Head-to-head · updated 13 September 2026
DataShield vs Fivetran: once the pipeline lands the data, who governs it?
Fivetran is the best managed ELT product on the market. We are not going to pretend otherwise. Point it at 900 or so sources and rows land in your warehouse. Schema drift is handled. Nobody gets paged at 2am. The dbt Labs merger closed on 1 June 2026, so they own the transform layer too, plus stewardship of Great Expectations. Their homepage says "The data foundation for AI" and "Automated data for autonomous agents". For the movement half of that, it is a fair claim.
We do not move data. DataShield has no connector library and never will. We start one step later, at the datasets your agents read. 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 before it runs. Every decision is sealed into a hash chain you can verify yourself. Most of our buyers keep their pipelines. Below is the honest split, and it includes the rows Fivetran wins.
The short version
Pick DataShield when
- An agent reads the data, and one day someone asks you to prove the access log was not edited. An examiner, an auditor, or Article 12 of the EU AI Act. Our chain answers with math. Run the verifier.
- You need to pull an agent's authority mid-session and have the very next tool call fail. Not the next token refresh.
- You want to know which landed columns hold PII or PHI, by class, with a verdict you can re-derive. We ship 129 field classes, including all 18 HIPAA Safe Harbor identifiers.
- The policy engine, the vault and the evidence all have to run on hardware you control.
Pick Fivetran when
- You need rows out of Salesforce, SAP, Postgres, a stream and a pile of files, and you would rather not own connector code. No one on earth does that job better.
- You want load and dbt transform from one vendor, on one support contract, with one roadmap. Since 1 June 2026 that is a real thing you can buy.
- Certifications gate the deal. They hold SOC 1 and SOC 2, ISO 27001, HITRUST and PCI DSS Level 1, and they sign a HIPAA BAA. We hold none of those yet.
- Your team wants to see a usage price before talking to anyone. Their MAR curve is published, and so is ours.
Bottom line: Fivetran gets the data there. We decide what an agent may do with it, and we keep proof of that call. These are different products. For most teams the sane answer is both.
Feature by feature
Competitor cells describe what Fivetran's public site and press releases say as of the date above. If we have mischaracterised something, email support@myorg.ai and we will correct it, credited.
| What matters | DataShield | Fivetran | Edge |
|---|---|---|---|
| Data movement and connectors | None. We ingest files, URLs and S3-compatible storage. We watch a bucket or SFTP subtree for changes. We can register a live PostgreSQL database as a catalog provider. That is not a pipeline product and we do not sell it as one. | The core product and the reason they exist. 900+ sources and targets, automatic schema drift handling, incremental sync, and dbt transform since the merger. | ◇ |
| Audit evidence | SHA-256 hash chain with Ed25519-signed checkpoints that are themselves chained. Verification returns a three-valued verdict and names the failure: tampering, insertion, deletion or truncation. Try the verifier. | Log events from connections, user actions and API calls, sent on to CloudWatch, Azure Monitor or Datadog. Useful in daily ops. A forwarded log is still a log you can edit. | ◆ |
| Agent authorization | Every governed tool call passes a scope gate, a consented-tool allowlist, a declared authority tier and a mid-session revocation check before dispatch. It fails closed. | Role-based access control over accounts, destinations and connectors, with SSO from Okta or Entra ID. It governs who sets up pipelines. It says nothing about what an agent reads at query time. | ◆ |
| Break-glass | Scoped, time-boxed emergency access for agents. Admin plus IP-allowlist plus step-up gated, auto-revoking, and it cannot be quietly removed from the log. | Not described in their public material. | ◆ |
| GDPR erasure | Crypto-shred of per-subject key material, plus ISO 27560 consent receipts. Actor names in the chain are HMAC-committed, so the audit still verifies after the subject is gone. | Regional DPAs, plus GDPR and CCPA commitments. Erasing a subject inside the warehouse is your problem, as it is with every ELT tool. | ◆ |
