Head-to-head · updated 13 September 2026
DataShield vs Entro: find every non-human identity, or prove what it was allowed to do?
Entro is good at the thing most teams get wrong. First. Knowing what you have. It scans code and cloud. CI/CD and SaaS too. For secrets. It builds an inventory of non-human identities. It names a human owner. For each one. And watches for odd behaviour. Their hero line is "Govern every AI Agent. Secure every action." If your honest answer to "how many machine identities do we run?" is a shrug: start there. We are not a discovery tool. We won't pretend to be. One update worth knowing: SailPoint closed its buyout of Entro. That was 29 June 2026. The product now lives inside SailPoint's Agentic Fabric. Our SailPoint page covers the parent.
We pick up one step later. An agent makes a tool call. Something has to decide, right then. Does that call sit inside the agent's current access? Then it has to seal the decision. Into a record. One nobody can quietly edit later. That's the seam we sell. Access per call, break-glass. Plus erasure that survives the audit trail. A chain you can verify yourself. Below is row by row. It includes the rows Entro wins.
The short version
Pick DataShield when
- An examiner, or the EU AI Act's Article 12, will one day ask you to prove an agent's access log wasn't edited. Our chain answers with math, not a policy PDF. Run the verifier.
- You need to pull an agent's access mid-session. The next tool call should fail. Not wait for a token to age out.
- Someone has to hold an emergency key. Break-glass access for agents is scoped, time-boxed, auto-revoking. It can't be quietly deleted from the log.
- Your team wants the policy engine, the credentials and the evidence on your own infrastructure. With your keys. How Auth is built.
Pick Entro when
- You don't yet have an inventory. Entro's secrets scanning across code, cloud, CI/CD and SaaS is a wider net than anything we ship. You can't govern what you haven't found.
- Ownership attribution is the gap. Mapping every stale key and service account back to a named human is dull, unglamorous work. They do it well.
- You want behavioural detection on machine identities. NHIDR looks for anomalies across the whole estate. We only see the calls that come through us.
- Your procurement team needs SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 on day one. Entro has both. We don't, and we say so below.
Bottom line: Entro tells you which identities exist, and who owns them. We decide whether a given call is allowed. We also keep proof of the decision. Most buyers who talk to both end up running both. That's a fine outcome.
Feature by feature: NHI security platform versus agent control plane
Competitor cells describe what Entro's site and blog say. Launch posts too. We use the date above. If we mischaracterised something, email support@myorg.ai. We'll correct it, and credit you.
| What matters | DataShield | Entro | Edge |
|---|---|---|---|
| Audit evidence | A SHA-256 hash chain. With Ed25519-signed checkpoints. Those checkpoints are themselves chained. Verification names the exact failure. Tampering, insertion, deletion or truncation. Try the verifier. | Rich activity logging. Intent classification and SIEM forwarding. We found no public cryptographic tamper proof. Ask them. | ◆ |
| Agent authorization | Each checked tool call passes a token scope ceiling. Also a declared access tier. And a revocation re-check. That's before dispatch. Cedar decides admin, config and token questions. Not each dispatch. | AGA describes scope reduction. Plus MCP activity policy. And blocking of suspicious patterns. That's detection logic. They don't describe a per-call access decision. | ◆ |
| Break-glass | Scoped, time-boxed emergency access, just for agents. It auto-revokes on its own. The grant stays in the chain. | Not in their public material at all. | ◆ |
| GDPR erasure | Crypto-shred of per-subject key material. Plus ISO 27560 consent receipts. Actor IDs carry HMAC commitments. The chain still checks out. Even after a subject is erased. | Not in their docs. Their model is identity and secrets. Not subject data. | ◆ |
| Secrets and NHI discovery | None. We check what's connected to us. We are not a scanner. | Deep scanning. Across code, cloud, CI/CD and SaaS. Plus idle-secret detection and lineage maps. Their home turf. | ◇ |
