Head-to-head · updated 13 September 2026
DataShield vs Fivetran: once the pipeline lands the data, who governs it?
Fivetran is the best managed ELT product on the market. We won't pretend otherwise. Point it at 900 or so sources. Rows land in your warehouse. It handles schema drift. Nobody gets paged at 2am. The dbt Labs merger closed on 1 June 2026. So they own the transform layer too. Plus stewardship of Great Expectations. Their homepage says "The data foundation for AI" and "Automated data for autonomous agents". For the movement half of that, it's a fair claim.
We do not move data. DataShield has no connector library and never will. We start one step later, at the datasets your agents read. We tokenize datasets at ingest. Agents query tokenized data over MCP. Detokenization is privileged. It's audited. We check every checked tool call. That check runs against the agent's access before it runs. We seal every decision into a hash chain. You can verify it yourself. Most of our buyers keep their pipelines. Below is the honest split. It includes the rows Fivetran wins.
The short version
Pick DataShield when
- An agent reads the data. One day someone asks you to prove the access log was not edited. An examiner, an auditor, or Article 12 of the EU AI Act. Our chain answers with math. Run the verifier.
- You need to pull an agent's access mid-session. The very next tool call should fail. Not the next token refresh.
- You want to know which landed columns hold PII or PHI. By class, with a verdict you can re-derive. We ship 129 field classes, including all 18 HIPAA Safe Harbor identifiers.
- The policy engine, the vault and the evidence all have to run on hardware you control.
Pick Fivetran when
- You need rows out of Salesforce, SAP, Postgres, a stream and a pile of files. You'd rather not own connector code. No one on earth does that job better.
- You want load and dbt transform from one vendor. One support contract, one roadmap. Since 1 June 2026, that's a real thing you can buy.
- Certifications gate the deal. They hold SOC 1 and SOC 2, ISO 27001, HITRUST and PCI DSS Level 1. They sign a HIPAA BAA, too. We hold none of those yet.
- Your team wants to see a usage price before talking to anyone. Their MAR curve is published. So is ours.
Bottom line: Fivetran gets the data there. We decide what an agent may do with it. We keep proof of that call, too. These are different products. For most teams, the sane answer is both.
Feature by feature
Competitor cells describe what Fivetran's public site and press releases say. We use the date above. Did we mischaracterise something? Email support@myorg.ai and we'll correct it, credited.
| What matters | DataShield | Fivetran | Edge |
|---|---|---|---|
| Data movement and connectors | None. We ingest files, URLs and S3-compatible storage. A bucket or SFTP subtree gets watched for changes. We can register a live PostgreSQL database as a catalog provider. That is not a pipeline product. We don't sell it as one. | The core product, and the reason they exist. 900+ sources and targets. Automatic schema drift handling, incremental sync, and dbt transform since the merger. | ◇ |
| Audit evidence | SHA-256 hash chain with Ed25519-signed checkpoints, themselves chained. Verification returns a three-valued verdict. It names the failure: tampering, insertion, deletion or truncation. Try the verifier. | Log events from connections, user actions and API calls. Sent on to CloudWatch, Azure Monitor or Datadog. Useful in daily ops. A forwarded log is still a log you can edit. | ◆ |
| Agent authorization | Every checked tool call passes a scope gate. Plus a consented-tool allowlist and a declared access tier. Plus a mid-session revocation check before dispatch. It fails closed. | Role-based access control over accounts, destinations and connectors. SSO from Okta or Entra ID. It governs who sets up pipelines. It says nothing about what an agent reads at query time. | ◆ |
| Break-glass | Scoped, time-boxed emergency access for agents. Admin plus IP-allowlist plus step-up gated. It auto-revokes and can't be quietly removed from the log. | Not described in their public material. | ◆ |
| GDPR erasure | Crypto-shred of per-subject key material, plus ISO 27560 consent receipts. HMAC commitments stand in for actor names in the chain. So the audit still verifies after the subject is gone. | Regional DPAs, plus GDPR and CCPA commitments. Erasing a subject inside the warehouse is your problem. That's true of every ELT tool. | ◆ |
