Head-to-head · updated 13 September 2026
DataShield vs Protecto: detection is the easy part, what happens next?
Protecto is good at finding sensitive data. Hundreds of entity types. Dozens of languages. An inline masker that sits in the live request path. A free demo you can throw text at, no call needed. We're not going to argue with their detection numbers. You shouldn't ask us to.
The point is about the next second. Something gets detected and masked. Who decided the agent was allowed to make that call? What happens when you revoke its access halfway through a job? Can you prove three months later that the log wasn't edited? That's the layer DataShield sells. Below is a row-by-row comparison. It includes the places Protecto is plainly ahead of us.
The short version
Pick DataShield when
- You'll eventually have to prove an agent's access log wasn't altered. Ours is a hash chain with signed, chained checkpoints, and the verifier tells you whether it was tampering, insertion, deletion, or truncation. Run it yourself.
- You need an agent's authority pulled mid-session, with the very next checked tool call failing closed instead of riding out a token's lifetime.
- You want to issue the agent's credentials, not watch traffic authenticated somewhere else. We're the identity plane: MCP tool tokens, scope ceilings, JWKS rotation, a Connection Vault. How Auth works.
- A subject exercises their right to erasure and your auditor still wants the March logs. Crypto-shred plus ISO 27560 receipts gives you both.
Pick Protecto when
- Detection breadth is the requirement. 200+ data types, 50+ languages, and a live PII demo you can test in a browser. We publish no detection rate and don't claim multilingual coverage.
- You need masking inside the live request path, right as a prompt heads to a model. Their GPT Guard does that. We deliberately don't sit inline; see the FAQ.
- Certifications gate the purchase. SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, and a HIPAA BAA are on their side of the table today. We have none of those yet.
- You want a managed SaaS with a fast setup and a GCP Marketplace listing, plus named customers and case studies to show your board.
Bottom line: Protecto decides what to mask. DataShield decides what the agent is allowed to do and keeps evidence you can verify without trusting us. If your open risk is detection coverage, buy theirs. If it's authorization and proof, start here.
Feature by feature
Competitor cells describe what Protecto's public site and docs say. This is as of the date above. Did we get something wrong? Email support@myorg.ai. We will correct it, and credit you.
| What matters | DataShield | Protecto | Edge |
|---|---|---|---|
| PII/PHI detection | PII and PHI classification against 129 field classes. This covers all 18 HIPAA Safe Harbor identifiers and eight non-US national ID formats. It uses checksum checks (Luhn, NPI, Verhoeff, ABA, IBAN, GTIN) and anti-pattern filters. Deterministic and reproducible, with no model behind it. They cover more languages. | 99%+ accuracy claimed. 200+ data types. 50+ languages. A self-serve live demo. This is their home turf. | ◇ |
| Audit evidence | SHA-256 row chain with Ed25519-signed checkpoints. The checkpoints are chained too. The check names the failure: tampering, insertion, deletion, or truncation. Try the verifier. | Full event logging, named as audit-ready. We found no public cryptographic tamper evidence, and no verify endpoint. | ◆ |
| Agent authorization | Every checked tool call passes a scope ceiling. It also passes a declared access tier, and a revoke check. This happens before dispatch. Cedar handles admin, platform, config, and token decisions. | Context-Based Access Control decides at inference time. It reads identities from your existing AD or Okta. A decision point, not an issuer. | ◆ |
| Break-glass | Scoped, time-boxed emergency access for agents. It auto-revokes and can't be quietly removed from the chain. | Not named in their public docs. | ◆ |
| GDPR erasure | Crypto-shred of per-subject key material, plus ISO 27560 consent receipts. Actor identities are HMAC commitments. So no log row has to be deleted. | Named as GDPR ready. The interaction between erasure and retained logs is not documented. | ◆ |
| Tokenization | We tokenize datasets at ingest. Agents query tokenized data over MCP. Detokenization is a checked, special step. Tokens are deterministic, join-preserving, and vault-reversible. | Masking in the request path, with reversal through their Privacy Vault. Both of us are reversible. That matters for the EDPB pseudonymization argument. | ◈ |
| Inline interception | We do not proxy your LLM traffic. We do gate each value that leaves a checked dataset for a prompt. A PII or PHI column with no set treatment gets redacted. A PHI dataset refuses any AI endpoint not marked BAA or ZDR approved. That is a gate on our own data path, not an inline product. | Yes. GPT Guard masks live traffic to and from models. | ◇ |
| MCP and agents | Native MCP endpoints on Auth, Ontology, and Lighthouse. Auth issues MCP tool tokens with scope ceilings. Per-call metering ties back to the agent. | Hero copy now names MCP pipelines directly. A Try the API option exists too. Protection sits on the data path. We found no tool-level agent identity model. | ◆ |
| Deployment | Self-hosted, or dedicated single-tenant. No managed SaaS. Ed25519 audit-signing keys stay on your instance, in a key folder you control. Chain checkpoints get signed there too, with kid-keyed rotation. KMS or HSM custody is a built seam in Auth, not a shipped connection. HMAC tokenization keys sit in your setup today. Or they come from your machine key. Not from a KMS. | SaaS, hosted VPC, air-gapped on-prem, and a GCP Marketplace listing. Broader options than ours. | ◇ |
| Maturity signals | Auth, Guardian, and Lighthouse are live in production. Guardian and Lighthouse have run since April 2026. No SOC 2 yet, and we say so. Design-partner terms include source escrow. | Founded 2021. SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, HIPAA BAA, named logos, and case studies. Both of us are early-stage. Their trust surface is further along. | ◇ |
| Pricing | Published model, scoped instant quote, no sales wall. | Sales-gated. They used to publish a monthly tier. That page now returns a 404. Talk to an Expert is the only route to a number. | ◆ |
◆ DataShield leads◇ Protecto leads◈ comparable
Protecto claims come from protecto.ai and our battle-card research. Last checked 13 September 2026. They have also surfaced a product called DeepSight. We have not been able to check it yet. So we left it out, rather than guess.
