Head-to-head · updated 13 September 2026

DataShield vs Peliqan: two trust layers, one of them keeps proof

Peliqan calls itself "The trust layer for AI & BI", and it is the closest thing to us in the all-in-one data platform market. One vendor gives you 300+ connectors, built-in ELT, a warehouse with a federated query engine, reverse ETL, BI connectivity, low-code data apps, and a single MCP endpoint an agent can read from and write through. Credentials stay inside Peliqan, the agent gets a scoped key, and you can pull any tool in one click. They hold SOC 2 Type II. They publish their prices. For a 60-person finance team in Ghent or Leeds, that is a very good afternoon's shopping.

We sell the same headline promise and a different mechanism underneath it. Datasets are tokenized at ingest; agents query tokenized data over MCP; detokenization is a privileged, audited operation. Fields are classified against 129 built-in PII, PHI, financial and secret classes before an agent ever sees them. Every governed tool call re-checks the agent's authority right then, and every decision lands in a hash chain with signed checkpoints that anyone can verify without trusting us. Below is the honest split, including the rows Peliqan wins outright.

Get free Demo Center access Get an instant quote

The short version

Pick DataShield when

Someone will ask you to prove an agent's activity log was not edited. An auditor, an examiner, or Article 12 of the EU AI Act. An activity dashboard is a screen. 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 login. The next call.
You need to know which columns hold PHI before the agent queries them, and you want those values tokenized rather than trusted to a role setting. How the catalog does it.
The whole stack has to run on your own hardware without an enterprise contract, on keys you hold.

Pick Peliqan when

You need data out of 300+ business systems this month. Exact Online, Teamleader, Odoo, the ERP nobody has touched since 2019. We do not have that connector estate and we will not pretend otherwise.
Your procurement form has a SOC 2 Type II box. They have one. We do not, yet.
You want BI tools, an Excel add-in, reverse ETL and low-code data apps from the same vendor. That bundle is real and it is cheap at EUR 75 per source.
You want your agent to write back into business apps. Their MCP server does create and update, by design. Ours governs reads of governed datasets.

Bottom line: Peliqan moves your data and gives an agent one safe door into it. We decide what the agent may do once it is through the door, and keep proof of the decision. If your problem is plumbing, buy the plumbing. If your problem is the examiner, the plumbing will not answer.

