Head-to-head · updated 13 September 2026
DataShield vs SailPoint: who governs the agent, and who proves what it did?
SailPoint has been doing identity governance since 2005, and they are very good at it. Agentic Fabric, generally available since August 2026, extends that to non-human identities: it finds the agents you didn't know you had, ties each one to a human owner, runs certification campaigns on their entitlements, and gives you a kill switch when one goes rogue. If your board asks how many agents you have and who owns them, SailPoint answers that better than we do.
DataShield answers the next question. Six months later an examiner picks one tool call from 14 March and asks whether the agent was allowed to make it, then asks how you know the log wasn't edited. We re-check authority on every governed tool call, revoke mid-session, and seal each decision into a hash chain you can verify without trusting us. Most large enterprises will run both. Here is the honest split, including the rows SailPoint wins.
The short version
Pick DataShield when
- You will have to prove an agent's access log wasn't edited. Article 12 of the EU AI Act and HIPAA §164.312(b) both land here. Our chain answers with math. Run the verifier.
- You want an agent's authority pulled mid-session, so the very next governed tool call fails, rather than waiting for a token to expire.
- You need the inverse of a kill switch: scoped, time-boxed break-glass access that grants, logs itself, and auto-revokes.
- Nothing may leave your account. We run self-hosted or on your own infrastructure, with your keys, and we publish a price.
Pick SailPoint when
- You don't yet know what agents exist. Their agentless discovery, plus the Entro secrets engine they bought in June 2026, covers over 1,200 kinds of tokens, keys and certificates across your CI/CD and codebases. We are not a discovery tool.
- Your auditors already live inside access certification campaigns. Extending those reviews to agent entitlements is home turf for an IGA vendor with two decades of practice.
- You need joiner-mover-leaver lifecycle, ownership mapping and provisioning across thousands of applications. That is a connector problem, and their connector library is enormous.
- You want one vendor covering humans and machines, with the Fortune 500 references and the CrowdStrike SIEM integration to match.
Bottom line: SailPoint tells you which agents exist, who owns them, and how to switch one off. DataShield decides whether a given tool call was allowed and keeps proof of the decision. Those are different layers, and buying ours doesn't mean replacing theirs. If your near-term risk is an audit rather than an inventory, start here.
Feature by feature: agentic identity governance next to runtime authorization
Competitor cells describe what SailPoint's public site and press releases say as of the date above. If we've mischaracterised something, email support@myorg.ai and we'll correct it, credited.
| What matters | DataShield | SailPoint | Edge |
|---|---|---|---|
| Audit evidence | SHA-256 hash chain with Ed25519-signed checkpoints that are themselves chained. Verification names the failure: tampering, insertion, deletion, or truncation. Public verifier. | Audit trails and compliance reporting, now feeding CrowdStrike Falcon Next-Gen SIEM. We found no published cryptographic tamper evidence. | ◆ |
| Agent authorization | Every governed tool call passes a scope ceiling, a declared authority tier, and a revocation re-check before dispatch. Cedar handles admin, config and token decisions, with policy_explain for each one. | The Agentic Fabric page claims "real-time authorization" and dynamic risk scoring, but doesn't name the decision point or the policy language. Worth asking them to demo it on a single tool call. | ◆ |
| Stopping a rogue agent | Revocation lands on the next governed tool call, mid-session. No waiting for a refresh. | A centralised, policy-driven kill switch, the clearest agent-native mechanism they lead with. Their docs don't say whether it takes effect immediately or at the next token refresh. | ◈ |
| Break-glass | Scoped, time-boxed emergency access for agents that auto-revokes and can't be quietly deleted from the log. | Just-in-time provisioning and Zero Standing Privilege for humans. No agent break-glass grant described. | ◆ |
| Discovery and inventory | We govern the agents you register with us. We don't crawl your estate looking for shadow ones, and we won't pretend otherwise. | Continuous agentless discovery of AI agents, machine identities, credentials and MCP servers, plus endpoint and browser sensors. Entro adds 1,200+ secret types across CI/CD. | ◇ |
| Lifecycle and certification | Scope ceilings, authority tiers and config-change governance with propose, approve and rollback. No certification campaign workflow. | Two decades of access reviews, entitlement certification, lineage to human owners and automated ownership rules, now extended to agents. | ◇ |
| GDPR erasure | Crypto-shred of per-subject key material plus ISO 27560 consent receipts. Actor identities are HMAC-committed, so the chain still verifies after erasure. | Not described in their non-human identity materials. Ask how erasing a data subject interacts with agent audit history. | ◆ |
| Data handling | Datasets are tokenized at ingest; agents query tokenized data over MCP; detokenization is a privileged, audited operation. Tokens are deterministic, join-preserving and vault-reversible, with 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 for quasi-identifiers. | Since August 2026 they ship inline prompt security that redacts PII before it reaches the model. Redaction is one-way by construction, so joins and re-identification aren't on the table. | ◈ |
| MCP and agents | Native MCP endpoints on Auth, Ontology and Lighthouse. MCP tool tokens with scope ceilings, and per-call metering attributed to the agent. | Agentic Fabric discovers MCP servers as assets. We found no description of issuing or constraining MCP tool tokens. | ◆ |
| Deployment | Self-hosted in your own cloud or data center, or on a dedicated single-tenant server we operate. Your keys. | SaaS on the Atlas platform, with endpoint and browser sensors. Legacy IdentityIQ had on-prem options; we couldn't confirm that for Agentic Fabric. | ◆ |
| 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. | Founded 2005, public again and reporting fiscal quarters, 53% of the Fortune 500 as customers by their count, nine launch partners building on Atlas. | ◇ |
| Pricing | Published model, scoped instant quote, no sales wall. | Quote-only. Agentic Fabric sells in Agentic Business and Agentic Business Plus suites, with no figures published. | ◆ |
◆ DataShield leads◇ SailPoint leads◈ comparable
SailPoint claims are drawn from sailpoint.com and SailPoint's own press releases, last checked 13 September 2026. We link them below rather than paraphrase from memory.