| Sensitive field handling | Deterministic, join-preserving, vault-reversible tokens at ingest, plus quasi-identifier generalization: dates to year, decade or age band, ZIPs to 3 or 4 digits, partial phones, SSNs and emails, each with a measured cardinality-reduction score. Detokenization is privileged and audited. | Column blocking and hashing before data lands, plus customer-managed keys. Both are real and useful. Both are one-way, and you pick the columns by hand. | ◆ |
| PII and PHI classification | 129 built-in field classes across PII, PHI, financial data and secrets. The method is regex, checksum validation (Luhn, NPI, Verhoeff, ABA, IBAN, GTIN), column-name lexicons and anti-pattern suppressors. No model, so a verdict can be re-derived from a config digest. It cut over from shadow mode days ago, so call it shipped, not battle-tested. | We could not find field-level PII or PHI labelling in their governance material. They hook into catalog vendors who do it. | ◆ |
| MCP and agents | More than 200 MCP tools across Ontology, Auth, Corpus and Lighthouse. Auth issues MCP tool tokens with an enforced scope ceiling, meters each call and attributes it to the agent. | A real MCP server, scoped to connector and platform ops: list agents, manage connections, build custom connectors by prompt. Plus Agents Schema, an open standard that keeps agent context in plain SQL tables. Neither one authorizes a read. | ◆ |
| Deployment | Self-hosted in your own cloud or data center, or a dedicated single-tenant server we operate. Docker images ship for Auth, Ontology, Corpus and Lighthouse, and the deploy manifest is signed and verified by Guardian. | SaaS by default. Hybrid Deployment runs an agent on your side, so the data work happens in your network. The control plane, the scheduler and the metadata stay with Fivetran. There is no mode where the whole thing runs inside your walls. | ◆ |
| Certifications | None. We cite HIPAA §164.312(b), GDPR Art. 17 and ISO 27560 as design targets, each backed by a code path. SOC 2 not yet certified, and we say so on every page. | SOC 1 and SOC 2, ISO 27001, HITRUST, PCI DSS Level 1 on Business Critical, and a signed HIPAA BAA. | ◇ |
| Maturity signals | Auth, Guardian and Lighthouse are live in production (Guardian and Lighthouse since April 2026). Small team, source escrow in design-partner terms. | Founded 2012, merged with dbt Labs June 2026, more than 100,000 data teams, customers including Pfizer, Roche, Verizon and Siemens. | ◇ |
| Pricing | Published model with a scoped instant quote and no sales wall. | A published MAR usage curve with worked examples, and a 500,000 MAR free tier. Enterprise and Business Critical are quote-only. MAR is also famously hard to forecast through a backfill. | ◈ |
◆ DataShield leads◇ Fivetran leads◈ comparable
Fivetran claims are drawn from fivetran.com and Fivetran's own press releases, last checked 13 September 2026. We link them below rather than work from memory.
Three things you get here that you won't get from a data movement platform
Proof that survives an audit
A log a vendor can rewrite proves nothing. Ours is a hash chain with signed checkpoints. The verifier tells you what broke, not just that something did. Tamper again with a chain already marked as damaged, and it drops that mark on its own. That is the trait EU AI Act Article 12 and HIPAA §164.312(b) reviewers care about. Try it in your browser, no signup.
Authority that can change mid-flight
An analyst leaves on a Friday. Their agent is 20 minutes into a 40-minute job over the data your pipeline landed last night. With DataShield the next governed tool call is re-checked against live authority, and it fails closed. A pipeline has no view on this. It is not its job. How Auth does it.
An erasure you can defend
GDPR says delete. 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 Fivetran is genuinely stronger
Start with the boring truth. Connectors are a grind. Fivetran has been grinding since 2012. Schema drift, broken APIs, rate limits, backfills, a source vendor changing a field type on a Tuesday: they soak up all of it. The team you would need to do that yourself costs more than the bill. The dbt merger closed on 1 June 2026, so load and transform now sit under one roof, with dbt Core v2.0 keeping the Fusion engine under Apache 2.0. Their compliance shelf is fuller than ours by a mile. SOC 1 and SOC 2, ISO 27001, HITRUST, PCI DSS Level 1, a signed HIPAA BAA. We have none of it. If your buying gate is a certificate, that gate is real.
