Head-to-head · updated 13 September 2026

DataShield vs Keboola: your pipeline landed the data, so who governs the agent that reads it?

Keboola is a data operations platform with a sharp new haircut. It used to sell a self-serve data stack to data engineers. Today the homepage says "Your board wants AI. Your data isn't ready" and pitches "the governed data foundation CFOs deploy before AI, live in eight weeks." Behind that sit 700+ connectors, SQL and Python transformations, orchestration, a Data Catalog, and finance logic most ELT tools never touch: a unified chart of accounts, currency conversion, intercompany eliminations. They shipped an open-source MCP server in 2025, before most of this market had a plan for agents. Good product, real customers, and a pitch with a point of view.

We build the layer underneath the answer, not the pipeline that produced it. DataShield is not an ELT tool and has no orchestrator. Datasets are tokenized at ingest; agents query tokenized data over MCP; detokenization is a privileged, audited operation. Every governed tool call is re-checked against the agent's current authority before it runs, and every decision is sealed into a hash chain you can verify without trusting us. Below is the split, including the rows where Keboola wins outright.

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The short version

Pick DataShield when

Someone will ask you to prove the agent access log was not edited. An auditor, a regulator, or Article 12 of the EU AI Act. Our chain answers with math, not a policy PDF. Run the verifier.
You need to cut an agent's authority mid-session and have the very next tool call fail. Not the next token refresh. The next call.
The data, the keys and the evidence have to sit on your own infrastructure. We ship Docker images and self-host. Keboola is a hosted platform.
The sensitive fields must be tokenized before an agent or a model ever sees them, and every detokenization has to leave a record.

Pick Keboola when

You need data moved. 700+ connectors, SQL and Python transformations, jobs, flows, CDC. We do none of that and never will.
The buyer is the CFO. Chart-of-accounts harmonization, currency conversion and intercompany eliminations are real engineering, and almost nobody else packages them.
You want a platform that is already SOC 2 Type II with a decade of operating history. We are not certified yet.
You would rather rent the whole stack than run it. Their free tier starts at $0 and you can be building this afternoon.

Bottom line: Keboola gets the data into shape and gives the CFO a number they can trace. DataShield decides what an agent may do with that data and keeps proof of the decision. Most buyers who talk to us already have a pipeline tool. Very few have an answer for the audit question.

Feature by feature

Competitor cells describe what Keboola's public site, docs and blog say as of the date above. If we have mischaracterised something, email support@myorg.ai and we will correct it, credited.

