Head-to-head · updated 13 September 2026

DataShield vs Reltio (SAP): is master data management still a choice you make on its own?

Reltio is a good product. It runs multidomain MDM at a scale we do not, across customer, product and supplier data, for Pfizer and Mars and forty other brands you know. Gartner made them a Leader in the 2026 Magic Quadrant for MDM. They ship real agent tooling now: AgentFlow, a set of prebuilt agents with names like Resolver and Unmerger, and their own MCP Server. Their hero line is "The future is agentic AI. The foundation is Reltio," and they have earned the right to say it.

Then SAP bought them. The deal closed on 7 May 2026 and Reltio is now "a core capability within SAP Business Data Cloud." If you picked Reltio partly to stay off a big platform contract, that plan just changed. We are a smaller stack with a narrower job: master data you host yourself, matching maths you can check line by line, and an audit chain an examiner can verify without trusting us. Below is the honest split, including the rows Reltio wins outright.

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The short version

Pick DataShield when

Your golden records have to live on hardware you control. Reltio is cloud only. We ship Docker images and run self-hosted in your own cloud or data center, or as a dedicated single-tenant server we operate.
You want to see how the match was scored. Ours is Fellegi and Sunter probabilistic linkage with Jaro-Winkler, Levenshtein, Soundex and Double Metaphone, LSH blocking, and m and u values trained by EM. You can read the weights. How the ontology works.
An agent will read those golden records, and someone will later ask you to prove what it was allowed to see. Our audit log is a hash chain with signed checkpoints. Run the verifier.
You want MDM priced and scoped without a six-month programme in front of it. You can see a price before you book a call.

Pick Reltio when

You need multidomain MDM across customer, product, supplier and location at once, with the UI and the reference architectures to match. This is their home ground and they are better at it.
You are an SAP shop. Reltio inside Business Data Cloud means one contract, one support line, and an integration path we cannot offer.
You want prebuilt agents out of the box. Resolver, Unmerger, Profiler, Work Assigner, Address Enricher and friends already exist. Ours are tools you wire up yourself.
Most of your dark data is documents. AgentFlow Unstructured pulls PDFs and Word files into unified profiles. We do not do that at their depth.

Bottom line: Reltio is the better MDM suite. We are the better fit when the data cannot leave your building, when the match logic has to be auditable, or when the agent reading the golden record needs an authority check on every call.

Feature by feature

Competitor cells describe what Reltio's public site, press releases and SAP's own announcements say as of the date above. If we have mischaracterised something, email support@myorg.ai and we will correct it, credited.

