Head-to-head · updated 13 September 2026
DataShield vs Entro: find every non-human identity, or prove what it was allowed to do?
Entro is good at the thing most teams get wrong first: knowing what you have. It scans code, cloud, CI/CD and SaaS for secrets, builds an inventory of non-human identities, names a human owner for each one, and watches for odd behaviour. Their hero line is "Govern every AI Agent. Secure every action." If your honest answer to "how many machine identities do we run?" is a shrug, start there. We are not a discovery tool and we won't pretend to be. One update worth knowing: SailPoint closed its acquisition of Entro on 29 June 2026, so the product now lives inside SailPoint's Agentic Fabric. Our SailPoint page covers the parent.
DataShield picks up one step later. An agent makes a tool call. Something has to decide, right then, whether that call is inside the agent's current authority, and then seal the decision into a record nobody can quietly edit later. That is the seam we sell: authority per call, break-glass, erasure that survives the audit trail, and a chain you can verify yourself. Below is row by row, including the rows Entro wins.
The short version
Pick DataShield when
- An examiner, or the EU AI Act's Article 12, will one day ask you to prove an agent's access log wasn't edited. Our chain answers with math, not a policy PDF. Run the verifier.
- You need to pull an agent's authority mid-session and have the next tool call fail, not wait for a token to age out.
- Someone has to hold an emergency key. Break-glass access for agents is scoped, time-boxed, auto-revoking, and can't be quietly deleted from the log.
- Your team wants the policy engine, the credentials and the evidence on your own infrastructure, with your keys. How Auth is built.
Pick Entro when
- You don't yet have an inventory. Entro's secrets scanning across code, cloud, CI/CD and SaaS is a wider net than anything we ship, and you can't govern what you haven't found.
- Ownership attribution is the gap. Mapping every stale key and service account back to a named human is dull, unglamorous work, and they do it well.
- You want behavioural detection on machine identities. NHIDR looks for anomalies across the whole estate; we only see the calls that come through us.
- Your procurement team needs SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 on day one. Entro has both. We don't, and we say so below.
Bottom line: Entro tells you which identities exist and who owns them. DataShield decides whether a given call is allowed and keeps proof of the decision. Most buyers who talk to both end up running both, and that is a fine outcome.
Feature by feature: NHI security platform versus agent control plane
Competitor cells describe what Entro's public site, blog and launch 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 | Entro | Edge |
|---|---|---|---|
| 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. | Rich activity logging, intent classification and SIEM forwarding. We found no published cryptographic tamper evidence. Ask them. | ◆ |
| Agent authorization | Every governed tool call passes a token scope ceiling, a declared authority tier and a revocation re-check before dispatch. Cedar decides admin, config and token questions, not each dispatch. | AGA describes scope reduction, MCP activity policy and blocking of suspicious patterns. That is detection logic. No per-call authority decision is described. | ◆ |
| Break-glass | Scoped, time-boxed emergency access for agents. It auto-revokes and the grant stays in the chain. | Not described in their public material. | ◆ |
| GDPR erasure | Crypto-shred of per-subject key material plus ISO 27560 consent receipts. Actor IDs are HMAC-committed, so the chain still verifies after a subject is erased. | Not described. Their model is identity and secrets, not subject data. | ◆ |
| Secrets and NHI discovery | None. We govern what is connected to us. We are not a scanner. | Deep scanning across code, cloud, CI/CD and SaaS, plus idle-secret detection and lineage maps. Their home turf. | ◇ |
| Ownership attribution | Identities are bound to org, app and instance, and every call is attributed to the agent. No estate-wide owner graph. | Every NHI and secret gets mapped to a human owner. Clean answer in an audit meeting. | ◇ |
| Behavioural detection | We fail closed on authority, and log. We don't sell anomaly detection. | NHIDR flags behavioural anomalies across agents and NHIs. A Claude Code plugin adds intent classification with an in-house small language model. | ◇ |
| Credential handling | Connection Vault holds encrypted per-subject credentials across eight strategies, including Snowflake keypair-JWT. Issued, used, logged. | Finds, classifies and prioritises secrets, and tells you which are stale. Rotation and storage stay with your existing vault. | ◈ |
| 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. | WebGuard scans prompts in the browser and can block, warn or log. That covers a person typing into ChatGPT, not an agent querying a warehouse. | ◆ |
| MCP and agents | Native MCP endpoints on Auth, Ontology and Lighthouse. MCP tool tokens with scope ceilings, per-call metering attributed to the agent. | MCP monitoring, sanctioned MCP targets and a Claude Code audit plugin that hooks sessions passively. | ◆ |
| Deployment | Self-hosted in your own cloud or data center, or on a dedicated single-tenant server we operate. Your keys. | SaaS, with a large integration surface. We found no self-hosted option; worth asking if that's a hard rule for you. | ◆ |
| 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 2023, $18M Series A in June 2024 led by Dell Technologies Capital, SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001, named CISO customers at SolarWinds, Elastic and ControlUp, Gartner Cool Vendor. Acquired by SailPoint, closed 29 June 2026. | ◇ |
| Pricing | Published model, scoped instant quote, no sales wall. | Quote-only. "Request a Demo" is the only door on the site. | ◆ |
◆ DataShield leads◇ Entro leads◈ comparable
Entro claims are drawn from entro.security and Entro's own launch posts, last checked 13 September 2026. Sources are linked below rather than paraphrased from memory. Entro was acquired by SailPoint (closed 29 June 2026); some capabilities may now be sold only as part of SailPoint Agentic Fabric.