What matters	DataShield	Keboola	Edge
Pipelines and connectors	None. We ingest files, URLs and S3-compatible storage, and we watch a bucket or SFTP path for new files. There is no connector catalog and no orchestrator. If you need data out of NetSuite, buy a tool that does that.	The core of the product. 700+ connectors, SQL and Python transformations, jobs, flows, CDC and streaming at the Enterprise tier.	◇
Finance close logic	Nothing vertical. We classify, tokenize, resolve entities and govern access. Your chart of accounts is your business.	Unified chart of accounts, currency conversion, intercompany eliminations, plus "Audit & Controlling Agents" that watch the numbers. A genuine vertical build.	◇
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.	Lineage back to the source journal entry, an activity centre, and audited support access. That is traceability, which is useful. We found no cryptographic tamper evidence in their public material.	◆
Agent authorization	Every governed tool call passes a token scope ceiling, a consented-tool allowlist, a declared authority tier and a live revocation re-check before dispatch. It fails closed.	Their MCP server uses OAuth sign-in, project-level access control and isolated workspaces per run. Access is scoped at the project boundary, not re-decided per call. Ask them what happens on call number 400.	◆
Break-glass	Scoped, time-boxed emergency access for agents. It auto-revokes, needs step-up plus an IP allowlist, and cannot be quietly deleted from the log.	Not described in their public material.	◆
GDPR erasure	Crypto-shred of per-subject key material, plus ISO 27560 consent receipts. Actor identities in the chain are HMAC-committed, so the log still verifies after the subject is gone.	A GDPR-aligned data processing agreement and regional deployment for residency. The erasure mechanism itself is not described.	◆
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. Masking and generalization are switches you turn on, not defaults.	AES-256 at rest with AWS KMS and TLS in transit. Encryption, not tokenization. Tokens are not part of their vocabulary.	◆
Field classification	129 field classes covering PII, PHI, financial data and secrets, including all 18 HIPAA Safe Harbor identifiers. Regex plus checksums (Luhn, NPI, Verhoeff, ABA, IBAN), column-name lexicons and anti-pattern suppressors. No model, so verdicts are reproducible from a config digest. It cut over from shadow mode days ago, so it is new, not battle-worn.	Active metadata, a business glossary and a Data Catalog at the Enterprise tier. Sensitive-field classification is not a published capability.	◆
Catalog and glossary	A real catalog with asset and column metadata, a glossary materialized from entity types, typed lineage traversal with access gating at every hop, and a 29-command stewardship workflow. We scan and profile a live PostgreSQL source in place with no rows leaving it. PostgreSQL today, not your whole estate.	Data Catalog, active metadata and lineage across everything the platform moves, which is a lot more sources than we touch. Gated to Enterprise.	◈
Entity resolution and MDM	Fellegi-Sunter probabilistic record linkage with Jaro-Winkler, Levenshtein, Soundex and Double Metaphone comparators, LSH blocking, EM-trained parameters, five survivorship strategies and drift monitoring on every promoted match config.	Harmonization and mapping, mostly account and dimension alignment. We found no golden-record resolution engine in their docs. Worth asking, since the words look similar.	◆
MCP and agents	More than 200 MCP tools across Ontology, Auth, Corpus and Lighthouse. Tool tokens carry scope ceilings, calls are metered and attributed to the agent, and each one lands in the chain.	A real MCP server, open source under MIT, in customer hands since May 2025. 30+ tools for storage, SQL, jobs, flows and data apps, with OAuth login and a hosted endpoint. They were early and they deserve credit for it.	◆
Deployment	Self-hosted in your own cloud or data center, or a dedicated single-tenant server we operate. Docker images for Auth, Ontology, Corpus and Lighthouse. Ed25519 audit-signing keys can live in your KMS or HSM. HMAC tokenization keys sit in your environment today, not in a KMS, and we say so.	Hosted on AWS, Azure or GCP, with single-tenant stacks, dedicated domains and regional residency at the Enterprise tier. No self-hosted option we could find.	◆
Maturity signals	Auth, Guardian and Lighthouse are live in production (Guardian and Lighthouse since April 2026). SOC 2 not yet certified, and we will not pretend otherwise.	Long operating history, $32M Series A in December 2023 led by Viking Global after a $5M seed, 1,000+ companies claimed, SOC 2 Type II available under NDA.	◇
Pricing	Published model and a scoped instant quote, no sales wall.	Free tier at $0, then 60 compute minutes a month and $0.14 a minute over that, billed in Time Credits where one credit is an hour of job time. Enterprise is quote-only and holds the Data Catalog, SSO and the compliance package.	◈

◆ DataShield leads◇ Keboola leads◈ comparable

Keboola claims are drawn from keboola.com, its pricing page, its blog and the keboola/mcp-server repository, last checked 13 September 2026. We link the sources below rather than work from memory.

Three things you get here that you won't get from a data operations platform

Proof, not just lineage

Lineage tells you where a number came from, assuming the record of it is honest. A hash chain tells you whether the record itself was touched. Ours signs its checkpoints and chains them too, so deleting a checkpoint shows up. The verifier names what broke. Try it in your browser, no signup.

Authority that changes mid-flight

An analyst quits on a Friday. Their agent is 20 minutes into a 40-minute job over payroll data. With DataShield the next governed tool call is checked against current authority and fails closed. Project-scoped access does not do this. How Auth works.

An erasure you can defend

GDPR says delete the person. 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 Keboola is genuinely stronger

Start with the obvious. They move data and we do not. 700+ connectors, transformations in SQL, Python, R and Julia, jobs, flows, CDC, data apps. That is years of connector maintenance nobody enjoys and everybody needs. Their finance build is real too: a chart of accounts you can actually agree on, currency conversion, intercompany eliminations. And they were early on agents. The MCP server went from Anthropic's announcement in November 2024 to customer hands by May 2025, open source under MIT, with OAuth and isolated workspaces. We shipped ours in the same window and we know what that year cost.