Here is the push-back, and their own research hands it to us. Their May 2026 Agentic AI Readiness Index found 41% of firms already run agentic AI in production. Only 15% say they are fully ready. Two of the top three barriers were named by 39% each: rules and risk. Their fix for that gap is better data. Cleaner, fresher, with Agents Schema handing agents context as plain SQL tables. It is a good standard. It says nothing about who may read what. An agent that reads a well-built context table is still an agent nobody checked. Column hashing is the closest they come. It is one-way, per connector, and picked by a human who has to know which columns matter. What a regulator asks is not whether the data was fresh. It is who was allowed to read it, and how you know.
Questions worth asking both of us
These are the questions we would want answered if we were the ones buying. Ask them on every 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 Ed25519-signed and chained. Verification tells deletion apart from truncation and from tampering. Try it at /verify. Fivetran: their governance page lists log events sent on to CloudWatch, Azure Monitor or Datadog. Those are ops logs. Nothing in their public material claims tamper evidence. Ask them what stops an admin editing history.
What happens to a revoked agent mid-session?
DataShield re-checks authority on every governed tool call. Revoke, and the very next call drops to anonymous. Fivetran's access control covers users and service accounts against accounts, destinations and connectors, fed from Okta or Entra ID. That is control at setup time, not at query time. Ask how long an agent with a warehouse credential keeps reading after you cut it off upstream.
How does GDPR erasure interact with the audit trail?
DataShield crypto-shreds the per-subject key material and issues an ISO 27560 consent receipt. Actor names in the chain are HMAC-committed, so the evidence still verifies once the subject is gone. Fivetran commits to GDPR and CCPA and offers regional DPAs. That is the right stance for a processor. Wiping a subject from the warehouse, and keeping the history sound, is still yours to solve.
Do we replace Fivetran with DataShield?
No. We have no connector library, no scheduler and no reverse ETL. If your problem is moving rows from 40 SaaS apps into Snowflake, buy Fivetran and be happy. Run us over the datasets agents query, where the job is labelling, authority and proof. Plenty of teams will run both. We would rather say that than pretend otherwise.
Fivetran now owns dbt and Great Expectations. Does that change anything for us?
It packs the stack tighter. The merger closed on 1 June 2026. Three weeks before that, Fivetran took stewardship of the Great Expectations open source community and GX Core. One firm now holds load, transform, and the best known open source data quality project. dbt Core v2.0 open-sourced the Fusion engine under Apache 2.0, which is a real good-faith signal. Still, ask what you would ask of any roll-up. Whose roadmap wins when load and transform pull apart? And what is your exit if the answer stops suiting you?
Does DataShield have SOC 2?
No, and we will not imply otherwise. Fivetran does, plus ISO 27001, HITRUST, PCI DSS Level 1 and a HIPAA BAA. What we offer instead is a mechanism you can check. A public threat model. A verifier you can run in your browser. Source escrow in design-partner terms, so a small vendor is not a single point of failure. Auth is live. Guardian and Lighthouse have been in production since April 2026. Details on the security page.
- Fivetran and dbt Labs completed their all-stock merger on 1 June 2026, serving "more than 100,000 data teams", and shipped dbt Core v2.0 alpha with the Fusion engine open-sourced under Apache 2.0, plus Agents Schema, an open standard storing agentic context as plain SQL tables. — Fivetran press release, 1 Jun 2026
- Fivetran became steward of the Great Expectations open source community and the GX Core project. — Fivetran press release, 13 May 2026
- Fivetran's 2026 Agentic AI Readiness Index surveyed 400 data professionals: 41% already run agentic AI in production, only 15% say they are fully prepared, and 39% name regulatory compliance and 39% name security and privacy as barriers. — Fivetran press release, 5 May 2026
- Fivetran's certifications: SOC 1 and SOC 2, ISO 27001, HITRUST, PCI DSS Level 1, a signed HIPAA BAA, customer-managed keys, and column blocking and hashing before data enters the destination. — fivetran.com/security, 13 Sep 2026
- Published pricing: a free tier of 500,000 monthly active rows, a per-MAR consumption curve with worked connection examples, and customer-managed encryption keys plus PCI DSS Level 1 only on Business Critical. — fivetran.com/pricing, 13 Sep 2026
- Homepage positioning: "The data foundation for AI" and "Automated data for autonomous agents", with 900+ sources and destinations. — fivetran.com, 13 Sep 2026
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