What matters	DataShield	Reltio	Edge
Multidomain MDM	Open entity-type vocabulary with a People, Places and Things business category, per-type matching modes, parent-scoped hierarchies, curated reference datasets and validation rules that gate golden publication. It is real, but it is one product team's worth of breadth.	The category leader. Customer, product, supplier, location and more, with Intelligent 360 on top, and a Gartner MQ Leader placement in April 2026 to back it.	◇
Entity resolution method	Fellegi and Sunter probabilistic record linkage. Comparators: Jaro-Winkler, normalised Levenshtein, Soundex, Double Metaphone, n-gram, date and numeric proximity. LSH blocking. EM-trained m and u parameters. Five survivorship strategies. Population Stability Index drift monitoring on every promoted match config. An absolute-identifier tier routes identifier conflicts to review instead of merging blind.	Strong and long-standing, and they have shipped ML-assisted entity resolution for years. The scoring internals are not published in the detail ours are, so you cannot read the weights.	◈
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 Guardian verifies a signed deploy manifest.	Cloud only, on AWS, Google Cloud and Azure, and now delivered through SAP Business Data Cloud. We found no self-hosted or on-premises option in their public material.	◆
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. Ed25519 signing keys can live in your KMS or HSM. Try the verifier.	AgentFlow lists audit logging and role-based access control. We found no published cryptographic tamper evidence. Ask them whether a log entry can be silently edited.	◆
Agent authorization	Every governed tool call passes a scope ceiling, an authority tier and a revocation re-check before dispatch, then metering, then a sealed audit write. The call fails closed. Delegation is RFC 8693 token exchange with an enforced scope ceiling.	Role-based access control on the platform, plus the Reltio MCP Server for "real-time, secure access to governed data." We found no per-call decision point or mid-session revalidation in their docs.	◆
Break-glass	Scoped, time-boxed emergency access for agents, gated by admin role, IP allowlist and step-up. It auto-revokes 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 and a consent-validity record per subject and purpose sitting under the masked golden views. Actor identities in the chain are HMAC-committed, so the audit still verifies after the subject is gone.	Their 2025.1 release added data masking rules for PII inside the platform. The erasure mechanism, and what it does to history, is not spelled out.	◆
Tokenization	Datasets are tokenized at ingest; agents query tokenized data over MCP; detokenization is a privileged, audited operation. Tokens are deterministic and join-preserving, so records still match across datasets. Matching runs on real source values, and a tokenized-at-rest matching field makes the run refuse with a typed error rather than merge everything together.	Masking rules, yes. Reversible tokenization is not vocabulary they use.	◆
MCP and agents	More than 200 MCP tools across Ontology, Auth, Corpus and Lighthouse, with 99 commands on the MDM tool alone. Tool tokens carry scope ceilings, and per-call usage is metered and attributed to the agent.	A shipped Reltio MCP Server plus AgentFlow, with prebuilt agents including Resolver, Unmerger, Profiler, Data Explorer and Segmenter, and an Agent Builder for custom ones. This is a real surface, not a slide.	◈
Unstructured data	Corpus indexes documents for retrieval with local embeddings, and we extract text from PDF, DOCX and EML. We do not push extracted facts into golden profiles.	AgentFlow Unstructured ingests PDFs, Word files and HTML to enrich unified profiles, so a folder of documents becomes profile attributes. That is a capability we do not have.	◇
Vendor independence	We are small and independent. Design-partner terms include source escrow, so a small vendor is not a single point of failure.	Owned by SAP since 7 May 2026. SAP says the portfolio stays available standalone "for the foreseeable future." That is a sentence, not a contract term.	◆
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. The MDM matching engine is validated against real public Chicago datasets, not only synthetic ones.	Founded 2011, $185M ARR at the end of FY26, over 200 large enterprise customers, 43 of the Fortune 500, Gartner MQ Leader, ISO 27001 and alignment to HITRUST CSF and NIST 800-53.	◇
Pricing	Published model, scoped instant quote, no sales wall.	Quote only, billed by consolidated profile count and invoiced annually in advance according to third-party summaries. Reltio publishes no figures, and post-acquisition the number may arrive inside an SAP negotiation.	◆

◆ DataShield leads◇ Reltio leads◈ comparable

Reltio claims are drawn from reltio.com, Reltio press releases and SAP's own newsroom, 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 an enterprise MDM suite

Golden records that never leave your building

A pharma client once asked us where the match index would sit. Not the data. The index. That is a fair question, and "our cloud" is not an answer for everyone. We ship Docker images and run in your own cloud or data center. See the architecture.

Authority that can change mid-flight

A steward leaves on a Friday. Their agent is still 20 minutes into a 40-minute merge run. With DataShield the next governed tool call is re-checked against current authority and fails closed. Not the next token refresh. The next call. How Auth does it.

Proof that survives an audit

A log that can be silently edited proves nothing. 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.

Where Reltio is genuinely stronger

We would rather you heard this from us. Reltio has been building MDM since 2011 and it shows. Multidomain breadth, a stewardship UI real business users will sit in all day, pharma reference architectures, and a partner bench of system integrators who have done this fifty times. They hit $185M ARR at the end of FY26 with over 200 large enterprise customers and 43 of the Fortune 500. Gartner named them a Leader in April 2026. Their agent story is shipped, not sketched: AgentFlow, eight or more named prebuilt agents, an Agent Builder, and an MCP Server. And AgentFlow Unstructured does something we simply do not do, which is turn a folder of PDFs and Word files into enriched profile attributes. If your problem is breadth, buy breadth.