Here is the push-back. Their June 2026 post draws the right line between guessing AI and verifiable AI, then defines verifiable as a governed semantic layer with lineage back to the journal entry. That makes an answer explainable. It does not make it enforceable, and it does not make the record of it provable. If an agent reads a payroll table it should never have opened, a glossary does not stop the call, lineage does not refuse it, and a mutable activity log does not prove what happened. Those are three different jobs and we only claim the second and third. Run their pipelines into your warehouse. Point your agents at governed datasets through us. Nobody has to lose.

Questions worth asking both of us

These are the questions we would ask if we were buying. Put them to every vendor on your list, including us.

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. Try it on a sample chain at /verify. Keboola: their material describes lineage, an activity centre and audited support access. We found no tamper-evidence mechanism published. Ask them to show one.

What happens to a revoked agent mid-session?

DataShield re-checks authority on every governed tool call, so revocation lands on the next call and the context drops to anonymous. Keboola's MCP server signs in over OAuth and scopes access at the project level, with isolated workspaces per run. We could not find a mid-session revocation mechanism in their docs. Ask how long a compromised agent keeps working after you pull its access.

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 identities in the chain are HMAC-committed, so the evidence still verifies once the subject is gone. Keboola publishes a GDPR-aligned processing agreement and regional deployment for residency. The mechanism for erasing a subject, and what that does to history, is not spelled out. Ask for the mechanism, not the policy.

Is DataShield an ELT tool? Do we drop Keboola?

No, and no. We have no connector catalog, no orchestrator and no opinion about your NetSuite extract. If the problem is getting data from 40 systems into one place, buy a platform that does that. Run us for the datasets agents actually query, where the obligation is authorization and evidence. Plenty of teams will sensibly run both.

Keboola ships an MCP server too. What's different?

Theirs opens the platform to an agent: read storage, write SQL, run jobs, build flows, deploy data apps. It is a good build and it was early. The agent signs in over OAuth, works inside a project and gets an isolated workspace. Ours is where the governed data is queried, so the tool token carries a scope ceiling, the call is authorized right then, usage is metered against the agent, and the decision is sealed into the chain. Different jobs. If you want an agent to build a pipeline, use theirs. If you want an agent to read regulated data under a policy you can later prove, use ours.

Does DataShield have SOC 2?

Not yet, and we will not imply otherwise. Keboola does, Type II, available under NDA, and that is a fair thing to weigh against us. What we offer instead is a published threat model, a verifier anyone can run, and source escrow in design-partner terms so a small vendor is not a single point of failure. Auth is live, and Guardian and Lighthouse have been in production since April 2026. Details on the security page.

Keboola's current positioning: "Your board wants AI. Your data isn't ready." and "the governed data foundation CFOs deploy before AI, live in eight weeks." — keboola.com, 13 Sep 2026
Free tier at $0 with 60 compute minutes a month after the first month and $0.14 a minute over that; Time Credits bill one hour of job time each; Data Catalog, SSO, SOC 2 Type II, GDPR and HIPAA sit at the Enterprise tier. — keboola.com/pricing, 13 Sep 2026
Keboola's MCP server is open source under MIT, exposes tools for storage, SQL, components, jobs, flows and data apps, and offers a hosted OAuth endpoint plus local stdio and HTTP transports. — github.com/keboola/mcp-server, 13 Sep 2026
MCP work started after Anthropic's November 2024 announcement, reached proof of concept in January 2025 and was in customer use by May 2025; 30+ tools, project-level access control, isolated workspaces. — Keboola blog, 29 Jun 2025
$32M Series A led by Viking Global Investors, with Presto Ventures and TCF Capital, following a $5M seed. — Keboola blog, 1 Dec 2023
SOC 2 Type II under annual audit and available under NDA, AES-256 at rest via AWS KMS, TLS 1.2+ in transit, SAML and OAuth SSO, single-tenant stacks with regional residency. — Keboola blog, 18 Jan 2026
Keboola defines verifiable AI as a governed semantic layer with lineage traced back to the source journal entry. — Keboola blog, 18 Jun 2026

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