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Head-to-head · updated 13 September 2026

DataShield vs Amundsen: where do you take a self-hosted data catalog that just got archived?

Amundsen was a good idea. Done early. Given away for free. Lyft open-sourced it in 2019. The Linux Foundation took it in 2020. For a while, it was the default answer. Teams needed "a search box over our tables". It was that box. The popularity ranking was clever. The install was light. Thousands of teams starred it. A fair number ran it.

It is over now. LF AI & Data voted to archive the project in September 2026. The GitHub repo carries an archive banner. The last real release shipped in August 2024. So this page is not a feature duel. It is a migration read, for people still running it. DataShield Ontology is a self-hosted catalog. It has field classification, built in. Stewardship and an agent surface too. We tokenize datasets at ingest. Agents then query tokenized data over MCP. Turning a token back into real data is a privileged step. It's audited, each time.

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DataShield vs Amundsen at a glanceEight questions a self-hosted buyer asks us. Scored from public repos and project pages. DataShield vs Amundsen at a glance Eight questions a self-hosted buyer asks us. Scored from public repos and project pages. DataShield Amundsen Actively developed in 2026 Tamper-evident audit chain you can verify Authority re-checked on every governed tool call PII and PHI classification in the catalog GDPR erasure that keeps the chain valid Metadata connectors across a mixed estate Free, Apache-2.0, no vendor at all Runs in your own data center shipped partial / roadmap not offered Sources at the bottom of this page.

The short version

Pick DataShield when

  • You want a catalog someone is still shipping. Ours gets releases. Amundsen got an archive banner on 10 September 2026.
  • You need the catalog to know what the data is. Not just where it lives. We label columns against 129 PII, PHI, financial and secret classes. The verdict repeats, from a config digest.
  • Agents read your tables now. We expose the catalog over MCP. We gate each call. We re-check access mid-session. How Auth does it.
  • You have to prove who read what. Our audit log is a hash chain, with signed checkpoints. Erasure does not break it. Run the verifier.

Pick Amundsen when

  • It already works. Nobody is asking it to do more. Archived code does not stop running. If your Neo4j and Elasticsearch boxes are quiet, leave them quiet.
  • You need Databuilder's extractor list, today. Hive, Presto, Redshift, Snowflake, BigQuery, dbt, Airflow. Our provider scanning is PostgreSQL only, right now.
  • Cost has to be zero. Apache-2.0. No seats, no renewal. Nobody left to raise the price.
  • You want a search-first analyst UI, with popularity ranking. That was the best thing Amundsen did. We do not copy it.

Bottom line: Amundsen answered "where is the table". The question now is different: "who may read this column, and can you prove they did". That is a different product. It is the one we build.

Feature by feature

Competitor cells describe what Amundsen's repo and releases say. Also its LF AI & Data project page. We use the date above. If we've mischaracterised something, email support@myorg.ai. We'll correct it and credit you.

What mattersDataShieldAmundsenEdge
Project statusLive and in use. Guardian and Lighthouse since April 2026. Small team, active releases. SOC 2 not yet certified, and we say so.Archived. The repo banner reads: "Due to inactivity, this project was archived in September 2026." LF AI & Data's page confirms it. The board voted to archive. Last release, August 2024.◆
Catalog and discoveryRegister a provider over a live connection. Scan it. Profile assets and columns in place, with no row egress. PostgreSQL is GA today. We've also declared Snowflake, BigQuery, Databricks, S3 and Salesforce. We just haven't built them yet.Databuilder shipped extractors for a long list of warehouses. Also BI tools and schedulers. Broader than us on day one. Frozen at the 2024 version of each, though.◇
Classification129 built-in field classes. That includes all 18 HIPAA Safe Harbor identifiers. Plus eight non-US national ID formats. Regex plus checksum validation. Column-name lexicons and anti-pattern suppressors, too. No model, so no drift. It cut over to live days ago. Call it shipped, not proven, for now.No PII or PHI classification. Tags and descriptions are whatever a human typed in.◆
Sample values in the catalogDefault policy is omit. We don't copy any column value into the catalog. Storing plaintext samples needs an explicit acknowledgement. That step writes an audit row.We couldn't find a sample-value rule in what remains of the public docs. The docs site now redirects off the project entirely. Ask whoever runs your instance.◆
LineageTyped lineage traversal, with access gating at each hop. An edge never reveals an asset you can't read. It comes from the pipelines that own the relationships. Not a stored column-level graph.Table-level lineage, where an extractor supplied it. No per-hop access gating. The graph has no opinion on who is asking.◈
Audit evidenceSHA-256 hash chain, with Ed25519-signed checkpoints. We chain those checkpoints too. Verification names the failure: tampering, insertion, deletion or truncation. Browser demo.Application logs. Nothing that survives someone with database access and a bad week.◆
Agent authorizationEvery tool call passes a scope ceiling. It carries a declared access tier, too. It gets a re-check before it goes out. A pulled grant lands mid-session, not after.No actor model beyond a login for the frontend. Nothing to authorize an agent with.◆
Break-glassScoped, time-boxed emergency access for agents. It auto-revokes on its own. It can't be quietly deleted from the log.Not a concept in the project.◆
GDPR erasureCrypto-shred of per-subject key material. Plus ISO 27560 consent receipts. The chain still verifies after erasure.A metadata catalog holds metadata. So erasure is a question for the systems underneath it.◆
Tokenization and data handlingDeterministic, join-preserving, vault-reversible tokens, applied at ingest. Plus quasi-identifier generalization, as a rule. Dates become year, decade, or age band. ZIPs become 3 or 4 digits. Phones, SSNs and emails get partial masking too. Each column gets a measured cardinality-reduction score. Masking and generalization are switches you turn on, not defaults.None. Amundsen never touched the data, only the metadata about it.◆
MCP and agentsMore than 200 MCP tools across Ontology, Auth, Corpus and Lighthouse. An agent can search the catalog and read a profile. It acts under a tool token with a scope ceiling.No MCP server and no agent story. Shipping stopped before anyone asked the question.◆
DeploymentSelf-hosted, in your own cloud or data center. Or a dedicated single-tenant server we operate. Docker images cover Auth, Ontology, Corpus and Lighthouse. Each comes with a signed deploy manifest.Self-hosted only. Neo4j or Atlas run the graph. Elasticsearch handles search. Plus frontend, metadata and search services. No managed option exists, now that Stemma's is gone.◈
PricingPublished model, scoped instant quote, no sales wall.Free forever, Apache-2.0. We are not going to pretend to win this row.◇

