Head-to-head · updated 13 September 2026

DataShield vs Peliqan: two trust layers, one of them keeps proof

Peliqan calls itself "The trust layer for AI & BI". It is the closest thing to us in the all-in-one data platform market. One vendor gives you 300+ connectors. It also gives you built-in ELT. You get a warehouse too. It has a federated query engine, reverse ETL and BI links. Add low-code data apps. Add a single MCP endpoint. An agent can read from it. An agent can write through it too. Credentials stay inside Peliqan. The agent gets a scoped key instead. You can pull any tool in one click. They hold SOC 2 Type II. They publish their prices too. For a 60-person finance team, in Ghent or Leeds, that is a great afternoon of shopping.

We sell the same headline promise. Our mechanism underneath it differs. We tokenize datasets at ingest. Agents query tokenized data over MCP. Detokenization is a separate act. It stays privileged and audited. We classify fields before agents see them. We check them against 129 built-in classes: PII, PHI, financial and secret. Each checked tool call re-checks the agent's access right then. Each decision lands in a hash chain. Signed checkpoints back the chain up. Anyone can verify it without trusting us. Below is the honest split. It includes the rows Peliqan wins outright.

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The short version

Pick DataShield when

Someone will ask you to prove an agent's log was not edited. Maybe an auditor asks. Maybe an examiner asks. Maybe it is Article 12 of the EU AI Act. A dashboard is just a screen. Our chain answers with math instead. Run the checker.
You need to pull an agent's authority mid-session. You want the very next tool call to fail. Not the next login. The next call itself.
You need to know which columns hold PHI before the agent queries them. You want those values tokenized. A role setting alone is not enough. How the catalog does it.
The whole stack has to run on your own hardware. No enterprise contract needed. You hold the keys yourself.

Pick Peliqan when

You need data out of 300+ business systems this month. Think Exact Online, Teamleader, Odoo. Even the ERP nobody has touched since 2019. We do not have that connector estate. We will not pretend otherwise.
Your procurement form has a SOC 2 Type II box. They have one. We do not, yet.
You want BI tools, an Excel add-in, reverse ETL and low-code data apps. All from the same vendor. That bundle is real. It is cheap too, at EUR 75 per source.
You want your agent to write back into business apps. Their MCP server does create and update. That is by design. Ours governs reads of checked datasets instead.

Bottom line: Peliqan moves your data. It gives an agent one safe door into it. We decide what the agent may do once it is through the door. We keep proof of the decision too. If your problem is plumbing, buy the plumbing. If your problem is the examiner, plumbing will not answer.

Feature by feature

Competitor cells describe what Peliqan's public site says, as of the date above. If we got something wrong, email support@myorg.ai. We will fix it, and credit you.