Here is the push-back, and it is about where the product now lives. Reltio is cloud only and, since 7 May 2026, a component of SAP Business Data Cloud. SAP says standalone purchase continues "for the foreseeable future." Read that phrase again slowly. Every buyer who chose Reltio to avoid a platform dependency now has one, and the roadmap is set by someone else's agenda. Meanwhile the thing an agent-first buyer actually needs is not more domains. It is a decision point on each tool call, a revocation that lands on the next call rather than the next refresh, and an evidence artefact an examiner can check without taking anyone's word for it. We found none of those three in Reltio's public material. That is the seam we sell into, and we are happy to lose the rest.

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 the verdict is clean, attested damage, or tampered. Deletion reads differently from truncation, and differently again from an edit. Run it at /verify. Reltio: AgentFlow lists audit logging, and the platform holds ISO 27001. 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 next call. Reltio has role-based access control and an MCP Server, but no published detail on token lifetime, scope model, or revocation behaviour. Ask how long a compromised agent keeps reading golden records after you pull its access. The answer is usually the token TTL, and the token TTL is usually too long.

How does GDPR erasure interact with the audit trail?

DataShield crypto-shreds the per-subject key, which destroys every ciphertext for that subject at once, and issues an ISO 27560 consent receipt. Actor identities in the chain are HMAC-committed, so the evidence still verifies. Reltio added masking rules in 2025.1. Masking is not erasure. Ask for the mechanism, not the workflow, and ask what it does to match history.

What does the SAP acquisition mean if I buy Reltio now?

SAP closed on 7 May 2026 and calls Reltio "a core capability within SAP Business Data Cloud." SAP's own March release says the portfolio stays available standalone "for the foreseeable future." We are not going to tell you that is a disaster, because it is not. SAP has money and a field team, and Reltio will get both. But if you chose Reltio to stay independent of a platform vendor, ask for the standalone commitment in writing, with a term on it. Also ask who sets the roadmap for a non-SAP customer in year three.

Can we run Reltio, or DataShield, inside our own infrastructure?

Reltio is cloud only in everything we could find, built on AWS, Google Cloud and Azure, and now delivered through SAP's cloud. DataShield ships Docker images for Auth, Ontology, Corpus and Lighthouse, and runs self-hosted in your own cloud or data center, or as a dedicated single-tenant server we operate. If a residency rule or a board decision says the master data index stays inside your walls, that is the whole conversation.

Is DataShield a replacement for a full multidomain MDM programme?

For a lot of teams, no, and we will say so on the call. If you need customer, product, supplier and location domains live at once with a stewardship UI for two hundred business users, Reltio is the better buy. We fit the team that needs one or two domains done properly, hosted themselves, with explainable matching and an agent-safe read path. Plenty of buyers in that shape have been quoted enterprise MDM and walked away.

Does DataShield have SOC 2?

Not yet, and we will not imply otherwise. Auth is live with a public threat model and a verifier anyone can run. Guardian and Lighthouse have been in production since April 2026. Reltio holds ISO 27001 and says its security program follows HITRUST CSF and NIST 800-53, which is more than we can claim today. Design-partner terms include source escrow, so a small vendor is not a single point of failure. Details on the security page.

Reltio's current positioning: "The future is agentic AI. The foundation is Reltio." Product lines include Intelligent 360, Multidomain MDM and AgentFlow. — reltio.com, 13 Sep 2026
SAP completed its acquisition of Reltio on 7 May 2026, making it a core capability within SAP Business Data Cloud. — SAP News, 7 May 2026
"The Reltio portfolio will also remain available as a standalone offering for the foreseeable future," with a flexible model to buy it separately or bundled with SAP products. — SAP News, 27 Mar 2026
$185M ARR for the fiscal year ended 31 January 2026, over 200 large enterprise customers, 43 Fortune 500. Introduces AgentFlow and the Reltio MCP Server. — Reltio press release, 10 Feb 2026
Reltio AgentFlow ships prebuilt agents including Resolver, Unmerger, Profiler, Work Assigner and Data Explorer, an Agent Builder, and AgentFlow Unstructured for PDF, Word and HTML ingestion. — reltio.com/agentflow, 13 Sep 2026
Named a Leader in the 2026 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Master Data Management Solutions. — Reltio press release, 8 Apr 2026

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