| Ownership attribution | Identities are bound to org, app and instance. Each call ties back to the agent. No estate-wide owner graph. | They map each NHI and secret to a human owner. Clean answer in an audit meeting. | ◇ |
| Behavioural detection | We fail closed on access. And log it. We don't sell anomaly detection. | NHIDR flags behavioural anomalies. Across agents and NHIs. A Claude Code plugin adds intent classification. With an in-house small language model. | ◇ |
| Credential handling | Connection Vault holds encrypted per-subject credentials. Across eight strategies, including Snowflake keypair-JWT. Issued, used, logged. | Finds, classifies and prioritises secrets. Tells you which are stale. Rotation and storage stay with your existing vault. | ◈ |
| Tokenization and data handling | We tokenize datasets at ingest. Agents query tokenized data over MCP. Turning a token back into real data. A privileged, audited step. Plus quasi-identifier generalization. Dates become year, decade or age band. ZIPs become 3 or 4 digits. Phones, SSNs and emails get partial masking. Each column gets a measured cardinality-reduction score. | WebGuard scans prompts in the browser. It can block, warn or log. That covers a person typing into ChatGPT. Not an agent querying a warehouse. | ◆ |
| MCP and agents | Native MCP endpoints on Auth, Ontology and Lighthouse. MCP tool tokens with scope ceilings. Per-call metering ties back to the agent. | MCP monitoring, and sanctioned MCP targets. Plus a Claude Code audit plugin. It hooks sessions passively. | ◆ |
| Deployment | Self-hosted. In your own cloud or data center. Or on a dedicated single-tenant server we operate. Your keys. | SaaS, with a large integration surface. We found no self-hosted option. Worth asking if that's a hard rule for you. | ◆ |
| Maturity signals | Auth, Guardian and Lighthouse are live in production. Guardian and Lighthouse have run since April 2026. SOC 2 not yet certified. We say so. | Founded 2023. An $18M Series A in June 2024. Led by Dell Technologies Capital. SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001. Named CISO clients at SolarWinds, Elastic and ControlUp. A Gartner Cool Vendor. Acquired by SailPoint. Closed 29 June 2026. | ◇ |
| Pricing | Published model, scoped instant quote, no sales wall. | Quote-only. "Request a Demo" is the only door on the site. | ◆ |
◆ DataShield leads◇ Entro leads◈ comparable
We draw Entro claims from entro.security. Plus Entro's own launch posts. Last checked 13 September 2026. We link sources below. Not paraphrased from memory. Entro was acquired by SailPoint. Closed 29 June 2026. Some features may now sell only one way. As part of SailPoint Agentic Fabric.
Three things you get here that you won't get from an NHI inventory
Proof, not just a record
Any platform can write a log. The question an examiner asks: could that log have been edited afterwards? Ours is a hash chain. With signed checkpoints. The verifier tells you what broke. Not just that something did. That's the property reviewers care about. Think EU AI Act Article 12, HIPAA §164.312(b). Try it in your browser, no signup.
Authority that changes mid-flight
An analyst resigns at 2pm. Their agent is 20 minutes into a 40-minute job. We re-check the next checked tool call. Against current access. It fails closed. A posture scan will tell you about it. Tomorrow morning. How Auth does it.
An erasure you can defend
GDPR says delete the subject. Your auditor says keep the log. Crypto-shred settles it. We destroy the subject's key material. The data goes unreadable. The chain still checks out. See the diagram.
Where Entro is genuinely stronger
We'd rather you heard this from us. Not found it out on the call. Entro has been at non-human identity security since 2023. They raised $18M in June 2024. From Dell Technologies Capital and others. They hold SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001. They have CISOs at SolarWinds, Elastic and ControlUp. On the record. Their secrets scanning reaches into code and cloud. CI/CD and SaaS too. That's a far wider net than we cast. The Wiz integration ties identity permissions. To data classification. You can see which machine identity can reach. Which sensitive bucket. And ownership attribution: the single most useful thing. You can hand it to a compliance team. Boring as it sounds. That's a real one. We don't do any of that. A prospect who needs it should buy it.
