Head-to-head · updated 13 September 2026
DataShield vs Evervault: cards are handled. What about the rest of your PII?
Evervault holds card data so your servers don't. They're good at it. PCI DSS Level 1, SOC 2 Type II, and a pitch we can't match: separate card collection from your processor and cut your PCI scope. If the sensitive thing in your stack is a card number, go talk to them. We have no PCI story and we're not going to pretend otherwise.
We sell the other half. The claims file, the patient record, the HR table, the customer list your AI agents now query all day. Datasets are tokenized at ingest; agents query tokenized data over MCP; detokenization is a privileged, audited operation. Every governed tool call is checked against the agent's authority at the moment it runs, and each decision is sealed into a hash chain you can verify without trusting us. Here's where the two products actually differ, sources included, and yes, some rows go to them.
The short version
Pick DataShield when
- Your sensitive data isn't a card. It's health records, claims, HR files, or customer PII, and it needs to stay useful for analytics after you protect it.
- An auditor 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 very next tool call fail.
- Nothing may leave your own account. We self-host on your own infrastructure, with your keys.
Pick Evervault when
- PCI scope is the problem on the board slide. They're a Level 1 service provider and say they cut PCI requirements by up to 95%. We have no PCI attestation at all.
- You want to swap or multiplex payment processors without re-collecting cards. Holding the card is the whole trick, and they hold it.
- You need card-native features: 3D Secure, network tokens, Card Account Updater, Apple and Google Pay. None of that is on our roadmap.
- You want attested confidential compute. Their Enclaves run signed code you can verify at runtime. Our tokens never get decrypted in an enclave, they get looked up in a vault.
Bottom line: Evervault keeps card data out of your systems. DataShield decides what an AI agent may do with the data you keep, then proves it. Plenty of fintechs will end up running both, and that's a fine answer.
Feature by feature
Competitor cells describe what Evervault's public site, pricing page, and blog say as of the date above. If we've mischaracterised something, email support@myorg.ai and we'll correct it, credited.
| What matters | DataShield | Evervault | 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. | Enclave attestation proves which code ran. We found no published tamper-evident log of who asked for what. | ◆ |
| Agent authorization | Every governed tool call passes a scope ceiling, an authority tier, and a revocation re-check before dispatch. Revocation lands mid-session. | API keys and app-level access to encrypted data. No agent identity, authority tiers, or mid-session revocation described. | ◆ |
| Break-glass | Scoped, time-boxed emergency access for agents. It auto-revokes and can't be quietly deleted from the log. | Not offered, and not something a payments API would be expected to offer. | ◆ |
| GDPR erasure | Crypto-shred of per-subject key material plus ISO 27560 consent receipts. The audit chain still verifies after erasure. | Data is encrypted and held by them, so deletion is possible. The effect on audit history isn't documented. | ◆ |
| Tokenization | Deterministic, join-preserving, vault-reversible tokens applied at ingest, 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. You can still group by city and join on customer. | Encryption and tokens built for card flows, including network tokens issued by the card schemes. Great for payments, not built for analytics joins. | ◆ |
| Payments and PCI | None. No PCI DSS attestation and no card products. Not our market. | PCI DSS Level 1 service provider. Card collection iframes, 3D Secure, network tokens, ASV scans, processor routing. | ◇ |
| Confidential computing | No enclave product. Data is protected by tokenization and policy, not hardware isolation. | Enclaves: signed workloads with runtime attestation, so you can check the code that touched your data. | ◇ |
| 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. | No AI, LLM, agent, or MCP messaging found on their site or blog as of the date above. | ◆ |
| Deployment | Self-hosted in your own cloud or data center, or on a dedicated single-tenant server we operate. Your keys. | SaaS. Relay and Functions sit in their path by design; that's the point of the product. | ◆ |
| 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 2018, $46M raised including a $25M Series B in March 2026, PCI DSS Level 1, SOC 2 Type II, $5B+ in transaction volume, customers like Ramp and Rippling. | ◇ |
| Pricing | Published model, scoped instant quote, no sales wall. | Also published: $995 a month plus usage, with per-operation rates listed. Free sandbox. Credit where it's due. | ◈ |
◆ DataShield leads◇ Evervault leads◈ comparable
Evervault claims are drawn from evervault.com, their pricing and customers pages, and their blog, 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 payments encryption
Proof that survives an audit
Attestation tells you which code ran. It doesn't tell you who asked, or whether the record of that request was edited later. Ours is a hash chain with signed checkpoints, and the verifier names what went wrong, not just that something did. Try it in your browser, no signup.