What matters	DataShield	Peliqan	Edge
Connectors and ELT	Not our job. We ingest files, S3-compatible storage, SFTP and SMB subtrees. We also register a live PostgreSQL database as a catalog provider. Snowflake, BigQuery, Databricks and Salesforce sit on the roadmap. No handler exists yet.	They ship 300+ pre-built connectors, plus a managed ELT engine. Plus a built-in warehouse. This is the core of the product. It is good.	◇
Audit evidence	SHA-256 hash chain. Checkpoints are Ed25519-signed, and chained too. Verification returns a three-valued verdict. It names the failure: tampering, insertion, deletion or truncation. Try the checker.	"You see all activity in one dashboard." They log AI queries and writeback actions too. We found no tamper-evidence system in their public docs. A log you can edit is a record, not evidence.	◆
Agent authorization	Each checked tool call runs the same pipeline before dispatch. First: authority refresh, metering guard, auth gate. Then: consented-tool narrowing, scope ceiling, authority tier. It fails closed.	"Your AI gets a scoped key, never your passwords." It also uses role-based access. Plus per-app action controls. The key sets scope when issued. We found no per-call decision point.	◆
Mid-session revocation	We revalidate access on each checked tool call. Revoke access at 14:02. The system refuses the 14:02:01 call.	"You can revoke any tool in one click." Good ergonomics. They do not state how fast that reaches a live session. Worth asking on the call.	◆
Break-glass	Scoped, time-boxed emergency access for agents. Admin, IP allowlist, and step-up gate it. It cannot be quietly removed from the log.	Not covered in their public docs.	◆
PII and PHI classification	We use 129 built-in field classes. They cover PII, PHI, financial data and secrets. That includes all 18 HIPAA Safe Harbor identifiers. We use regex plus checksum checks: Luhn, NPI, Verhoeff, ABA, IBAN, GTIN. We add column-name lexicons too. Plus anti-pattern suppressors. It is deterministic. Verdicts are reproducible, stamped by a config digest. No model means no drift.	They frame governance as role-based access. Plus audit trails, plus per-app action controls. We found no field-level sensitive-data classification in their docs.	◆
Tokenization and generalization	Deterministic, join-preserving, vault-reversible tokens apply at ingest. We also generalize quasi-identifiers: dates become year, decade or age band. ZIPs shrink to 3 or 4 digits. Phones, SSNs and emails go partial too. Each column gets a measured cardinality-reduction score.	Not vocabulary they use. Data lands in the warehouse in the clear. Access rules control it instead.	◆
GDPR erasure	We crypto-shred per-subject key material. We also issue ISO 27560 consent receipts. The chain still checks out after the subject is gone.	GDPR compliant, EU-hosted, with region-locked storage. Zero data egress on the sovereign tier too. They do not spell out the erasure steps.	◆
MCP and agents	More than 200 MCP tools span Ontology, Auth, Corpus and Lighthouse. Auth issues MCP tool tokens with an enforced scope ceiling. Delegation uses RFC 8693 token exchange. We attribute per-call metering to the agent.	One endpoint covers 300+ apps. It reads and writes, with credentials held centrally. Broader reach than ours, by a wide margin. Thinner underneath, though.	◈
Entity resolution	We use Fellegi-Sunter probabilistic record linkage. It uses Jaro-Winkler, Levenshtein, Soundex and Double Metaphone comparators. LSH blocking and EM-trained parameters feed five survivorship strategies. Golden records reach agents behind masked views.	Unifying 300+ sources here means pipes and SQL. We found no entity-resolution or golden-record feature.	◆
Deployment	Self-hosted, in your own cloud or data center. Or on a dedicated single-tenant server we run. Docker images ship for Auth, Ontology, Corpus and Lighthouse. Guardian checks a signed deploy manifest too. Ed25519 audit-signing keys stay on your instance. They sit 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. It is not a shipped integration though. HMAC tokenization keys sit in your setup today, not in a KMS.	EU-hosted SaaS. On-prem Kubernetes, bare metal and private cloud exist too. But only on the Enterprise tier, with custom pricing.	◆
Certifications	SOC 2 not yet certified. We say so on every page. We publish a threat model instead. A checker anyone can run. Source escrow sits in our design-partner terms.	SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001:2022 and GDPR. Their about page calls ISO 27001 in progress. The security page presents it as already held. Ask them which one is current.	◇
Maturity signals	Auth, Guardian and Lighthouse run live in production (Guardian and Lighthouse since April 2026). Field classification cut over from shadow mode days ago. That makes it new, not battle-tested.	Founded 2022 in Ghent, with an office in Bangalore. Homepage claims 10,000+ companies powered. Plus a named logo wall, and a whitelabel partner channel.	◇
Pricing	Public model, scoped instant quote, no sales wall.	Public too: EUR 75 per source per month on Connect. EUR 500 per month on PRO. Custom pricing on Enterprise. Credit where it is due.	◈

◆ DataShield leads◇ Peliqan leads◈ comparable

Peliqan claims come from peliqan.io, last checked 13 September 2026. We link the pages below, rather than work from memory. Peliqan runs no press wire we could find. Dates come from their blog.

Three things you get here that you won't get from an all-in-one data platform

Proof, not a dashboard

Their own blog puts it well. Logging AI queries turns "the AI said something odd last week" into a five-minute lookup. True, and useful. But a lookup assumes the log stays honest. Ours is a hash chain with signed checkpoints instead. The checker tells you what broke. Not just that something did. That is the property EU AI Act Article 12 and HIPAA §164.312(b) reviewers care about. Try it in your browser, no signup needed.

Authority that changes 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 against current access. It fails closed. One-click revoke in a console is a fine button. Ask what it does to the live session, though. How Auth does it.

The sensitive columns named before the agent asks

A warehouse that has synced 300 sources holds a lot nobody labelled. We classify each field against 129 classes and store no column values by default. We tokenize at ingest instead. The agent joins on a token, not a national ID. Detokenization is a separate act: privileged, and logged. See the catalog.