| Sensitive field handling | Deterministic, join-preserving, vault-reversible tokens at ingest. Plus quasi-identifier generalization: dates to year, decade or age band, ZIPs to 3 or 4 digits, partial phones, SSNs and emails. Each gets a measured cardinality-reduction score. We privilege and audit every detokenization. | Column blocking and hashing before data lands, plus customer-managed keys. Both are real and useful. Both are one-way. You pick the columns by hand. | ◆ |
| PII and PHI classification | 129 built-in field classes across PII, PHI, financial data and secrets. The method is regex and checksum validation (Luhn, NPI, Verhoeff, ABA, IBAN, GTIN). Plus column-name lexicons and anti-pattern suppressors. No model. So you can re-derive a verdict from a config digest. It cut over from shadow mode days ago. Call it shipped, not battle-tested. | We could not find field-level PII or PHI labelling in their governance material. They hook into catalog vendors who do it. | ◆ |
| MCP and agents | More than 200 MCP tools across Ontology, Auth, Corpus and Lighthouse. Auth issues MCP tool tokens with an enforced scope ceiling. It meters each call and attributes it to the agent. | A real MCP server, scoped to connector and platform ops. List agents, manage connections, build custom connectors by prompt. Plus Agents Schema, an open standard. It keeps agent context in plain SQL tables. Neither one authorizes a read. | ◆ |
| 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. Guardian signs and verifies the deploy manifest. | SaaS by default. Hybrid Deployment runs an agent on your side. So the data work happens in your network. The control plane, the scheduler and the metadata stay with Fivetran. There is no mode where the whole thing runs inside your walls. | ◆ |
| Certifications | None. We cite HIPAA §164.312(b), GDPR Art. 17 and ISO 27560 as design targets. A code path backs each one. SOC 2 not yet certified. We say so on every page. | SOC 1 and SOC 2, ISO 27001, HITRUST. PCI DSS Level 1 on Business Critical. A signed HIPAA BAA, too. | ◇ |
| Maturity signals | Auth, Guardian and Lighthouse are live in production (Guardian and Lighthouse since April 2026). Small team, source escrow in design-partner terms. | Founded 2012. Merged with dbt Labs June 2026. More than 100,000 data teams. Customers include Pfizer, Roche, Verizon and Siemens. | ◇ |
| Pricing | Published model with a scoped instant quote and no sales wall. | A published MAR usage curve with worked examples, and a 500,000 MAR free tier. Enterprise and Business Critical are quote-only. MAR is also famously hard to forecast through a backfill. | ◈ |
◆ DataShield leads◇ Fivetran leads◈ comparable
We draw Fivetran claims from fivetran.com. Also Fivetran's own press releases. We checked them on 13 September 2026. We link them below, not just memory.
Three things you get here that you won't get from a data movement platform
Proof that survives an audit
A log a vendor can rewrite proves nothing. Ours is a hash chain with signed checkpoints. The verifier tells you what broke. Not just that something did. Tamper again with a chain already marked as damaged. It drops that mark on its own. That is the trait 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 on a Friday. Their agent is 20 minutes into a 40-minute job. It runs over the data your pipeline landed last night. With DataShield, we re-check the next checked tool call. We check it against live access. It fails closed. A pipeline has no view on this. That's not its job. How Auth does it.
An erasure you can defend
GDPR says delete. Your auditor says keep the log. Crypto-shred settles it. We destroy the subject's key material. The data goes unreadable. The chain still verifies. See the diagram.
Where Fivetran is genuinely stronger
Start with the boring truth. Connectors are a grind. Fivetran has been grinding since 2012. Schema drift, broken APIs, rate limits, backfills. A source vendor changing a field type on a Tuesday. They soak up all of it. The team you'd need to do that yourself costs more than the bill. The dbt merger closed on 1 June 2026. So load and transform sit under one roof now. dbt Core v2.0 keeps the Fusion engine under Apache 2.0. Their compliance shelf is fuller than ours, by a mile. SOC 1 and SOC 2. ISO 27001, HITRUST, PCI DSS Level 1. A signed HIPAA BAA. We have none of it. Is your buying gate a certificate? Then that gate is real.
