MadMax vs Tines
Tines is built for SOC teams composing stories; MadMax gives anyone an AI that builds and verifies workflows from a description. Covers approvals and data.
Tines comes from security automation: SOC teams orchestrating alerts, enrichment, and response with a disciplined no-code story builder. It's excellent at that. MadMax overlaps on the canvas and diverges on audience and approach. This page keeps to the shape of each product rather than feature-by-feature scorekeeping, because both change often and the shape is what decides the fit.
The core difference
Tines gives a security team a small set of precise action types and asks them to compose stories carefully. MadMax gives anyone an AI that builds and verifies the workflow from a description. The plan, the wiring, and a step-by-step verification pass on real data are the product, not a manual discipline. You can still drag every block by hand and edit any field in the Inspector; the AI is the default path, not the only one.
Side by side
| MadMax | Tines | |
|---|---|---|
| built for | anyone automating business work | security / SOC teams |
| building | AI plans, builds, verifies; hand-editing always available | no-code story builder, you compose |
| AI in workflows | first-class step + AI builder throughout | AI features within stories |
| human-in-the-loop | approvals with one-click email decisions | pages + human interaction actions |
| data | stores, memory, knowledge bases built in | records/cases oriented to sec ops |
| interfaces in | webhooks, email, SMS, forms, file drops, schedules | webhooks, schedules, sec-tool integrations |
| pricing shape | free tier; Pro + AI usage credits | enterprise contracts |
How a build feels in each
In Tines you add an action, configure it, run it to see its output, then add the next one; the discipline of testing each action in turn is yours to keep. In MadMax that loop is what the builder does for you: you describe the outcome, Max proposes a plan, drops the steps on the canvas and runs each one against real data (a captured webhook, a real email, a live API call) before moving on. The Plan tab shows the verified count climbing, and anything it can't verify is flagged, not glossed over. When you later edit a live workflow, the canvas and the running snapshot stay separate until you publish.
Approvals and people in the loop
Both products pause for a human. MadMax's approval step delivers the decision where the approver already is: Slack buttons, a one-click email link, or an SMS answered with YES or NO, with the in-app decision on the run page always available. Tines leans on its pages and human interaction actions, which fit an analyst working inside the Tines console.
Where Tines is the better pick
A dedicated SOC automating detection-and-response against a stack of security tools should look at Tines first. That's their specialty, their integration depth, and their compliance posture. If your team already lives in a security console and your cases are alerts, Tines' records and case orientation match the work better than a general-purpose store does.
Where MadMax fits instead
General business automation with judgment in the middle: triage inboxes, extract data from documents, run approval chains, keep a durable store of results, described in a sentence, built and verified by the AI, supervised by you. Add the built-in data layer (stores for records, memory for an agent's context, knowledge bases for your documents) and a workflow can remember and look things up without a second product.