wolf support?

Expel covers 160+ coverage areas through direct bi-directional APIs. Arctic Wolf markets more than 200 technology integrations across the Aurora Platform, and its MDR documentation lists 77 for log forwarding specifically: 34 cloud, 14 endpoint, and 29 through syslog. The distinction matters when you’re scoping an MDR contract, because platform-wide totals include products you may not be buying. The same documentation also notes that Arctic Wolf “can ingest logs from a wide array of log sources, but may not have rulesets or parsing available for all sources,” and directs customers to ask their Concierge Security Team whether a given source is fully supported. Ingestion and detection coverage aren’t the same thing, and that’s a question worth asking about your specific stack.

Is Arctic Wolf's five-minute response claim comparable to Expel's numbers?

They measure different things. Arctic Wolf publishes that it will “detect and investigate critical events within five minutes.” That’s fast, but it ends at investigation. Expel’s mean time to remediate (MTTR) on high and critical incidents is 14 minutes, when the response is fully automated, with a median time to detect of 2.41 minutes. When you compare vendors, pin down which milestone each number stops at. Detection, investigation, and containment are three different moments, and only the last one ends the attack.

How does cloud coverage compare between Expel and Arctic Wolf?

Expel provides detection and response across cloud, SaaS, network, endpoint, and identity at once, correlating signals between them, and Forrester rated Expel 5/5 for Vulnerability Management Integration & Contextualization in the Q1 2025 Wave for MDR Services. Arctic Wolf supports AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and Oracle Cloud Guard for cloud workloads, and Wiz for cloud posture, but has no documented support for Orca or FortiCNAPP (Lacework). Forrester rated Arctic Wolf 1/5 for cloud detections in the same report. If your cloud security program runs on a platform outside their list, that telemetry stays outside your MDR.

Which provider fits if we already have an internal SOC?

Arctic Wolf’s model puts the Concierge Security Team in charge of the operation for organizations that would otherwise build and staff a SOC. Expel is built to sit alongside an internal SOC. Your analysts see every investigation in Workbench in real time, the same view Expel analysts have, so both teams work from one record instead of trading reports. If you have a SOC you intend to keep, ask each vendor how they expect your team to participate.

Does either provider include ongoing posture reviews and executive reporting, or is that extra?

Both offer reviews; the difference is who delivers them and what your tier includes. With Arctic Wolf, you work with the Concierge Security Team, and they work with the SOC—you aren’t given direct access. What you’re provided from Arctic Wolf also depends on the contract tier you’re in—you need a minimum of the PLUS tier to get recommendations. With Expel, resilience recommendations come from the analysts working in your environment, and Workbench tracks which you’ve implemented and how the metrics moved. Forrester rated Expel 5/5 for both dashboards and reporting and metrics in the Q1 2025 Wave. Ask each vendor which tier your quote actually covers.