Three things you get here that you won't get from a masking layer
Evidence, not event logs
Most audit logs are rows in a database. Whoever owns the database can update those rows. Ours commit to each other. Checkpoints are signed and chained. The verifier reports which failure occurred: deletion, truncation, insertion, tampering. EU AI Act Article 12 and HIPAA §164.312(b) reviewers test for exactly that property. Break one yourself. No login.
We issue the credential
A filter reads a decision someone else made. We mint the agent's MCP tool tokens. Each gets capped with a scope ceiling. We rotate the signing keys. We re-check revoke status on each checked call. An analyst leaves at 14:00. Their agent's next tool call fails, not the one after its token expires. How Auth does it.
Erasure your examiner can live with
GDPR says delete. Your examiner says keep the March logs. Crypto-shred settles it. We destroy the subject's key material. The data is unreadable. The chain still checks out. You hand over an ISO 27560 receipt. See the diagram.
Where Protecto is genuinely stronger
Their detection work is better than ours. I would say so on a call. 200+ entity types, across 50+ languages, is a real engineering investment. The live PII demo is a smart piece of proof. You can test the claim yourself, in a minute. No need to sit through a deck. They have SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, and a HIPAA BAA. Add named healthcare and enterprise customers, an air-gapped deployment option, and a marketplace listing. Say a procurement checklist stands between you and a purchase order. They clear more boxes today than we do.
One narrow objection. Gartner's read through 2028: most unauthorized agent transactions will be internal policy violations. Not attacks. Picture that case. The agent was rightly identified. The data was rightly classified. The call still should not have happened. No detector fires, because nothing odd occurred. Neither does a mutable event log. Not when someone asks you to prove the record is complete. One more thing worth noticing. "Zero false negatives" is not a property open text can have. So ask for the eval set.
Questions worth asking both of us
If we were on the buying side, these are the questions we'd bring. Use them on us too.
Can you cryptographically prove an audit log entry wasn't deleted?
DataShield: yes, and it's a mechanism, not a policy. Records commit forward. Checkpoints are Ed25519-signed and linked to one another. So a deleted checkpoint surfaces too. A failed check comes back named: deletion, truncation, insertion, or tampering. There's a live chain at /verify you can try to break. Protecto: their material describes full event logging. We found no public tamper-evidence method and no verifier. Ask them to show one.
What happens to a revoked agent mid-session?
Revocation here is a state change, not a timer. We re-read access on each checked tool call. So the call after you pull access fails closed. Protecto's CBAC makes a decision at inference time, using identities from your IdP. But we could not find a written mid-session revoke path. Ask how many minutes a compromised agent keeps working after you pull its access. Ask who has to be awake to do it.
How does GDPR erasure interact with the audit trail?
We erase by destroying key material, not by deleting rows. The subject's data stops being readable. An ISO 27560 receipt records the act. The chain still checks out, because the actors in it are HMAC commitments. Protecto says GDPR ready. The effect of an erasure on retained logs? Not named in their public docs. Ask whether deleting a subject breaks the log you'd hand an examiner.
Protecto claims 99%+ detection and zero false negatives. What's your number?
We don't have one, and we're not going to invent one. What we do is PII and PHI classification against 129 field classes. We also generalize quasi-identifiers. Dates go to year, decade, or age band. ZIPs go to 3 or 4 digits. Phones, SSNs, and emails get partially masked. Each column gets a measured cardinality-reduction score. Detection breadth is their strength, and we score it that way above. What we'd ask them for is the evaluation set behind the number. Zero false negatives on open text is a claim no NER system can hold. Then ask what the system does about the call. It was rightly classified, and still shouldn't have been made.
Why doesn't DataShield intercept traffic inline like GPT Guard?
Because inline masking means the raw value was in the request path. You are trusting a matcher to catch it in flight. We tokenize datasets at ingest. Agents query tokenized data over MCP. Detokenization is a checked, special step. The trade-off is real, and it cuts both ways. If you need free-form prompts scrubbed on the way to a model, Protecto does that. We don't.
Does DataShield have SOC 2?
No. Protecto has SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001. We have neither. That is a gap, not a positioning problem. Here is what we can put on the table. Auth is live in production. It has a public threat model. It also has a verifier you can run before you sign anything. Also Guardian and Lighthouse, in production since April 2026. Add source escrow, in the design-partner terms. Security page.
- Protecto's current hero: "Protect Enterprise Data Across Every AI Interaction". Also: "One platform across LLMs, agents, and MCP pipelines". - protecto.ai, 13 Sep 2026
- Primary CTAs are "Talk to an Expert", "Try the API", and "Try the Live PII Demo". No self-serve price. - protecto.ai, 13 Sep 2026
- The former public pricing tier page now returns a 404. Pricing is sales-gated. - protecto.ai/pricing, 13 Sep 2026
- Products named publicly: Privacy Vault, GPT Guard, Context-Based Access Control, and DeepSight. - protecto.ai, 13 Sep 2026
- At least 80% of unauthorized agent transactions through 2028 will be internal policy violations. Not attacks. - Gartner, 2026
- EDPB names pseudonymization as a GDPR risk mitigation for AI models. - EDPB Opinion 28/2024
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DirectDataShield vs Noma Security
Full-lifecycle platform versus a verifiable evidence layer.
AllEvery comparison
Eleven vendors, one honest scorecard each.
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