Head-to-head · updated 13 September 2026

DataShield vs Skyflow: which one can prove what your AI agents did?

Skyflow built a very good privacy vault, and if your problem is keeping card numbers out of scope, they're a fine choice. But an AI agent isn't a payment form. It makes hundreds of tool calls a day, its authority can change mid-session, and one day a regulator will ask you to prove which of those calls were allowed.

That's the job DataShield was built for. Datasets are tokenized at ingest, every governed tool call is authorized against the agent's current authority, and each decision is sealed into a hash chain you can verify without trusting us. Below is where the two actually differ, with sources, including the rows Skyflow wins.

Get free Demo Center access Get an instant quote

The short version

Pick DataShield when

An auditor, examiner, or the EU AI Act's Article 12 will eventually ask you to prove an agent's access log wasn't edited. Our chain answers that with math, not a policy document. Run the verifier.
You need to pull an agent's authority mid-session and have the very next tool call fail, rather than waiting for a token to expire.
Your security team wants the vault, the policy engine, and the evidence to run inside your own VPC, with keys you hold.
You'd rather see a price before you book a call.

Pick Skyflow when

The core problem is PCI DSS scope reduction for payment data. Their Level 1 vault is home turf; we don't have a PCI story.
You need compute on encrypted data. Their polymorphic encryption lets you search and aggregate without decrypting. Our tokens are deterministic and join-preserving, but we don't do ciphertext math.
You want an inline gateway that de-identifies prompts on the way to the model and rehydrates on the way back. We deliberately don't sit inline; see the FAQ for why.
Data residency per jurisdiction is a hard requirement and self-hosting isn't on the table.

Bottom line: Skyflow protects data in flight. DataShield governs what an agent is allowed to do with data and keeps proof of it. Some teams run both. If you can only fund one and your exposure is agents rather than payments, start here.

Feature by feature

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

What matters	DataShield	Skyflow	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.	Access logging and governance reporting. We found no published cryptographic tamper evidence.	◆
Agent authorization	Every governed tool call passes a scope ceiling, an authority tier, and a revocation re-check before dispatch. Revocation lands mid-session.	Policy-based access control on vault data. No agent authority tiers or mid-session revocation described.	◆
Break-glass	Scoped, time-boxed emergency access for agents that auto-revokes and can't be quietly deleted from the log.	Not offered.	◆
GDPR erasure	Crypto-shred of per-subject key material plus ISO 27560 consent receipts. The audit chain stays verifiable after erasure.	Vault deletion and regional residency vaults. Interaction with audit history not documented.	◆
Tokenization	Deterministic, join-preserving, vault-reversible tokens applied at ingest, plus k-anonymity generalization of quasi-identifiers. Detokenization is a privileged, logged operation.	Patented polymorphic encryption with search and aggregation on encrypted data. Multiple token formats. Rehydration governed by PBAC.	◇
Inline prompt gateway	None, by design. Agents query already-tokenized datasets over MCP, so raw values never enter the queryable surface.	Yes. De-identifies prompt traffic pre-LLM and rehydrates post-inference.	◇
MCP and agents	Native MCP endpoints on Auth, Ontology, and Lighthouse. MCP tool tokens with scope ceilings; per-call metering attributed to the agent.	MCP data protection layer wraps data flows. No tool-level agent identity described.	◆
Deployment	Self-hosted, in your VPC, or BYOC. Your keys.	SaaS vault with regional residency; AWS and Google Cloud marketplace listings.	◆
Payments / PCI	No PCI DSS attestation. Not our market.	PCI DSS Level 1 vault. Strong descoping story.	◇
Maturity signals	Auth v1.0 live. Guardian and Lighthouse v0.2, in production since April 2026. SOC 2 not yet certified, and we say so.	Founded 2019, roughly $100M raised, SOC 2 Type II, HIPAA-eligible, named enterprise customers.	◇
Pricing	Published model, scoped instant quote, no sales wall.	Quote-only; enterprise agreements. No dollar figures on their pricing page.	◆

◆ DataShield leads◇ Skyflow leads◈ comparable

Skyflow claims are drawn from skyflow.com and Skyflow's own announcements, 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 a vault

Proof that survives an audit

A log that can be silently edited has no evidentiary value. Ours is a hash chain with signed checkpoints, and the verifier tells you what went wrong, not just that something did. That's the property EU AI Act Article 12 and HIPAA §164.312(b) reviewers care about. Try it in your browser, no signup.

Authority that can change mid-flight

An analyst leaves. Their agent is still running a 40-minute job. With DataShield the next governed tool call is re-checked against current authority and fails closed. With a vault, the token rides until it expires. 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 Skyflow is genuinely stronger

We'd rather you hear this from us. Skyflow has been shipping since 2019, has a PCI DSS Level 1 vault, SOC 2 Type II, and customers like GoodRx and Lenovo on the record. Their polymorphic encryption is real, patented, and lets you run searches and aggregates over data that never gets decrypted. If your workload is payments, or you need per-jurisdiction residency vaults, or you specifically want an inline gateway that scrubs prompts before they reach the model, those are legitimate reasons to choose them.

What we'd push back on is the idea that any of that answers the agent question. Gartner expects most unauthorized agent transactions through 2028 to be internal policy violations, not attacks. Detecting a secret in a prompt doesn't tell you whether the agent was allowed to call the tool that produced it, and a vault access log doesn't prove the entry wasn't altered afterward. That's the layer we sell.

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 and chained, and verification distinguishes deletion from truncation from tampering. You can run it against a sample chain at /verify. Skyflow: their documentation describes access logging and governance reporting; we found no published tamper-evidence mechanism. Ask them to show one.

What happens to a revoked agent mid-session?

DataShield re-checks authority on every governed tool call, so revocation takes effect on the next call. Skyflow's PBAC engine controls vault access at the point of use, but we found no description of agent authority tiers or mid-session revocation. Ask how long a compromised agent keeps working after you pull its access.

Why doesn't DataShield sit inline like Skyflow's gateway?

Because inline scrubbing means raw data was in the path and you're trusting a regex to catch it. We tokenize datasets at ingest, so what the agent queries over MCP never contained the raw value. Detokenization is a privileged, audited vault operation. The trade-off is honest: if you need to de-identify free-form prompts on the fly, Skyflow's gateway does that and we don't.

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. Skyflow documents vault deletion and residency vaults; the effect on audit history isn't described. Ask whether erasing a subject breaks the log.

Can we run the whole thing inside our VPC?

DataShield: yes, self-hosted or BYOC, with your keys. Skyflow: SaaS vault with regional residency options and marketplace deployment. If 'nothing leaves our account' is a hard rule, that's a meaningful difference.

Does DataShield have SOC 2?

Not yet, and we won't imply otherwise. Auth is v1.0 with a public threat model and a verifier anyone can run. Guardian and Lighthouse are v0.2 and have been in production since April 2026. Design-partner terms include source escrow so a small vendor isn't a single point of failure. Details on the security page.

Skyflow's current positioning: "Agents break data security." Primary CTA is a demo request. — skyflow.com, 13 Sep 2026
Skyflow for Glean brings "runtime data control" to enterprise AI search. — Business Wire, 25 Aug 2026
No published pricing; enterprise agreements and marketplace listings. — skyflow.com/pricing, 13 Sep 2026
≥80% of unauthorized agent transactions through 2028 will be internal policy violations rather than attacks. — Gartner, 2026
EDPB names pseudonymization as a GDPR risk mitigation for AI models. — EDPB Opinion 28/2024

Other head-to-heads

Direct

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 →