# Amazon Bedrock AgentCore vs SOAT: Feature Comparison

> Amazon Bedrock AgentCore and SOAT compared on 15 agent capabilities, 11 vs 12 native, each rating linked to its source.

# 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](/benchmark) tracks, Amazon Bedrock AgentCore covers 11 natively and SOAT 12.

## At a glance

| | Amazon Bedrock AgentCore | SOAT |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Type | a managed agent platform | agent infrastructure |
| License | Proprietary (AWS commercial service) | Apache-2.0 |
| Deployment | managed | self-hosted |
| Native capabilities | 11 of 15 | 12 of 15 |
| Last verified | 2026-08-14 | 2026-08-14 |

## 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](https://aws.amazon.com/bedrock/agentcore/).

## 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](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/bedrock-agentcore/latest/devguide/agents-tools-runtime.html))
- **SOAT: Native.** Agents, sessions, chats, and generations with full lifecycle tracking. ([source](https://soat.ttoss.dev/docs/modules/agents))

### 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](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/bedrock-agentcore/latest/devguide/what-is-bedrock-agentcore.html))
- **SOAT: Native.** DAG orchestrations, workflow state machines, durable tasks, and triggers (manual, webhook, schedule). ([source](https://soat.ttoss.dev/docs/modules/orchestrations))

### 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](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/bedrock-agentcore/latest/devguide/memory.html))
- **SOAT: Native.** Documents with per-chunk embeddings, named memories, unified semantic search, and ingestion rules for PDFs, images, and audio. ([source](https://soat.ttoss.dev/docs/modules/knowledge))

### 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](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/bedrock-agentcore/latest/devguide/gateway.html))
- **SOAT: Native.** HTTP, MCP, client, and agent-to-agent tools; model routes with failover; webhooks; any LLM provider. ([source](https://soat.ttoss.dev/docs/modules/tools))

### 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](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/bedrock-agentcore/latest/devguide/policy.html))
- **SOAT: Native.** AWS-inspired IAM, actors, scoped API keys, guardrails, human approvals, quotas, and an append-only audit log. ([source](https://soat.ttoss.dev/docs/modules/iam))

### 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](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/bedrock-agentcore/latest/devguide/observability.html))
- **SOAT: Native.** Traces of every tool call and model response, activity feed, usage/cost tracking, and an exceptions queue. ([source](https://soat.ttoss.dev/docs/modules/traces))

### 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](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/bedrock-agentcore/latest/devguide/identity-outbound-credential-provider.html))
- **SOAT: Native.** File storage over local/S3/GCS backends and encrypted secrets storage. ([source](https://soat.ttoss.dev/docs/modules/files))

### 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](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/bedrock-agentcore/latest/devguide/evaluations.html))
- **SOAT: Native.** Datasets, scorers, and scored runs; eval-gated promotion of agent versions. ([source](https://soat.ttoss.dev/docs/modules/evaluations))

### 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](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/bedrock-agentcore/latest/devguide/code-interpreter-tool.html))
- **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](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/bedrock-agentcore/latest/devguide/harness-tools.html))
- **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](https://soat.ttoss.dev/docs/modules/approvals))

### 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](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/bedrock-agentcore/latest/devguide/runtime-sessions.html))
- **SOAT: Native.** Projects are multi-tenant namespaces scoping every resource, with IAM policies and quotas enforced per project. ([source](https://soat.ttoss.dev/docs/modules/projects))

### 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](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSCloudFormation/latest/TemplateReference/AWS_BedrockAgentCore.html))
- **SOAT: Native.** Formations provision providers, memories, tools, agents, orchestrations, and webhooks from one template, resolving refs into a dependency graph with tracked operations. ([source](https://soat.ttoss.dev/docs/modules/formations))

### 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](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/bedrock-agentcore/latest/devguide/agent-runtime-versioning.html))
- **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](https://soat.ttoss.dev/docs/tutorials/agent-versioning-and-canary-rollout))

### 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](/benchmark). A rating that is out of date is a bug: [open an issue](https://github.com/ttoss/soat/issues).