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Head-to-head · updated 13 September 2026

DataShield vs Glean: the agent may read the record, but should the model see the SSN?

Glean is very good at the job it picked. Point it at your 250-plus SaaS apps. It builds an Enterprise Graph. That graph knows who wrote what. It knows who can see it. It knows which Jira ticket the Slack thread was really about. The source system's permissions carry over. On each read and write. Their MCP Gateway precomputes the joins. An off-the-shelf MCP tool makes the model do those joins at runtime, instead. That's smart engineering, genuinely. They passed $300M ARR in May 2026. Can't staff find anything? Buy Glean and stop reading.

We do a different job. DataShield governs the structured and sensitive data agents act on. The customer table. The claims extract. The golden record. We tokenize datasets at ingest. Agents query tokenized data over MCP. Detokenization needs a privileged step. We audit it, each time. Each checked tool call gets re-checked. That check runs against the agent's current access, before it runs. We seal each decision into a hash chain. You can verify it without trusting us. Most buyers who talk to both of us end up running both. Here is the honest split. It includes the rows Glean wins outright.

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DataShield vs Glean at a glanceEight questions regulated buyers ask us. Scored from each vendor's public material. DataShield vs Glean at a glance Eight questions regulated buyers ask us. Scored from each vendor's public material. DataShield Glean Sensitive values tokenized before the model Authority re-checked on every tool call Tamper-evident audit chain you can verify Runs fully on your own infrastructure GDPR erasure that keeps the chain valid Search across 250+ SaaS apps Permission-inherited retrieval at scale SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, ISO 42001, HIPAA shipped partial / roadmap not offered Sources at the bottom of this page.

The short version

Pick DataShield when

  • The sensitive value must be a token before the model sees it. Not a document the model was merely allowed to open. Permission filtering says yes or no to a whole file. We change what the field says.
  • Someone will ask you to prove an agent's 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. The next call. How Auth does it.
  • The index, the keys, the policy engine and the evidence all have to sit on your own hardware. We ship Docker images. We embed locally. So no text and no embeddings leave your network.

Pick Glean when

  • The actual problem is that nobody can find anything. 250-plus connectors and a precomputed Enterprise Graph are years of work. We do not index Slack, Confluence or Google Drive at all.
  • You want permission-aware retrieval over unstructured documents. Glean inherits source-system permissions on every read and write. They've been doing it since 2019.
  • Your security review wants certificates today. They hold SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, ISO 42001, HIPAA and TX-RAMP Level 2. We hold none of those yet.
  • You want a no-code agent builder, an agent library, trace views and an AI gateway from one vendor. Their Agent Development Lifecycle is a real operating model, not a slide.

Bottom line: Glean decides whether an agent may open the document. We decide what the data says when it gets there. We keep proof of the decision, too. Skyflow noticed the same gap. They shipped a tokenization layer for Glean in August 2026. That tells you the market is real.

Feature by feature

Competitor cells describe what Glean's public site, blog and press releases say. We use the date above. Did we get this wrong? Email support@myorg.ai and we'll correct it, credited.