Authority that can change mid-flight
An analyst resigns at 4pm. Their agent is 20 minutes into a 40-minute job. With DataShield the next governed tool call is re-checked and fails closed. With an API key, the job finishes and nobody notices. How Auth does it.
Data that stays useful after you protect it
A tokenized card is a dead end by design. A tokenized patient ID still has to join to claims, and the city column still has to group. We keep tokens deterministic and generalize quasi-identifiers (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 instead. How the ontology layer works.
Where Evervault is genuinely stronger
We'd rather you hear this from us. Evervault has been shipping since 2018, raised $25M more in March 2026, and holds PCI DSS Level 1 and SOC 2 Type II. We hold neither. They've processed over $5 billion in transaction volume for names like Ramp, Rippling, and Uniswap. Their Enclaves work is real engineering, and runtime attestation of signed code is a stronger guarantee than "trust our SaaS". They publish their prices, which most of this market still won't do. On payments, this is not a close fight and we won't stage one.
The push-back is about scope. Their own Series B post says they're moving past payments into wallets, identity, and healthcare. Fine, but the hard part of health data isn't holding it, it's deciding who may read it and proving that decision later. Gartner expects most unauthorized agent transactions through 2028 to be internal policy violations rather than attacks. An encrypted field doesn't stop an agent that was allowed to decrypt it, and an access log nobody can verify is just a text file with good intentions.
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.
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. Evervault: their enclave attestation proves which code ran, which is a different question. We found no published tamper-evidence for access logs. 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. Evervault's docs describe API keys and app access to encrypted data; we found no description of agent identity or mid-session revocation. Ask how long a stolen key keeps working after you pull it.
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 still verifies once the subject is gone. Evervault can delete data they hold, but the effect on audit history isn't documented. Ask whether erasing a subject breaks the record.
Is DataShield an Evervault alternative for non-payments PII?
For health, HR, and customer data headed into analytics and AI agents, yes, and that's the honest edge of the overlap. For card data, no. We have no PCI DSS attestation, no card collection iframe, no 3D Secure, and no network tokens. If a prospect needs both, run Evervault for the card rail and DataShield for everything the agents touch.
Enclaves or tokenization: which one do we actually need?
Different guarantees. An enclave lets code process plaintext in isolation and proves which code it was. Tokenization means the plaintext never reaches the query surface at all, so there's nothing to leak if the workload misbehaves. Enclaves suit key handling and signing. Tokenization suits datasets that dozens of agents and analysts will query for years. We do the second.
Does DataShield have SOC 2?
Not yet, and we won't imply otherwise. Evervault does, along with PCI Level 1, and that's a fair mark against us. What we offer instead: Auth is live a public threat model and a verifier anyone can run, Guardian and Lighthouse have been in production since April 2026. Details on the security page.
- Evervault's hero: "Take control of your payments." Card collection separated from processors, with minimal PCI scope. — evervault.com, 13 Sep 2026
- $25M Series B led by Ribbit Capital, $46M raised in total, $5B+ transaction volume, 100M+ encrypted tokens a month, expanding into wallets, identity, and healthcare. — Evervault blog, 5 Mar 2026
- PCI DSS Level 1 and SOC 2 Type II, with customers including Ramp, FlightHub, Tebex, and XP. — evervault.com/customers, 13 Sep 2026
- Published pricing: $995 a month plus usage, $0.03 per 3D Secure authentication, $0.03 per network token. — evervault.com/pricing, 13 Sep 2026
- Enclaves: workloads are signed by you and attestable at runtime, built on confidential computing hardware. — Evervault blog, 10 Jan 2024
- 80% or more of unauthorized agent transactions through 2028 will be internal policy violations rather than attacks. — Gartner, 2026
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Developer-first card tokens, and what they don't cover.
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Payments aliasing versus analytics-grade tokens and agent policy.
AllEvery comparison
One honest scorecard per vendor, rows we lose included.
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