Feature by feature

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

What matters	DataShield	Peliqan	Edge
Connectors and ELT	Not our job. We ingest files, S3-compatible storage, SFTP and SMB subtrees, and we register a live PostgreSQL database as a catalog provider. Snowflake, BigQuery, Databricks, Salesforce and the rest are declared on the roadmap with no handler yet.	300+ pre-built connectors with a managed ELT engine and a built-in warehouse. This is the core of the product and it is good.	◇
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.	"You see all activity in one dashboard", and they log AI queries and writeback actions. We found no tamper-evidence mechanism in their public material. A log you can edit is a record, not evidence.	◆
Agent authorization	Every governed tool call runs the same pipeline before dispatch: authority refresh, metering guard, auth gate, consented-tool narrowing, scope ceiling, authority tier. It fails closed.	"Your AI gets a scoped key, never your passwords", with role-based access and per-app action controls. Scoping happens when the key is issued. We found no per-call decision point.	◆
Mid-session revocation	Authority is revalidated on every governed tool call. Revoke at 14:02 and the 14:02:01 call is refused.	"You can revoke any tool in one click." Good ergonomics. How fast that reaches a session already running is not stated. Worth asking on the call.	◆
Break-glass	Scoped, time-boxed emergency access for agents, gated by admin plus IP allowlist plus step-up, and it cannot be quietly removed from the log.	Not described in their public material.	◆
PII and PHI classification	129 built-in field classes covering PII, PHI, financial data and secrets, including all 18 HIPAA Safe Harbor identifiers. Regex plus checksum validation (Luhn, NPI, Verhoeff, ABA, IBAN, GTIN) plus column-name lexicons and anti-pattern suppressors. Deterministic, with reproducible verdicts stamped by a config digest. No model, so no drift.	Governance is framed as role-based access, audit trails and per-app action controls. We found no field-level sensitive-data classification in their docs.	◆
Tokenization and generalization	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.	Not vocabulary they use. Data lands in the warehouse in the clear and is governed by access rules.	◆
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 compliant, EU-hosted, with region-locked storage and zero data egress on the sovereign tier. The erasure mechanism itself is not described.	◆
MCP and agents	More than 200 MCP tools across Ontology, Auth, Corpus and Lighthouse. Auth issues MCP tool tokens with an enforced scope ceiling, delegation is RFC 8693 token exchange, and per-call metering is attributed to the agent.	One endpoint over 300+ apps, read and write, with credentials held centrally. Broader reach than ours by a wide margin. Thinner underneath.	◈
Entity resolution	Fellegi-Sunter probabilistic record linkage with Jaro-Winkler, Levenshtein, Soundex and Double Metaphone comparators, LSH blocking, EM-trained parameters and five survivorship strategies. Golden records are exposed to agents behind masked views.	Unifying 300+ sources here means connectivity and SQL. We found no entity-resolution or golden-record capability.	◆
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 a signed deploy manifest is verified by Guardian. Ed25519 audit-signing keys can live in your own KMS or HSM. HMAC tokenization keys sit in your environment today, not in a KMS.	EU-hosted SaaS. On-prem Kubernetes, bare metal and private cloud exist, but only on the Enterprise tier with custom pricing.	◆
Certifications	SOC 2 not yet certified, and we say so on every page. Published threat model, a verifier anyone can run, source escrow in design-partner terms.	SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001:2022 and GDPR. Their about page calls ISO 27001 in progress while the security page presents it as held, so ask which is current.	◇
Maturity signals	Auth, Guardian and Lighthouse are live in production (Guardian and Lighthouse since April 2026). Field classification cut over from shadow mode days ago, and that is new rather than battle-tested.	Founded 2022 in Ghent, with an office in Bangalore. Homepage claims 10,000+ companies powered, plus a named logo wall and a whitelabel partner channel.	◇
Pricing	Published model, scoped instant quote, no sales wall.	Published too: EUR 75 per source per month on Connect, EUR 500 per month on PRO, custom on Enterprise. Credit where it is due.	◈

◆ DataShield leads◇ Peliqan leads◈ comparable

Peliqan claims are drawn from peliqan.io, last checked 13 September 2026. We link the pages below rather than work from memory. Peliqan runs no press wire we could find, so dates come from their blog.

Three things you get here that you won't get from an all-in-one data platform

Proof, not a dashboard

Their own blog puts it well: logging AI queries turns "the AI said something odd last week" into a five-minute lookup. True, and useful. But a lookup assumes the log is honest. 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 leaves on a Friday. 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. One-click revoke in a console is a fine button. Ask what it does to the session already running. How Auth does it.

The sensitive columns named before the agent asks

A warehouse that has synced 300 sources holds a lot of things nobody labelled. We classify each field against 129 classes, store no column values by default, and tokenize at ingest so the agent joins on a token instead of a national ID. Detokenization is a separate, privileged, logged act. See the catalog.

Where Peliqan is genuinely stronger

Start with the obvious. 300+ connectors and a managed ELT engine is years of unglamorous work, and we have not done it. Our live catalog scanning covers PostgreSQL and nothing else yet. They ship a warehouse, a federated query engine, BI connectivity, an Excel add-in, reverse ETL and low-code data apps in the same subscription, from EUR 75 per source. They hold SOC 2 Type II and they will sell you a single-tenant EU sovereign deployment with region-locked storage. Their MCP server writes as well as reads, across all of it, which is a bigger surface than ours. And their architectural argument is right: an agent querying a synced warehouse behaves better than an agent hammering live APIs, because it can join across systems and it will not trip a rate limit at month end.