The push-back is narrow, and it's about the word "govern". Entro's AGA launch describes enforcement as scope reduction. Also policy on MCP activity. And blocking of suspicious behaviour. All of that runs on pattern recognition. Gartner expects most unauthorized agent transactions through 2028 to be internal. Policy violations. Not attacks. A policy violation, by a legitimate agent, looks normal. Perfectly normal. Even to an anomaly detector. Even with a valid credential. Deciding it needs access state. Right at the moment of the call. Proving it needs a log. One that can't be rewritten. Ask both of us which one we actually do.
Questions worth asking both of us
These are the questions we'd want answered. If we were the buyer. Ask them on each vendor call, ours included.
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 the checkpoints. Verification tells deletion apart. From truncation, and from tampering. Run it on a sample chain at /verify. Entro: their material describes logging and intent classification. Plus SIEM forwarding. That's useful. But we found no tamper-evidence method. Ask them to show one.
What happens to a revoked agent mid-session?
We re-check access on each checked tool call. Revocation bites on the next call. Entro can flag the identity. And drive remediation. AGA can cut scope too. But we found no per-call access re-check described. The question to ask is simple. After I hit revoke: how many more tool calls succeed?
Does NHIDR block a tool call, or notice it afterwards?
Worth pinning down. NHIDR is their detection and response tool. For behavioural anomalies. AGA adds blocking of suspicious patterns. And sanctioned MCP targets. That's a detector making a judgement call. We're not clever about behaviour at all. The call either sits inside the agent's scope ceiling. And its access tier. Or it doesn't. Different jobs. Honestly, they pair well.
How does GDPR erasure interact with the audit trail?
We crypto-shred per-subject key material. We issue an ISO 27560 consent receipt. Actor identities in the chain carry HMAC commitments. Evidence stays checkable. Even after the subject is gone. Entro's public material doesn't cover subject erasure. Their world is identities and secrets. Not customer data. If you need both, that's a two-vendor answer.
We're already buying Entro. Does DataShield still make sense?
Often, yes. We'd rather say that than pretend otherwise. Entro finds the identities. It names the owners, and watches behaviour. We sit in the path. The agent's tool calls. We decide each one against current access. And seal the decision. One layer tells you the estate is clean. The other tells the auditor what happened. On 4 March. And proves it.
Does DataShield have SOC 2?
No, and we won't imply otherwise. Entro has SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001. If that's a procurement gate: they clear it. We don't. What we offer instead: Auth is live. It ships with a public threat model. Also a verifier anyone can run. No account needed. Guardian and Lighthouse have been in production. Since April 2026. Design-partner terms include source escrow. That way, a small vendor stays safe. Never a single point of failure. Details on the security page.
- Entro's hero: "Govern every AI Agent. Secure every action." Primary CTA is a demo request. - entro.security, 13 Sep 2026
- Agentic Governance and Administration (AGA) launch: discovery, classification, posture, ownership, NHIDR detection, plus MCP activity policy enforcement. - Entro blog, 17 Mar 2026
- $18M Series A led by Dell Technologies Capital, with StageOne and Hyperwise. - Entro blog, 18 Jun 2024
- Claude Code MCP audit plugin captures sessions passively through hooks and classifies agent intent with an in-house small language model. - Entro blog, 9 Feb 2026
- Wiz integration: 61% of organisations have secrets exposed in public code repositories; 90% of NHIs hold excessive permissions. - Entro blog, 13 May 2025
- ≥80% of unauthorized agent transactions through 2028 will be internal policy violations rather than attacks. - Gartner, 2026
Other head-to-heads
DataShield vs Astrix
NHI discovery and posture. Versus access at the moment of the call.
DirectDataShield vs Oasis Security
Lifecycle for machine identities. Versus proof an examiner can verify.
ComplementDataShield vs Microsoft Entra Agent ID
Entra says who the agent is. We prove it was allowed to do what it did.
AllEvery comparison
One honest scorecard per vendor, sources at the bottom.
See both mechanisms run in your browser. Break a live audit chain. Revoke an agent mid-session. Then decide what you still need. Demo Center access is free with a work email.
Get free Demo Center accessYou've seen the proof
Ready for a number? Scope your deployment and we'll price it against your own economics.
Get your quote →