What mattersDataShieldGleanEdge
Enterprise search over SaaS appsNot our product. Ontology has a real catalog. Plus RAG over datasets and files you load into it. But we don't crawl your Slack, your Drive or your Jira.The core of the business. More than 250 connectors, an Enterprise Graph and a Personal Graph. Plus a precomputed index that answers cross-app questions in one hop.◇
Sensitive data before the modelDeterministic, join-preserving, vault-reversible tokens, applied at ingest. Then a fail-closed prompt-egress gate. We redact any PII or PHI column with no set treatment. Before prompt assembly, each time. A PHI dataset refuses an AI endpoint not marked BAA or ZDR. 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 gets a measured cardinality-reduction score.Glean Protect adds sensitive-content policies. Plus restricted-topics policies and oversharing detection. Their own framing: they detect and block sensitive content. They can hide files from results, too. We found no tokenization or generalization of field values on their public pages.◆
Audit evidenceSHA-256 hash chain with Ed25519-signed checkpoints, themselves chained. The verdict takes three values: clean, attested damage, or tampered. Re-tampering an attested chain un-attests it, on its own. Try the verifier."Every control point is logged to an end-to-end audit trail as it happens, with events available to stream into SIEM." A good day-to-day log. We found no cryptographic tamper evidence.◆
Agent authorizationEvery checked tool call passes five checks before dispatch. Session-access revalidation. A metering guard. A consented-tool allowlist. A scope gate. An access gate. It fails closed.Agent Access Policies (beta in May 2026) apply org-wide guardrails. Agent alignment models pre-scan write actions to flag misaligned tries. That is a model checking a plan. Useful, but not the same as a deterministic gate.◆
Agent identityAgents are first-class subjects. They get SSO. Plus MCP tool tokens, carrying a scope ceiling. Plus RFC 8693 delegation, with an enforced scope subset. Our subject model classifies human, service account and system. That's a classification, not a separate NHI product.Genuinely strong, and they got there on its own. Agent identity went to public beta in July 2026. An agent gets its own scoped service keys. Plus its own Slack bot and GitHub App. Actions attribute to the agent. It records the triggering human alongside. Admin can rotate or revoke.◈
Mid-session revocationWe recheck access on each tool call. It downgrades to anonymous the moment it drifts. Revocation lands on the next call.Admins can rotate or revoke an agent key at any time. For one system, or all. How fast that reaches a running agent? Not covered in their public docs. Worth asking.◆
Break-glassScoped, time-boxed emergency access for agents. Admin plus IP-allowlist plus step-up gated. Fully audited, auto-revoking.Not described on their public pages.◆
GDPR erasureCrypto-shred of per-subject key material. Plus ISO 27560 consent receipts. Delete the subject key. Every ciphertext for that subject goes dark at once. The audit chain still checks out afterwards.They list GDPR compliance on the security page. The erasure steps aren't covered, though. Not for indexed content. Not for the audit trail. Ask what happens to an index built from a file you deleted.◆
Retrieval and embeddingspgvector, with hybrid keyword and vector retrieval. Plus local nomic-embed-text embeddings. So no text and no vectors leave your network. Chunk views mask at read time. They rebuild the keyword index from the masked text. So search can't probe for a redacted value. We publish no retrieval accuracy number. We have no benchmark paper to point at.Better retrieval, and they should be. A precomputed index and knowledge graph span each app they connect. Tuned since 2019. Plus 40-plus models to choose from. Their September 2026 benchmark claims 81% lower token cost. Plus a 78% preference rate, against one competing setup. That's their own test. But the architecture logic behind it holds up.◇
Structured data and golden recordsOntology is a dataset platform. Ingest, in-place scan and profiling of a live PostgreSQL source. No row egress. 129-class field classification. Reproducible verdicts. Typed lineage, stewardship queues. MDM with Fellegi-Sunter probabilistic linkage, LSH blocking and five survivorship strategies. Golden records reach agents through views that mask unconditionally.Interactive dashboards combine structured data with unstructured context. Announced September 2026. The centre of gravity is files and chats. They describe no entity resolution or master data layer.◆
MCP and agentsMore than 200 MCP tools across Ontology, Auth, Corpus and Lighthouse. Auth issues MCP tool tokens with scope ceilings. It meters each call and tags who ran it.The MCP Gateway is the best part of their agent story. Permission-inherited connectors. OAuth through Glean's own server. Authentication goes to your IdP. Downstream tokens stay server-side. Access to more than 2,000 tools, from one place.◈
DeploymentSelf-hosted, in your own cloud or data center, your call. Or a dedicated single-tenant server we run. Docker images for Auth, Ontology, Corpus and Lighthouse. With a signed deploy manifest Guardian checks. Ed25519 audit-signing keys stay on your instance. In a key directory you control. Kid-keyed rotation fails closed on an unknown key. KMS or HSM custody is a built seam in Auth. Not a shipped integration. HMAC tokenization keys sit in your environment today. Or come from your machine key. Not in a KMS.SaaS. The agent sandbox runs file system and code execution. In the customer's own cloud. At least one case study cites hosting Glean in the customer's tenant. They don't publicly offer a fully self-hosted edition.◆
Maturity signalsAuth, Guardian and Lighthouse are live in production (Guardian and Lighthouse since April 2026). SOC 2 not yet certified, and we say so.Founded 2019. Past $300M ARR in May 2026. Fortune 500 customers nearly doubled year over year. Live in 28 countries. Certificates: SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, ISO 42001, HIPAA and TX-RAMP Level 2.◇
PricingPublished model, scoped instant quote, no sales wall.Their pricing page is a demo request. They publish no tiers and no per-seat figure.◆

◆ DataShield leads◇ Glean leads◈ comparable

Glean claims come from glean.com, the Glean blog and Glean press releases. We checked them on 13 September 2026. We link them below, not just a paraphrase from memory.

Three things you get here that you won't get from an enterprise search platform

The model never sees the value

Permission-aware retrieval asks one question. May this person open this file? Fair question. Wrong one, though, when the file is a claims export. With 40,000 member IDs in it. We tokenize at ingest. So the agent joins on TOK_9f2a.... It gets a correct answer. It never holds the identifier. Detokenizing is a separate, privileged, tenant-scoped call. The audit write has to succeed. Or we refuse the lookup. How the data plane works.

