Head-to-head · updated 13 September 2026
DataShield vs Astrix: what do you buy now that Astrix is Cisco?
Astrix built one of the best non-human identity products anyone shipped. Find the API keys, service accounts, OAuth grants, MCP servers and agents nobody wrote down, then flag the ones with far too much power. Workday, HubSpot, NetApp and Figma all bought it. Cisco closed the acquisition on 29 June 2026, and the day after, Astrix stopped selling new standalone licences.
So if you're here, you probably searched "Astrix alternative" and want a straight answer. Here it is: we don't do discovery, and we won't pretend to. DataShield is the layer that starts once the inventory is clean. Every governed tool call is checked against the agent's authority right then, and every decision is sealed into a hash chain you can verify without trusting us.
The short version
Pick DataShield when
- You need to prove an agent's access log wasn't edited. Our chain answers that with math, and you can run the check yourself. Try the verifier.
- You want to pull an agent's authority mid-session and have the very next governed tool call fail. A short-lived credential still lives until it expires.
- Your security team wants the tokens, the policy plane and the evidence on your own infrastructure, with keys you hold. Astrix is SaaS.
- Roadmap independence matters. Ours is ours. Astrix capabilities now land inside Cisco Identity Intelligence, Secure Access, Duo and Splunk, on Cisco's schedule.
Pick Astrix (now Cisco) when
- Your real problem is "we don't know what we have." Astrix's discovery of NHIs, MCP servers and OAuth grants is genuinely good, and we don't compete with it.
- You're already a Cisco shop. The same technology is being folded into tools you own, so the cheapest path is the one you've already paid for.
- You want secure-by-design provisioning: their Agent Control Plane mints agents with short-lived credentials and scoped, just-in-time access at creation.
- You need detection of odd machine-identity behaviour at SaaS scale. Their ADR work and Splunk integration go somewhere we don't.
Bottom line: Astrix tells you which agents exist and how over-privileged they are. DataShield decides whether a given call is allowed right now and keeps proof of the answer. Those are different jobs, and most mature teams need both. If your Astrix evaluation stalled on 30 June, start with the half you can still buy.
Feature by feature
Competitor cells describe what Astrix's public site, product pages and the Cisco acquisition posts say as of the date above. If we've mischaracterised something, email support@myorg.ai and we'll correct it, credited.
| What matters | DataShield | Astrix | Edge |
|---|---|---|---|
| NHI and agent discovery | Not a discovery tool. We govern the agents and datasets you register with us. If you need an inventory of every OAuth grant in your SaaS estate, buy that elsewhere. | Real-time inventory of AI agents, MCP servers and NHIs with risk context. This is the core of the product and it's strong. | ◇ |
| Agent authorization | Every governed tool call passes a scope ceiling, a declared authority tier and a revocation re-check before dispatch. The decision happens at call time. | Policy at creation, with short-lived and just-in-time credentials via the Agent Control Plane. We found no per-call authorization described in their public docs. | ◆ |
| Mid-session revocation | Revoke or suspend and the next governed call fails closed. No waiting on token lifetime. | Short credential lifetimes shrink the window. Shrinking a window isn't closing it. Ask them what happens at minute three of a ten-minute token. | ◆ |
| Audit evidence | SHA-256 hash chain with Ed25519-signed checkpoints that are themselves chained. Verification names the failure: tampering, insertion, deletion or truncation. Public verifier. | Activity monitoring and risk reporting, with Splunk as the SOC destination post-acquisition. We found no published cryptographic tamper evidence. | ◆ |
| Break-glass | Scoped, time-boxed emergency access for agents that auto-revokes and can't be quietly removed from the log. | Not described in their public docs. | ◆ |
| GDPR erasure | Crypto-shred of per-subject key material plus ISO 27560 consent receipts. The audit chain still verifies after erasure. | Not described. Their product governs identities, not the subject data those identities touch. | ◆ |
| Tokenization and data handling | Datasets are tokenized at ingest; agents query tokenized data over MCP; detokenization is a privileged, audited operation. Plus quasi-identifier generalization (dates to year, decade or age band; ZIPs to 3 or 4 digits; partial phones, SSNs and emails) with a measured cardinality-reduction score per column. | Out of scope. Astrix secures the credential, not the payload the credential reaches. | ◆ |
| MCP and agents | Native MCP endpoints on Auth, Ontology and Lighthouse. MCP tool tokens with scope ceilings, and per-call metering attributed to the agent. | MCP servers are a first-class discovery target, and agent provisioning is built in. Different half of the same problem. | ◈ |
| Deployment | Self-hosted in your own cloud or data center, or on a dedicated single-tenant server we operate. Your keys. | SaaS. Post-acquisition, delivery folds into Cisco Security Cloud surfaces. | ◆ |
| Availability as a product | You can buy it today, from us, at a published price. | Standalone new-licence sales ended 30 June 2026. Existing deployments and support continue. New buyers go through Cisco. | ◆ |
| Maturity signals | Auth, Guardian and Lighthouse are live in production (Guardian and Lighthouse since April 2026). SOC 2 not yet certified, and we say so. | Founded 2021, over $85M raised including a $45M Series B led by Menlo Ventures, named enterprise customers, Gartner recognition, and now Cisco behind it. | ◇ |
| Pricing | Published model, scoped instant quote, no sales wall. | Never published, and now a Cisco line item rather than its own. | ◆ |
◆ DataShield leads◇ Astrix leads◈ comparable
Astrix claims are drawn from astrix.security, the founders' acquisition post and Cisco's announcement, last checked 13 September 2026. We link them below rather than paraphrase from memory.
