Head-to-head · updated 13 September 2026

DataShield vs Metaplane: your tables are fresh, but can you prove what the agent read?

Metaplane is a good data observability tool and it is honest about what it is. Point it at Snowflake, wait a day, and it starts telling you when a table went stale, when a row count fell off a cliff, and when someone changed a column type on a Friday. Column-level lineage shows you which dashboard breaks. There is a free tier with no credit card, which is rarer than it should be. Datadog bought them in April 2025 and the product still sells on its own as Metaplane by Datadog.

We do none of that. DataShield has no anomaly detection, no monitors on your warehouse tables, no freshness SLAs and no incident management. We sit one layer over: the datasets your AI agents actually read. Every dataset gets a 20-section profile and a trust score. Fields get classified against 129 PII and PHI classes. 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, and the decision is sealed into a hash chain you can verify yourself. Below is the honest split, rows they win included.

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The short version

Pick DataShield when

Agents are already querying your data and somebody will ask you to prove what they touched. Our audit chain answers with a hash, not a screenshot. Run the verifier.
You need to cut an agent's authority mid-job and have the next tool call fail. An alert on Monday is not the same thing.
The data has PII or PHI in it and you want the fields classified and tokenized before a model ever sees a row.
Nothing may leave your network, not even metadata. We self-host on your own hardware.

Pick Metaplane when

Your problem is silent breakage. Stale tables, dropped rows, a schema change nobody announced. That is the job they were built for and we do not do it at all.
You want to try it this afternoon. Free forever at 10 tables, no card, and they claim setup in about 15 minutes with anomalies flagged within a day.
You live in Snowflake. There is a Native App and you can pay out of credits you have already committed.
You already run Datadog. Metaplane is Datadog's data observability line now, and one vendor, one invoice, one on-call rota is a real argument.

Bottom line: Metaplane tells you the data broke. DataShield tells you who read it, under what authority, and proves the record was not edited. These are different jobs and most teams with agents in production will end up wanting both.

Feature by feature

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

What matters	DataShield	Metaplane	Edge
Anomaly detection and alerting	We have none, and we will not pretend. No monitors on warehouse tables, no freshness SLAs, no incident workflow. What we do have is change and drift detection over datasets we ingest: a diff engine, a change classifier, schema evolution tracking and a CDC log.	The core product. Machine-learned detection on freshness, volume, schema and distribution, with alerts to Slack, Teams, email and PagerDuty. Custom SQL monitors on every tier.	◇
Data quality scoring	Every dataset gets a 20-section analysis profile: completeness, field statistics, patterns, column semantics, a relationship graph, quality metrics, lineage and compliance governance. On top sits a weighted composite trust score per entity type, per domain and across the estate, with a per-axis breakdown and a trend, recomputed hourly.	Quality is expressed as monitors and incidents rather than a scored profile. Data Insights covers warehouse usage and cost. We found no per-dataset trust score in their public material.	◆
Lineage	A typed lineage graph with access gating at every hop, derived from the pipelines that own the data. It is not a stored column-level graph of your warehouse, and it does not reach into dbt.	Column-level lineage from Pro upward, with impact analysis, and it is one of the better ones in the category.	◇
PII and PHI classification	129 field classes covering PII, PHI, financial data and secrets, with deterministic, reproducible verdicts. All 18 HIPAA Safe Harbor identifiers are discrete classes, each citing 45 CFR §164.514(b)(2). Also source-system fingerprinting across 95 built-ins.	Not part of the product. Their security page says they only touch aggregate metadata such as row counts, freshness and summary statistics, so classification of field contents is out of scope by design.	◆
Tokenization and data handling	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. Detokenization is privileged and logged.	No tokenization. Their answer to the same worry is to never read your values in the first place, which is a clean design for a monitoring tool.	◆
Audit evidence	SHA-256 hash chain with Ed25519-signed checkpoints that are themselves chained. Verification returns clean, attested damage or tampered, and names the break. Try the verifier.	Alert history and incident records. We found no cryptographic tamper evidence in their public docs.	◆
Agent authorization	Every governed tool call passes a scope ceiling, a consented-tool allowlist, an authority tier and a revocation re-check before dispatch. It fails closed.	Not a thing they sell. Access is scoped by user and role in a dashboard.	◆
Break-glass	Scoped, time-boxed emergency access for agents, admin and step-up gated, IP-allowlisted, fully audited and auto-revoking.	Not described in their public material.	◆
GDPR erasure	Crypto-shred of per-subject key material plus ISO 27560 consent receipts. The audit chain still verifies after the subject is gone.	GDPR compliance is claimed on their security page. Since they hold metadata rather than your rows, subject erasure is largely your warehouse's problem, not theirs.	◆
MCP and agents	More than 200 MCP tools across Ontology, Auth, Corpus and Lighthouse. MCP tool tokens carry scope ceilings, and per-call usage is metered and attributed to the agent.	No AI, agent or MCP language anywhere on their site as of this check. Datadog ships its own MCP server covering APM, logs, metrics, monitors and dashboards; we found no Metaplane data-quality tools in its documented surface.	◆
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, with a signed deploy manifest Guardian verifies. Ed25519 audit-signing keys can live in your KMS or HSM. HMAC tokenization keys sit in your environment today, not in a KMS.	SaaS only, on AWS, hosted in the United States. PrivateLink at Enterprise. We found no self-hosted or customer-account option.	◆
Warehouse and connector coverage	Narrow and we say so. We scan, profile and classify a live PostgreSQL source in place, with no rows leaving it. Snowflake, BigQuery, Databricks, S3 and Salesforce are declared on the roadmap with no handler yet. That is PostgreSQL today, not your whole estate.	Broad warehouse coverage with a Snowflake Native App, dbt integration and job monitoring. This is their home turf.	◇
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 on every page.	Founded 2019, Y Combinator, $22.2M raised, acquired by Datadog in April 2025. SOC 2, GDPR and HIPAA compliance claimed, reports on request. Around 25 named customers with attributed quotes.	◇
Pricing	Published model, scoped instant quote, no sales wall.	Free forever at 10 tables and 4 users. Pro is usage-based per monitored table at 100 tables and 12 users. Enterprise is quote only. No dollar figures published for Pro or Enterprise.	◈