Authority that can change mid-flight

An analyst leaves on a Friday. Their agent is 20 minutes into a 40-minute job. With DataShield, we re-check the next checked tool call. We check it against current access. It fails closed. Rotating a key is the right move too. But it only helps on the next handshake. How Auth does it.

Proof that survives an audit

A log you can stream into a SIEM is still a log. An admin could have edited it first. Ours is a hash chain with signed checkpoints. The verifier names what broke: tampering, insertion, deletion, or 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.

Where Glean is genuinely stronger

Almost everywhere our page doesn't go. Their connector estate is the deepest in the category. It took seven years to build. Their permission model mirrors source-system access. On each read. On each write. It's the thing each rival quietly copies. The MCP Gateway case is sharp, technical writing. The sharpest any vendor in this market posted in 2026. An off-the-shelf MCP setup makes the model reconcile Jira, Confluence and GitHub. At runtime, each time. A precomputed index and knowledge graph do that join in advance instead. That's a real architecture insight. Not positioning. Their agent identity beta shipped in July 2026. It reaches the same conclusion we did. Agents borrow human keys. That's a problem. Their write-up of the problem beats most of ours. They also hold the certificates we do not. And they have the logos.

Here is the push-back, and it's narrow on purpose. Each control they describe works on files and actions. Hide the overshared file. Block the restricted topic. Flag the misaligned write. Score the risky pattern. None of it changes what a permitted field contains. So a regulated buyer has one question to answer. What happens when the sensitive data sits inside a file staff can read? Glean's answer is a rule that hides the whole thing. That's why a professional-services CIO told Skyflow something telling. They said they would otherwise have had to "kill 60% of Glean's doc repos after legal found unsanitized client data." Skyflow launched a product for exactly that, in August 2026. We think a token in the field beats a deleted repo. We also think something else. The record of who detokenized what should be checkable by an examiner. Not just claimed by your vendor.

Questions worth asking both of us

These are the questions we would want answered if we were the ones buying. Ask them on each call, ours too.

Can you cryptographically prove an audit log entry wasn't deleted?

DataShield: yes, it can. Each record commits to the one before it. We sign and chain the checkpoints. The verdict tells deletion apart from truncation and from tampering. Run it against a sample chain at /verify. Glean: their security page promises an end-to-end audit trail. One that streams to a SIEM. That's a day-to-day log. We found no tamper-evidence check, though. Not on their public pages. Ask them to show one.

What happens to a revoked agent mid-session?

DataShield rechecks access on each tool call. So the change lands on the next call. Glean's agent identity beta lets an admin rotate or revoke an agent's keys. For one system, or all of them. That's the right primitive. What their docs don't say is how quickly a running agent notices. Ask how long a compromised agent keeps working after you pull its access. Ask for the number in seconds.

How does GDPR erasure interact with the audit trail?

DataShield crypto-shreds per-subject key material. Then it issues an ISO 27560 consent receipt. HMAC commitments stand in for actor identities in the chain. So the evidence still checks out once the subject is gone. Glean lists GDPR on its security page. But it doesn't say how. Here's the interesting version of the question for an index. You delete a file. What happens to the chunks? The embeddings? The graph edges derived from it? Ask for the answer in writing.

Is DataShield a Glean alternative for enterprise search?

No. Can't your staff find the onboarding doc? Then we are the wrong buy. We'll say so on the call. We have RAG over content you load into Ontology. With local embeddings and hybrid retrieval. But we don't crawl 250 SaaS apps. We're not trying to. Run Glean for finding things. Run us for the datasets agents read and write. That's where the job is tokenization, authorization and evidence.

Skyflow launched a product for Glean in August 2026. Why not just use that?

It's a reasonable choice. It backs up the whole case on this page. A tokenization vendor built a layer. Just to clean up files before Glean indexes them. Skyflow is a mature vault. It does that job well. Where we differ is what comes after the token. We also carry the catalog. The classification, too. The per-call agent authorization. The mid-session revocation. The verifiable chain. All in the same stack. We run entirely on your own setup. Do you only need sanitized ingest? Look at both of us. Our Skyflow comparison is honest about where they win.

Does DataShield have SOC 2?

Not yet, and we won't imply otherwise. Glean holds SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, ISO 42001, HIPAA and TX-RAMP Level 2. On that row they beat us flat. What we offer instead: a posted threat model. A verifier anyone can run. Design-partner terms that include source escrow. 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.

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