Here is the push-back. Their governance story is access plus activity, and both are configured once. A scoped key decides what an agent may reach at issue time; the dashboard tells you afterwards what it did. Nothing in the middle re-asks the question at the moment of the call, nothing labels which of those synced columns hold PHI, and nothing makes the activity record hard to change. Gartner expects most unauthorized agent transactions through 2028 to be internal policy violations rather than attacks, which is exactly the case where a correctly issued key does the wrong thing and an editable log is the only witness. That middle layer is what we sell, and it sits happily on top of a warehouse somebody else filled.

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, and verification tells deletion apart from truncation and from tampering. Run it against a sample chain at /verify. Peliqan: their material describes an activity dashboard and logging of AI queries and writeback. We found no tamper-evidence mechanism. Ask them who can edit the table.

What happens to a revoked agent mid-session?

DataShield re-checks authority on every governed tool call, so revocation lands on the next call rather than the next login. Peliqan says every AI client gets scoped access you can revoke instantly, and you can pull any tool in one click. What we could not find is how that reaches a session already in flight. Ask how long a compromised agent keeps working after you click.

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. Peliqan is GDPR compliant and EU-hosted, with region-locked storage and zero data egress on the sovereign tier. The mechanism of erasure across the warehouse and its logs is not spelled out. Ask for the mechanism, not the badge.

Is DataShield an ELT tool? Do we drop Peliqan?

No, and probably not. We do not maintain 300 connectors, we have no opinion about your Exact Online rate limits, and our live-source catalog scanning is PostgreSQL only today. If moving data is the problem, buy a tool that moves data. Run us over the datasets agents actually touch, where the obligation is classification, authorization and evidence. Plenty of teams will sensibly run both.

Peliqan's MCP server writes to business apps. Does yours?

Theirs does, on purpose: create and update across 300+ apps behind one endpoint. That is a real capability and a real blast radius, so ask what a bad write looks like and how you unwind it. Ours governs a data plane instead. Agents query tokenized datasets, tool tokens carry an enforced scope ceiling, delegation uses RFC 8693 token exchange, and the call is authorized before dispatch and sealed into the chain after. Different jobs. If you want an agent to update a CRM record, theirs. If you want an agent to read regulated data under a policy you can later prove, ours.

Does DataShield have SOC 2?

Not yet, and we will not imply otherwise. Peliqan does, along with ISO 27001, and on that row they beat us cleanly. What we offer instead is a published threat model, a verifier anyone can run against a sample chain, and design-partner terms that include source escrow so a small vendor is not a single point of failure. Details on the security page.

Peliqan's hero: "The trust layer for AI & BI. Governed data warehouse that unifies 300+ sources, with built-in ELT. Your AI agents connect through one unified MCP server." — peliqan.io, 13 Sep 2026
MCP server: "300+ apps behind one endpoint", read and write, "Your AI gets a scoped key, never your passwords", and "you can revoke any tool in one click". — peliqan.io/mcp, 13 Sep 2026
Published pricing: Connect at EUR 75 per data source per month, PRO at EUR 500 per month, Enterprise custom with on-prem Kubernetes, bare metal or private cloud. — peliqan.io/pricing, 13 Sep 2026
SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001:2022 and GDPR, plus a single-tenant European sovereign cloud option with region-locked storage and zero data egress. — peliqan.io/security, 13 Sep 2026
"Peliqan logs AI queries and writeback actions, which turns 'the AI said something odd last week' from an unanswerable question into a five-minute lookup." — Peliqan blog, AI-ready data, 26 Aug 2026
Founded 2022, headquartered in Ghent, Belgium, with an office in Bangalore; ISO 27001 described as in progress on this page. — peliqan.io/about, 13 Sep 2026

Other head-to-heads

Same market

Get free Demo Center access

You've seen the proof

Ready for a number? Scope your deployment and we'll price it against your own economics.

Get your quote →