◆ DataShield leads◇ Metaplane leads◈ comparable

Metaplane claims are drawn from metaplane.dev and Datadog's own blog and docs, 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 observability platform

Proof an examiner can check

A monitoring tool writes alerts. Alerts are rows in a database, and rows can be edited. Ours is a hash chain with signed checkpoints, and the verifier names what broke: tampering, insertion, deletion or truncation. That is the property EU AI Act Article 12 and HIPAA §164.312(b) reviewers ask about. Try it in your browser, no signup.

Authority that changes mid-flight

An analyst hands in notice on a Friday afternoon. 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 monitoring layer would tell you about it on Monday. How Auth does it.

A profile that knows what the column means

Row counts and freshness say a column is present. They do not say it holds a medical record number. We classify fields against 129 classes, including all 18 HIPAA Safe Harbor identifiers, and give the dataset a trust score you can watch over time. What Ontology profiles.

Where Metaplane is genuinely stronger

Their whole product is the thing we do not build. Machine-learned anomaly detection on freshness, volume, schema and distribution is hard to get right, and the hard part is not the maths. It is not drowning the on-call engineer. Metaplane tuned that for years on mid-market warehouses and the customer quotes read like real ones, with a named person and a named number rather than a blended vendor average. Column-level lineage and impact analysis are strong. The free tier is free, not a trial. And Datadog's distribution is an advantage no independent data-quality vendor can buy, which is roughly what the founder said out loud when the deal closed.

Here is the push-back, and it is a question about the next two years rather than a knock on the product. Metaplane has not said a word about AI agents. No agent language, no MCP, no per-call authorization, before or after the acquisition. Datadog's own MCP server exposes APM, logs, metrics and monitors, and we could not find Metaplane's data-quality surface in it. Meanwhile agents are the thing reading your tables now. The question that follows a broken dashboard used to be "which pipeline?" Increasingly it is "which agent, under whose authority, and can you show me?" That question lands on a different layer, and it is the one we sell. Ask them where it lands on their roadmap. It is a fair question and they may well have a good answer.

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 signed and chained, and the verdict tells deletion apart from truncation and from tampering. Run it against a sample chain at /verify. Metaplane: their material describes alerting and incident history. We found no tamper-evidence mechanism in their public docs. 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 very next call. Metaplane does not sell agent access control, so the honest answer is that this question goes to whatever issued the agent its warehouse credentials. Worth asking your warehouse vendor how long a pulled credential keeps working.

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 erased. Metaplane claims GDPR compliance and holds aggregate metadata rather than your rows, so erasure of subject data is mostly a question for your warehouse. Ask both of us for the mechanism, not the policy page.

Is DataShield a data observability tool? Do we drop Metaplane?

No, and no. We have no anomaly detection, no monitors on your warehouse tables, no freshness SLAs and no incident management. If silent breakage is your problem, buy a monitoring tool. Run us on the datasets agents read, where the obligation is classification, authorization and evidence. Plenty of teams will sensibly run both.

Metaplane is owned by Datadog now. Does that change anything?

It might. The April 2025 announcement said the experience stays the same "for now," which is a careful phrase. Datadog's stated plan is to fold data monitoring into one platform with infrastructure and application monitoring. That is good news if you already run Datadog and less good if you bought Metaplane because it was a focused data-quality tool with a free tier. Ask them what the standalone product and the free tier look like in 2027. We are small and independent, which cuts both ways, and our design-partner terms include source escrow so a small vendor is not a single point of failure.

Does DataShield have SOC 2?

Not yet, and we will not imply otherwise. Metaplane claims SOC 2, GDPR and HIPAA on its security page, with reports on request. We publish a threat model, a verifier anyone can run, and an honest limitations list instead. Auth is live, Guardian and Lighthouse have been in production since April 2026. Details on the security page.

Metaplane's hero: "Be the first to know about data incidents" and "an end-to-end data observability platform that catches silent data quality issues before they impact your business." — metaplane.dev, 13 Sep 2026
Datadog acquired Metaplane on 23 April 2025; the product continues standalone as Metaplane by Datadog and "all features, support, and services continue uninterrupted." — Metaplane blog, 23 Apr 2025
Datadog's stated plan: unify infrastructure, application and data monitoring, building on Data Jobs Monitoring and Data Streams Monitoring. — Datadog blog, 23 Apr 2025
Tiers as published: Free (10 monitored tables, 4 users, 3 custom SQL monitors), Pro (usage-based, 100 tables, 12 users, column-level lineage), Enterprise (custom, SSO, PrivateLink). No dollar figures for Pro or Enterprise. — metaplane.dev/pricing, 13 Sep 2026
Metaplane "only accesses aggregate metadata, such as row counts, freshness, and summary statistics"; SaaS on AWS, hosted in the United States; SOC 2, GDPR and HIPAA compliance claimed. — metaplane.dev/security, 13 Sep 2026
Datadog's MCP server documents coverage of APM, logs, metrics, monitors, dashboards and security signals. No Metaplane data-quality tools appear in its documented surface. — Datadog docs, 13 Sep 2026

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