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SOAT vs Amazon Bedrock AgentCore

Amazon Bedrock AgentCore is a managed agent platform (Proprietary (AWS commercial service), managed). SOAT is agent infrastructure (Apache-2.0, self-hosted). Of the 15 capabilities the benchmark tracks, Amazon Bedrock AgentCore covers 11 natively and SOAT 12.

At a glance​

Amazon Bedrock AgentCoreSOAT
Typea managed agent platformagent infrastructure
LicenseProprietary (AWS commercial service)Apache-2.0
Deploymentmanagedself-hosted
Native capabilities11 of 1512 of 15
Last verified2026-08-142026-08-14

Where each one leads​

  • Amazon Bedrock AgentCore is native where SOAT is not: code execution.
  • SOAT is native where Amazon Bedrock AgentCore is not: data & secrets, multi-tenancy.

What Amazon Bedrock AgentCore is​

AWS managed agent platform composed of modular services — Runtime, Harness, Memory, Gateway, Identity, Policy, Code Interpreter, Observability, and Evaluations — consumed as AWS APIs and usable independently or together. There is no self-hosted distribution. Amazon Bedrock AgentCore documentation.

Capability by capability​

Agent runtime​

Agent loop, sessions, and generation lifecycle.

  • Amazon Bedrock AgentCore: Native. AgentCore Runtime is a serverless agent runtime with session isolation; AgentCore Harness provides a managed agent loop behind a single API call. (source)
  • SOAT: Native. Agents, sessions, chats, and generations with full lifecycle tracking. (source)

Orchestration​

Multi-step pipelines, workflows, and triggers.

  • Amazon Bedrock AgentCore: Native. Harness handles orchestration, tool execution, and multi-step responses; Runtime supports multi-agent workloads including the A2A protocol. (source)
  • SOAT: Native. DAG orchestrations, workflow state machines, durable tasks, and triggers (manual, webhook, schedule). (source)

Knowledge & memory​

Documents, embeddings, semantic search, and recall.

  • Amazon Bedrock AgentCore: Native. AgentCore Memory provides short-term multi-turn memory and long-term memory persisting across sessions, with stores shareable across agents. (source)
  • SOAT: Native. Documents with per-chunk embeddings, named memories, unified semantic search, and ingestion rules for PDFs, images, and audio. (source)

Tools & integration​

Tool calling, MCP, providers, and webhooks.

  • Amazon Bedrock AgentCore: Native. AgentCore Gateway converts APIs and Lambda functions into MCP-compatible tools and connects to existing MCP servers behind a managed endpoint. (source)
  • SOAT: Native. HTTP, MCP, client, and agent-to-agent tools; model routes with failover; webhooks; any LLM provider. (source)

Identity & governance​

IAM, guardrails, approvals, quotas, and audit.

  • Amazon Bedrock AgentCore: Native. AgentCore Identity issues workload identities with IdP integration; AgentCore Policy enforces Cedar-based authorization on every Gateway tool call with audit logging. (source)
  • SOAT: Native. AWS-inspired IAM, actors, scoped API keys, guardrails, human approvals, quotas, and an append-only audit log. (source)

Observability​

Traces, activity, usage, and failure queues.

  • Amazon Bedrock AgentCore: Native. Emits OpenTelemetry traces and CloudWatch dashboards for session count, latency, token usage, and error rates across runtime, memory, gateway, and identity. (source)
  • SOAT: Native. Traces of every tool call and model response, activity feed, usage/cost tracking, and an exceptions queue. (source)

Data & secrets​

File storage and encrypted secrets.

  • Amazon Bedrock AgentCore: Partial. Identity manages outbound OAuth and API-key credential providers, but durable object storage relies on sibling services such as S3 rather than an AgentCore resource. (source)
  • SOAT: Native. File storage over local/S3/GCS backends and encrypted secrets storage. (source)

Evaluation​

Datasets, scorers, and eval-gated improvement.

  • Amazon Bedrock AgentCore: Native. AgentCore Evaluations provides built-in and custom LLM-as-a-judge evaluators with on-demand, batch, online, and dataset runs over agent traces. (source)
  • SOAT: Native. Datasets, scorers, and scored runs; eval-gated promotion of agent versions. (source)

Channels​

Built-in gateways to messaging platforms and UIs.

  • Amazon Bedrock AgentCore: Absent. Agents are exposed through API endpoints only; Slack and similar systems are reachable as outbound Gateway tools, not inbound messaging channels.
  • SOAT: Absent. Surfaces are REST, MCP, CLI, and SDK — no built-in gateways to messaging platforms like Slack, WhatsApp, or Telegram.

Code execution​

Sandboxed code or terminal runtimes for agents.

  • Amazon Bedrock AgentCore: Native. AgentCore Code Interpreter runs agent-generated Python, JavaScript, and TypeScript in an isolated managed sandbox, alongside a managed Browser runtime. (source)
  • SOAT: Absent. Tool types are HTTP, MCP, client, and agent-to-agent — no built-in sandboxed code or terminal runtime.

Human-in-the-loop​

Pausing a run for human approval, then resuming it.

  • Amazon Bedrock AgentCore: Native. An inline function tool halts the harness mid-run and returns the tool call to the caller, resuming when the client posts a matching tool result on the same session. (source)
  • SOAT: Native. Approvals are a first-class human-decision queue with frozen evidence, and guardrails classify each tool call so risky actions pause for a decision. (source)

Multi-tenancy​

Projects or workspaces scoping resources and permissions.

  • Amazon Bedrock AgentCore: Partial. Each runtime session gets an isolated microVM sanitized on termination, but AgentCore does not enforce session-to-user mapping and offers no tenant or namespace resource. (source)
  • SOAT: Native. Projects are multi-tenant namespaces scoping every resource, with IAM policies and quotas enforced per project. (source)

Declarative deployment​

Templates that provision agent resources as one stack.

  • Amazon Bedrock AgentCore: Native. CloudFormation exposes first-party agent resource types for Runtime, Harness, Gateway, Memory, and Policy, so agent infrastructure is provisioned through stack dependency resolution and change sets. (source)
  • SOAT: Native. Formations provision providers, memories, tools, agents, orchestrations, and webhooks from one template, resolving refs into a dependency graph with tracked operations. (source)

Versioning & rollout​

Agent versions, canary rollout, gated promotion.

  • Amazon Bedrock AgentCore: Native. Every runtime update mints an immutable version; the default endpoint tracks the latest while named endpoints are pinned per environment and moved between versions for staged promotion and rollback. (source)
  • SOAT: Native. Every config change is archived as an append-only agent version, with canary rollout to a slice of traffic and eval-gated promotion. (source)

Skill learning​

Agents authoring reusable skills from their own experience.

  • Amazon Bedrock AgentCore: Absent. Skills are developer-authored bundles fetched from git, S3, or a catalog, and optimization only produces prompt rewrites a human promotes.
  • SOAT: Absent. Memories and knowledge store retrievable context, but agents do not author or refine reusable skills from their own experience.

How this is rated​

Each rating comes from the public documentation linked beside it: Native is built in, Via plugin needs an add-on, Partial covers part of the capability, Absent is not offered. Every solution side by side is on the benchmark. A rating that is out of date is a bug: open an issue.