Three things you get here that you won't get from an identity governance platform
Proof, not just a trail
A log you control and can silently edit has weak evidentiary value. Ours is a hash chain with signed checkpoints, and the verifier tells you what went wrong, not just that something did: tampering, insertion, deletion, truncation. That's the property EU AI Act Article 12 and HIPAA §164.312(b) reviewers care about. Try it in your browser, no signup.
A decision at the tool call, not the entitlement
Certification tells you an agent was allowed to hold an entitlement last quarter. It doesn't tell you whether this call, at 14:03 on a Tuesday, was inside the scope ceiling. We check that before dispatch and record the answer. How Auth does it.
An erasure you can defend
GDPR says delete. Your auditor says keep the log. Crypto-shred resolves that: the subject's key material is destroyed, the data becomes unreadable, and the chain still verifies. See the diagram.
Where SailPoint is genuinely stronger
Let's be blunt about the size gap. SailPoint has been shipping identity governance for twenty years, claims more than half the Fortune 500, and in June 2026 bought Entro Security to pull real non-human identity and secrets discovery in-house. That buys them something we can't fake: coverage. Their sensors find agents, service accounts, API keys and MCP servers that nobody wrote down. They map each one back to a human owner. Then they run the certification campaigns your auditors already know how to read. If you are starting from "we think there are about forty agents, maybe," that is exactly the right first purchase.
The push-back is narrow but it matters. Discovery and certification are periodic, and an agent's behaviour is not. Gartner expects most unauthorized agent transactions through 2028 to be internal policy violations rather than attacks, which means the thing that hurts you is a legitimate agent doing a legitimate-looking call it shouldn't have made. Knowing the agent exists doesn't catch that. Neither does a quarterly review. You need a check at the call itself, and a record of that check that someone outside your company can verify. SailPoint's public materials describe the trail. They don't describe what makes it tamper-evident, and we'd ask them for that in writing.
Questions worth asking both of us
These are the questions we'd want answered if we were buying. Ask them on every vendor call, including ours.
Can you cryptographically prove an audit log entry wasn't deleted?
DataShield: yes. Each record commits to the one before it, checkpoints are signed with Ed25519 and chained to each other, and verification distinguishes deletion from truncation from tampering. Run it against a sample chain at /verify. SailPoint: their materials describe audit trails, compliance reporting, and a feed into CrowdStrike Falcon Next-Gen SIEM. We found no tamper-evidence mechanism published. Ask them to show one.
When the kill switch fires, what happens to a call already in flight?
This is the question. DataShield re-checks authority on every governed tool call, so revocation takes effect on the next call and the session context is downgraded. SailPoint's centralised kill switch is a genuinely good board-level story, but their public pages don't say whether it lands immediately or at the next token refresh. Ask how many minutes a compromised agent keeps working after you press it.
Do we have to choose between SailPoint and DataShield?
No, and we'd usually tell you not to. They are different obligations. SailPoint governs identity lifecycle: discovery, ownership, entitlements, certification. We govern the runtime decision and the evidence. DataShield Auth federates over SAML and OIDC, so SailPoint stays the source of truth for who the agent is while we record what it was allowed to do. We are not asking anyone to rip out their IGA.
Is DataShield a SailPoint Agentic Fabric alternative for non-human identity discovery?
Honestly, no. If your requirement is finding shadow agents and unmanaged secrets across cloud, CI/CD and endpoints, buy a discovery tool, and Agentic Fabric plus Entro is a strong one. We govern the agents you register with us. Where we'd compete for the same budget is the enforcement and evidence seam: per-call authority, mid-session revocation, break-glass, and a chain you can verify.
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 stays verifiable after the subject is gone. We couldn't find erasure mechanics in SailPoint's non-human identity materials. Ask whether erasing a subject breaks the agent log, because in most log stores it does.
Does DataShield have SOC 2?
Not yet, and we won't imply otherwise. Against a public company with twenty years of audit history, that's a real gap and you should weigh it. What we offer instead: Auth is live a public threat model and a verifier anyone can run, Guardian and Lighthouse have been in production since April 2026, and design-partner terms include source escrow so a small vendor isn't a single point of failure. Details on the security page.
- SailPoint Agentic Fabric leads with "Identity security built for AI and NHIs" and a policy-driven kill switch to neutralize rogue agents. — sailpoint.com, 13 Sep 2026
- Agentic Fabric reached general availability with MCP server discovery, endpoint and browser sensors, and inline prompt security that redacts PII before it reaches the LLM. — SailPoint press release, 4 Aug 2026
- SailPoint completed its acquisition of Entro Security, adding discovery of over 1,200 types of secrets, tokens and certificates. — SailPoint press release, 29 Jun 2026
- Unified Platform Access lets nine launch partners build native applications on the SailPoint Atlas platform. — SailPoint press release, 16 Jun 2026
- SecOps Identity Intelligence feeds identity governance and risk context into CrowdStrike Falcon Next-Gen SIEM. — SailPoint press release, 31 Aug 2026
- ≥80% of unauthorized agent transactions through 2028 will be internal policy violations rather than attacks. — Gartner, 2026
Other head-to-heads
DataShield vs Entro
The NHI discovery engine SailPoint bought in June 2026, read on its own terms.
AdjacentDataShield vs CyberArk
Secrets and privileged access next to per-call agent authority.
AdjacentDataShield vs Okta
They tell you who the agent is. We prove what it did was allowed.
AllEvery comparison
One honest scorecard per vendor, sources at the bottom.
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