Three things you get here that you won't get from an NHI inventory
Proof, not just a record
Any platform can write a log. The question an examiner asks is whether that log could have been edited afterwards. Ours is a hash chain with signed checkpoints, and the verifier tells you what broke, not just that something did. That is the property EU AI Act Article 12 and HIPAA §164.312(b) reviewers care about. Try it in your browser, no signup.
Authority that changes mid-flight
An analyst resigns at 2pm. Their agent is 20 minutes into a 40-minute job. With DataShield the next governed tool call is re-checked against current authority and fails closed. A posture scan will tell you about it tomorrow morning. How Auth does it.
An erasure you can defend
GDPR says delete the subject. Your auditor says keep the log. Crypto-shred settles it: the subject's key material is destroyed, the data goes unreadable, and the chain still verifies. See the diagram.
Where Entro is genuinely stronger
We'd rather you heard this from us than found it out on the call. Entro has been at non-human identity security since 2023, raised $18M from Dell Technologies Capital and others in June 2024, holds SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001, and has CISOs at SolarWinds, Elastic and ControlUp on the record. Their secrets scanning reaches into code, cloud, CI/CD and SaaS, which is a far wider net than we cast. The Wiz integration ties identity permissions to data classification, so you can see which machine identity can reach which sensitive bucket. And ownership attribution, boring as it sounds, is the single most useful thing you can hand a compliance team. We don't do any of that, and a prospect who needs it should buy it.
The push-back is narrow, and it is about the word "govern". Entro's AGA launch describes enforcement as scope reduction, policy on MCP activity and blocking of suspicious behaviour. All of that runs on pattern recognition. Gartner expects most unauthorized agent transactions through 2028 to be internal policy violations rather than attacks, and a policy violation by a legitimate agent with a valid credential looks perfectly normal to an anomaly detector. Deciding it needs authority state at the moment of the call. Proving it needs a log that can't be rewritten. Ask both of us which one we actually do.
Questions worth asking both of us
These are the questions we'd want answered if we were the buyer. Ask them on every vendor call, ours included.
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 on a sample chain at /verify. Entro: their material describes logging, intent classification and SIEM forwarding, which is useful, but we found no tamper-evidence mechanism. Ask them to show 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. Entro can flag the identity and drive remediation, and AGA can cut scope, but we found no per-call authority re-check described. The question to ask is simple: after I hit revoke, how many more tool calls succeed?
Does NHIDR block a tool call, or notice it afterwards?
Worth pinning down. NHIDR is described as detection and response for behavioural anomalies, and AGA adds blocking of suspicious patterns and sanctioned MCP targets. That is a detector making a judgement call. DataShield is not clever about behaviour at all: the call either sits inside the agent's scope ceiling and authority tier or it doesn't. Different jobs, and honestly they pair well.
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 evidence stays verifiable after the subject is gone. Entro's public material doesn't cover subject erasure; their world is identities and secrets, not customer data. If you need both, that is a two-vendor answer.
We're already buying Entro. Does DataShield still make sense?
Often, yes, and we'd rather say that than pretend otherwise. Entro finds the identities, names the owners and watches behaviour. We sit in the path of the agent's tool calls, decide each one against current authority, and seal the decision. One layer tells you the estate is clean. The other tells the auditor what happened on 4 March and proves it.
Does DataShield have SOC 2?
No, and we won't imply otherwise. Entro has SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001; if that is a procurement gate, they clear it and we don't. What we offer instead is Auth is live a published threat model and a verifier anyone can run without an account. Guardian and Lighthouse have been in production since April 2026. Design-partner terms include source escrow, so a small vendor isn't a single point of failure. Details on the security page.
- Entro's hero: "Govern every AI Agent. Secure every action." Primary CTA is a demo request. — entro.security, 13 Sep 2026
- Agentic Governance and Administration (AGA) launch: discovery, classification, posture, ownership, NHIDR detection, plus MCP activity policy enforcement. — Entro blog, 17 Mar 2026
- $18M Series A led by Dell Technologies Capital, with StageOne and Hyperwise. — Entro blog, 18 Jun 2024
- Claude Code MCP audit plugin captures sessions passively through hooks and classifies agent intent with an in-house small language model. — Entro blog, 9 Feb 2026
- Wiz integration: 61% of organisations have secrets exposed in public code repositories; 90% of NHIs hold excessive permissions. — Entro blog, 13 May 2025
- ≥80% of unauthorized agent transactions through 2028 will be internal policy violations rather than attacks. — Gartner, 2026
Other head-to-heads
DataShield vs Astrix
NHI discovery and posture versus authority at the moment of the call.
DirectDataShield vs Oasis Security
Lifecycle for machine identities versus evidence an examiner can verify.
ComplementDataShield vs Microsoft Entra Agent ID
Entra says who the agent is. We prove what it did was allowed.
AllEvery comparison
One honest scorecard per vendor, sources at the bottom.
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