Here is the push-back, though, and their own research hands it to us. Their May 2026 Agentic AI Readiness Index found 41% of firms already run agentic AI in production. Only 15% say they are fully ready. Two of the top three barriers tied at 39% each: rules and risk. Their fix for that gap is better data. Cleaner, fresher. Agents Schema hands agents context as plain SQL tables. It's a good standard. It says nothing about who may read what. An agent reads a well-built context table. It's still an agent nobody checked. Column hashing is the closest they come. It's one-way, per connector. A human picks the columns. They have to know which ones matter. A regulator doesn't ask whether the data was fresh. They ask who could read it. And how you know.
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. Verification tells deletion apart from truncation and from tampering. Try it at /verify. Fivetran: their governance page lists log events sent on to CloudWatch, Azure Monitor or Datadog. Those are ops logs. Nothing in their public material claims tamper evidence. Ask them what stops an admin editing history.
What happens to a revoked agent mid-session?
DataShield re-checks access on every checked tool call. Revoke, and the very next call drops to anonymous. Fivetran's access control covers users and service accounts. It applies to accounts, destinations and connectors. It's fed from Okta or Entra ID. That is control at setup time. Not at query time. Ask how long an agent with a warehouse credential keeps reading. After you cut it off upstream.
How does GDPR erasure interact with the audit trail?
DataShield crypto-shreds the per-subject key material. We issue an ISO 27560 consent receipt. HMAC commitments stand in for actor names in the chain. So the evidence still verifies once the subject is gone. Fivetran commits to GDPR and CCPA. They offer regional DPAs. That's the right stance for a processor. Wiping a subject from the warehouse is still yours to solve. So is keeping the history sound.
Do we replace Fivetran with DataShield?
No. We have no connector library, no scheduler and no reverse ETL. Is your problem moving rows from 40 SaaS apps into Snowflake? Buy Fivetran and be happy. Run us over the datasets agents query, where the job is labelling, access and proof. Plenty of teams will run both. We'd rather say that than pretend otherwise.
Fivetran now owns dbt and Great Expectations. Does that change anything for us?
It packs the stack tighter. The merger closed on 1 June 2026. Three weeks before that, Fivetran took stewardship of Great Expectations. The open source community, plus GX Core. One firm now holds load, transform, and the best known open source data quality project. dbt Core v2.0 open-sourced the Fusion engine under Apache 2.0. A real good-faith signal. Still, ask what you'd ask of any roll-up. Whose roadmap wins when load and transform pull apart? And what's your exit, if the answer stops suiting you?
Does DataShield have SOC 2?
No, and we won't imply otherwise. Fivetran does, plus ISO 27001, HITRUST, PCI DSS Level 1 and a HIPAA BAA. What we offer instead is a method you can check. A public threat model. A verifier you can run in your browser. Source escrow in design-partner terms, so a small vendor isn't a single point of failure. Auth is live. Guardian and Lighthouse have been in production since April 2026. Details on the security page.
- Fivetran and dbt Labs completed their all-stock merger on 1 June 2026, serving "more than 100,000 data teams." They shipped dbt Core v2.0 alpha, with the Fusion engine open-sourced under Apache 2.0. Plus Agents Schema, an open standard storing agentic context as plain SQL tables. - Fivetran press release, 1 Jun 2026
- Fivetran became steward of the Great Expectations open source community and the GX Core project. - Fivetran press release, 13 May 2026
- Fivetran's 2026 Agentic AI Readiness Index surveyed 400 data professionals. 41% already run agentic AI in production. Only 15% say they are fully prepared. 39% name regulatory compliance and 39% name security and privacy as barriers. - Fivetran press release, 5 May 2026
- Fivetran's certifications: SOC 1 and SOC 2, ISO 27001, HITRUST, PCI DSS Level 1. Plus a signed HIPAA BAA. Plus customer-managed keys, and column blocking and hashing before data enters the destination. - fivetran.com/security, 13 Sep 2026
- Published pricing. A free tier of 500,000 monthly active rows. A per-MAR consumption curve, with worked connection examples. Customer-managed encryption keys, plus PCI DSS Level 1, only on Business Critical. - fivetran.com/pricing, 13 Sep 2026
- Homepage positioning: "The data foundation for AI" and "Automated data for autonomous agents." Plus 900+ sources and destinations. - fivetran.com, 13 Sep 2026
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One honest scorecard per vendor.
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