Where Peliqan is genuinely stronger

Start with the obvious here. Building 300+ connectors, plus a managed ELT engine, took years of unglamorous work. We have not done it. Our live catalog scanning covers PostgreSQL only, for now. They ship a warehouse too, plus a federated query engine. BI links, an Excel add-in, reverse ETL and low-code data apps come in one subscription. It starts at EUR 75 per source. They hold SOC 2 Type II. They will sell you a single-tenant EU sovereign deployment too, with region-locked storage. Their MCP server writes as well as reads, across all of it. That is a bigger surface than ours. Their architecture argument is right, too. An agent querying a synced warehouse behaves better than one hammering live APIs. It can join across systems. It will not trip a rate limit at month end.

Here is the push-back, though. Their governance story is access plus activity. You set both up once. A scoped key decides what an agent may reach at issue time. The dashboard tells you afterwards what it did. Nothing in the middle re-asks the question at the moment of the call. Nothing labels which of those synced columns hold PHI. The record itself stays easy to change, too. Gartner expects most unauthorized agent transactions through 2028 to be internal policy violations, not attacks. That is exactly the case where a correctly issued key does the wrong thing. An editable log is the only witness then. That middle layer is what we sell. It sits happily on top of a warehouse somebody else filled.

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. Run it against a sample chain at /verify. Peliqan: their docs describe an activity dashboard. Plus logging of AI queries and writeback. We found no tamper-evidence system though. Ask them who can edit the table.

What happens to a revoked agent mid-session?

DataShield re-checks access on each checked tool call. Revocation lands on the next call, not the next login. Peliqan says every AI client gets scoped access. You can revoke it instantly. You can pull any tool in one click. What we could not find: how fast that reaches a live session. Ask how long a compromised agent keeps working after you click.

How does GDPR erasure interact with the audit trail?

DataShield crypto-shreds per-subject key material. It also issues an ISO 27560 consent receipt. HMAC commits actor identities in the chain. So the evidence still checks out once the subject is gone. Peliqan is GDPR compliant and EU-hosted, with region-locked storage. Zero data egress on the sovereign tier too. They do not spell out how erasure works across the warehouse and its logs. Ask for the how, not the badge.

Is DataShield an ELT tool? Do we drop Peliqan?

No, and probably not. We do not maintain 300 connectors. We have no opinion about your Exact Online rate limits. Our live-source catalog scanning is PostgreSQL only, today. If moving data is the problem, buy a tool that moves data. Run us over the datasets agents actually touch instead. That is where classification, authorization and evidence matter. Plenty of teams will sensibly run both.

Peliqan's MCP server writes to business apps. Does yours?

Theirs does, on purpose: create and update, across 300+ apps behind one endpoint. That is a real feature, and a real blast radius. Ask what a bad write looks like. Ask how you unwind it too. Ours governs a data plane instead. Agents query tokenized datasets. Tool tokens carry an enforced scope ceiling. Delegation uses RFC 8693 token exchange. We authorize the call before dispatch. Then sealed into the chain after. Different jobs, really. If you want an agent to update a CRM record, theirs. Want an agent to read regulated data under a policy? A policy you can prove later? Ours does that.

Does DataShield have SOC 2?

Not yet, and we will not imply otherwise. Peliqan does, along with ISO 27001. On that row they beat us cleanly. What we offer instead: a public threat model. Plus a checker anyone can run against a sample chain. Our design-partner terms include source escrow too. So a small vendor is not a single point of failure. Details on the security page.

Peliqan's hero: "The trust layer for AI & BI. Governed data warehouse that unifies 300+ sources, with built-in ELT. Your AI agents connect through one unified MCP server." - peliqan.io, 13 Sep 2026
MCP server: "300+ apps behind one endpoint", read and write, "Your AI gets a scoped key, never your passwords", and "you can revoke any tool in one click". - peliqan.io/mcp, 13 Sep 2026
Published pricing: Connect at EUR 75 per data source per month, PRO at EUR 500 per month. Enterprise is custom, with on-prem Kubernetes, bare metal or private cloud. - peliqan.io/pricing, 13 Sep 2026
SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001:2022 and GDPR. Also a single-tenant European sovereign cloud option with region-locked storage and zero data egress. - peliqan.io/security, 13 Sep 2026
"Peliqan logs AI queries and writeback actions, which turns 'the AI said something odd last week' from an unanswerable question into a five-minute lookup." - Peliqan blog, AI-ready data, 26 Aug 2026
Founded 2022, headquartered in Ghent, Belgium, with an office in Bangalore; ISO 27001 described as in progress on this page. - peliqan.io/about, 13 Sep 2026

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