Three things you get here that you won't get from an NHI inventory
A decision at the moment of the call
Discovery tells you an agent has too much access. Provisioning gives it a credential that expires in an hour. Neither one is standing at the door when the call arrives. We are: scope ceiling, authority tier, revocation check, then dispatch. How Auth does it.
Proof that survives an audit
A log that can be silently edited has no evidentiary value. Ours is a hash chain with signed checkpoints, and the verifier tells you what broke, not just that something did. That's the property EU AI Act Article 12 and HIPAA §164.312(b) reviewers care about. Try it in your browser, no signup.
A stack that stays yours
Run the whole thing on your own infrastructure, with your own keys, on a roadmap nobody else sets. Design-partner terms include source escrow, because a small vendor shouldn't be a single point of failure. See the architecture.
Where Astrix is genuinely stronger
Let's be fair about this. Astrix saw non-human identity as a category before most people had a name for it, raised over $85 million on that bet, and got Workday, NetApp, HubSpot, Figma and Boomi to run it. Their Discover pillar answers a question we simply don't answer: what is actually out there. If you have eleven years of accumulated service accounts and OAuth grants across forty SaaS apps, you need a crawler, and that crawler is theirs. The Agent Control Plane is also the right instinct. Minting agents with scoped, short-lived, just-in-time credentials is a real control, not marketing. And Cisco gives the technology distribution we will never match.
Here's the push-back. Issuance-time control and call-time control are not the same thing, and the difference shows up on a Tuesday afternoon. An analyst resigns at two o'clock. Her agent got a perfectly scoped credential at nine, and it's halfway through a long job. A shorter token lifetime makes that window smaller. A per-call authority check makes it zero. Gartner expects most unauthorized agent transactions through 2028 to be internal policy violations rather than attacks, which is exactly the failure mode a posture score catalogues and an enforcement point prevents. Then there's the awkward part nobody at Cisco will say out loud: you can't buy Astrix on its own any more. Whatever you sign now, you're signing up for someone else's integration timeline across four separate products.
Questions worth asking both of us
These are the questions we'd want answered if we were buying. Ask them on every vendor call, including ours.
Astrix stopped selling standalone licences. What are my options?
Three, roughly. Buy the capability through Cisco as it lands in Identity Intelligence, Secure Access, Duo and Splunk. Stay on your existing Astrix deployment, which the founders said keeps its support and team. Or split the problem: keep a discovery tool for inventory and put an independent enforcement and evidence layer under your agents. Plenty of teams take the third road, and it's the one we sell into.
Can you cryptographically prove an audit log entry wasn't deleted?
DataShield: yes. Each record commits to the one before it, checkpoints are signed and chained, and verification tells deletion apart from truncation and from tampering. Run it against a sample chain at /verify. Astrix: their material describes activity monitoring and risk reporting, with Splunk downstream after the acquisition. We found no tamper-evidence mechanism published. Ask to see one.
What happens to a revoked agent mid-session?
DataShield re-checks authority on every governed tool call, so revocation bites on the next call. Astrix issues short-lived, just-in-time credentials through the Agent Control Plane, which limits how long a stale credential works but doesn't kill it on command as far as we can tell from their public docs. Ask both of us the same question: how many seconds after I click revoke does the agent stop working?
Do you replace NHI discovery?
No. We don't crawl your SaaS estate hunting for forgotten OAuth grants, and a vendor telling you otherwise is selling you something. We govern the agents, tools and datasets registered with us. Most customers who care about this run a discovery tool as well, and that's the right answer.
How does GDPR erasure interact with the audit trail?
DataShield crypto-shreds per-subject key material and issues an ISO 27560 consent receipt. Actor identities in the chain are HMAC-committed, so the evidence stays verifiable after the subject is gone. Astrix governs identities rather than subject data, so the question mostly doesn't arise for them. If your obligation is "delete the person, keep the log," that obligation has to land somewhere.
Does DataShield have SOC 2?
Not yet, and we won't imply otherwise. Auth is live a public threat model and a verifier anyone can run. Guardian and Lighthouse have been in production since April 2026. Design-partner terms include source escrow. Astrix has the bigger compliance and customer résumé, and now a very large parent. Details on the security page.
- Astrix hero: "Discover, secure, and deploy AI agents responsibly across the enterprise." Site notice: standalone sales of new licences ended effective 30 June 2026. — astrix.security, 13 Sep 2026
- Founders confirm the Cisco deal, over $85M raised including a $45M Series B led by Menlo Ventures, and that existing deployments, support and teams stay in place. — Astrix blog, 4 May 2026
- Cisco: Astrix capabilities will be integrated into Cisco Identity Intelligence, Cisco Secure Access, Duo and Splunk. — Cisco Blogs, 4 May 2026
- "Deploy, powered by ACP (Agent Control Plane): provision secure-by-design AI agents with short-lived credentials, just-in-time, precisely scoped access, and policy at creation." — astrix.security/product, 13 Sep 2026
- ≥80% of unauthorized agent transactions through 2028 will be internal policy violations rather than attacks. — Gartner, 2026
Other head-to-heads
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DirectDataShield vs Aembit
Workload identity brokering meets agent break-glass and crypto-shred.
AllEvery comparison
One honest scorecard per vendor, sources at the bottom.
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