◆ DataShield leads◇ Amundsen leads◈ comparable

Amundsen claims come from github.com/amundsen-io/amundsen. Also its releases page, and the LF AI & Data project page. We checked last on 13 September 2026. Links are below, not paraphrased from memory.

Three things you get here that you won't get from a metadata catalog

The catalog knows what the column holds

Amundsen told you a column was called mbr_dob. It told you 40 people queried it last month. Useful. But it did not tell you the column held a date of birth. Not under HIPAA Safe Harbor, anyway. We label it and cite the rule. We stamp the verdict with a config digest. That way, you can redo the same check next quarter. What Ontology does.

Proof that survives an audit

A log you can edit proves nothing. Ours is a hash chain, with signed checkpoints. The verifier says what broke, not just that something did. EU AI Act Article 12 and HIPAA §164.312(b) reviewers look for that. Try the demo in your browser, no signup.

Authority that can change mid-flight

An analyst leaves on a Friday. Their agent is still 20 minutes into a job, over your tables. We check access again on the very next tool call. It fails closed. A search index has no view on this. It doesn't know who is asking. How Auth does it.

Where Amundsen is genuinely stronger

Credit where it is due. Amundsen shaped the modern catalog category. It was the first tool many teams used. It treated discovery as a search problem. Ranking tables by how often people queried them was smart. It beat anything the enterprise suites shipped, at the time. Over 200 people contributed. It cost nothing. It installed in an afternoon. Lyft never tried to sell it back to you. Databuilder's extractor list still beats ours, across a mixed warehouse setup. That gap is real. We scan PostgreSQL in place today. Everything else sits on a roadmap, not in a release. Say you run Snowflake and Redshift. You want a table search box this week. We are not the short path, then.

Here is the push-back. Free stops being free when nobody ships a fix. The docs site now redirects to an unrelated domain. The maintainers merged a commit in August 2026. It stripped their own broken doc links. A month later, the board archived the repo. Your CVE response plan for Neo4j and Elasticsearch is now your own problem. So is each part under them. Teams in this spot usually pick one of three doors. Fork it and own it. Move to another open-source catalog. Or ask if the catalog should have done more than search, all along. We are behind door three. We would rather you walked through it on purpose. Not because something broke.

Questions worth asking both of us

These are the questions we'd want answered if we were buying. Ask them on each 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. We sign and chain checkpoints. Verification tells deletion apart from truncation and tampering. Try it at /verify. Amundsen: no. It logs like any Flask app, into a store you can edit. That was fine for a discovery tool. It is not enough for an examiner.

What happens to a revoked agent mid-session?

DataShield re-checks access on each tool call. So a pulled grant bites on the next call. Amundsen has no agent model at all. So the honest answer is that the question doesn't apply. That's a different thing from a good outcome.

How does GDPR erasure interact with the audit trail?

DataShield crypto-shreds per-subject key material and issues an ISO 27560 consent receipt. The chain HMAC-commits actor identities, not names. So the evidence still checks out after the subject is gone. Amundsen stores metadata, not subjects. So erasure lands on the warehouse behind it. Also on whatever you built to track it.

Amundsen is archived. Can we just keep running it?

Yes, for a while. Archived code keeps working, and the images still pull. What stops is patches. You now own the security posture of Neo4j or Atlas. Same for Elasticsearch, and each Python dependency in Databuilder. Nobody upstream is left to accept your fix. The public docs moved off the project's own domain. So onboarding a new engineer means reading source. Plan a horizon, not a panic.

Are you a drop-in replacement for Databuilder's connectors?

No, and anyone who says otherwise is selling. Our catalog provider scanning is GA for PostgreSQL. We've also declared Snowflake, BigQuery, Databricks, SQL Server, MySQL, Salesforce, Kafka and object stores. No handler yet, though. Separately, we crawl open-data portals. We watch S3, Azure Blob, GCS, SFTP and SMB. That's where we find files to ingest. If your estate is mostly Postgres plus files, the swap works today. Is it a Snowflake shop? Talk to us about timing before you rip anything out.

Does DataShield have SOC 2?

Not yet, and we won't imply otherwise. Auth is live now. It ships with a public threat model. Also a verifier you can run in a browser. Guardian and Lighthouse have both been live since April 2026. Design-partner terms include source escrow. That way a small vendor isn't a single point of failure. Details on the security page.

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One honest scorecard per vendor, including the rows we lose.

Planning a move off Amundsen? Start by seeing what a catalog looks like. See it classify columns and prove access. Break a live audit chain. Revoke an agent mid-session. Then decide. Demo Center access is free with a work email.

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