Head-to-head · updated 13 September 2026
DataShield vs SailPoint: who governs the agent, and who proves what it did?
SailPoint has done ID control since 2005. They are very good at it. Agentic Fabric went live in August 2026. It extends their work to non-human IDs. It finds the agents you didn't know you had. It ties each one to a human owner. It runs review campaigns on their entitlements. It gives you a kill switch when one goes rogue. Ask your board how many agents you have and who owns them. SailPoint answers that better than we do.
DataShield answers the next question. Picture six months later. An examiner picks one tool call from 14 March. They ask if the agent was allowed to make it. Then they ask how you know the log wasn't edited. We re-check access on every governed tool call. Mid-session revoke, too. We seal each call into a hash chain you can verify without trusting us. Most large companies will run both tools. Here is the honest split, including the rows SailPoint wins.
The short version
Pick DataShield when
- You will have to prove an agent's access log wasn't edited. Article 12 of the EU AI Act and HIPAA §164.312(b) both land here. Our chain answers with math. Run the verifier.
- You want an agent's access pulled mid-session. The very next governed tool call should fail. Not wait for a token to expire.
- You need the inverse of a kill switch: scoped, time-boxed break-glass access. It grants, logs itself, and auto-revokes.
- Nothing may leave your account. We run self-hosted or on your own infrastructure, with your keys. We also publish a price.
Pick SailPoint when
- You don't yet know what agents exist. Their agentless scans, plus the Entro secrets engine they bought in June 2026, find over 1,200 kinds of tokens, keys and certificates across your CI/CD and codebases. We don't scan for hidden agents.
- Your auditors already live inside access review campaigns. Extending those reviews to agent access rights is home turf for an IGA vendor with two decades of practice.
- You need joiner-mover-leaver lifecycle, ownership mapping and provisioning across thousands of apps. That is a connector job, and their connector library is huge.
- You want one vendor covering humans and machines. They bring Fortune 500 references and the CrowdStrike SIEM connection to match.
Bottom line: SailPoint tells you which agents exist, who owns them, and how to switch one off. DataShield decides whether one tool call was allowed. We keep proof of the decision. Those are different layers. Buying ours doesn't mean replacing theirs. Is your near-term risk an audit, not an inventory? Start here.
Feature by feature: agentic identity governance next to runtime authorization
Competitor cells describe what SailPoint's public site and press releases say as of the date above. If we got something wrong, email support@myorg.ai. We'll fix it and credit you.
| What matters | DataShield | SailPoint | Edge |
|---|---|---|---|
| Audit evidence | A SHA-256 hash chain with Ed25519-signed checkpoints. The checkpoints are chained too. Verification names the failure: tampering, insertion, deletion, or truncation. Try the verifier. | Audit trails and compliance reports. These now feed CrowdStrike Falcon Next-Gen SIEM. We found no cryptographic tamper proof on their site. | ◆ |
| Agent authorization | Every governed tool call passes a scope ceiling. It also gets a declared authority tier and a re-check before dispatch. Cedar handles admin, setup and token calls. Each one gets a policy_explain. | The Agentic Fabric page claims "real-time authorization" and dynamic risk scoring. It doesn't name the decision point or the rule language. Ask them to demo it on one tool call. | ◆ |
| Stopping a rogue agent | Revocation lands on the next governed tool call, mid-session. No waiting for a refresh. | A central, policy-driven kill switch. It's the clearest agent-native feature they lead with. Their docs don't say if it fires right away or at the next token refresh. | ◈ |
| Break-glass | Scoped, time-boxed emergency access for agents. It auto-revokes and can't be quietly deleted from the log. | Just-in-time provisioning and Zero Standing Privilege, but only for humans. Their docs don't describe an agent break-glass grant. | ◆ |
| Discovery and inventory | We govern the agents you register with us. Your estate does not get crawled for shadow ones. We won't pretend otherwise. | Ongoing, agentless scans that find AI agents, machine IDs, credentials and MCP servers, plus endpoint and browser sensors. Entro adds 1,200+ secret types across CI/CD. | ◇ |
| Lifecycle and certification | Scope ceilings, authority tiers and config-change control, with propose, approve and rollback steps. No review-campaign workflow. | Two decades of access reviews and entitlement checks. They map access rights to human owners with automated rules, now extended to agents. | ◇ |
| GDPR erasure | Crypto-shred of per-subject key material, plus ISO 27560 consent receipts. Actor IDs are HMAC-committed. So the chain still checks out after the wipe. | Not on their non-human ID docs. Ask how wiping a data subject's records affects the agent audit history. | ◆ |
| Data handling | Datasets are tokenized at ingest. Agents query tokenized data over MCP. Detokenization is a privileged, audited step. Tokens are deterministic, join-preserving and vault-reversible. Quasi-identifier generalization turns dates into year, decade or age band. It turns ZIPs into 3 or 4 digits, and trims phones, SSNs and emails. Each column gets a measured cardinality-reduction score. | Since August 2026 they ship inline prompt security. It redacts PII before it reaches the model. Redaction is one-way by design. So joins and re-identification aren't on the table. | ◈ |
| MCP and agents | Native MCP endpoints on Auth, Ontology and Lighthouse. MCP tool tokens carry scope ceilings. Per-call use is metered and tied to the agent. | Agentic Fabric finds MCP servers and tracks them as assets. We found no description of issuing or limiting MCP tool tokens. | ◆ |
| Deployment | Self-hosted in your own cloud or data center. Or a dedicated single-tenant server we run for you. Your keys, either way. | SaaS on the Atlas platform, with endpoint and browser sensors. Legacy IdentityIQ had on-prem options. We couldn't confirm that for Agentic Fabric. | ◆ |
| Maturity signals | Auth, Guardian and Lighthouse run live in production (Guardian and Lighthouse since April 2026). We don't have SOC 2 yet, and we say so. | Founded in 2005. Public again, and reporting fiscal quarters. They count 53% of the Fortune 500 as customers. Nine launch partners build on Atlas. | ◇ |
| Pricing | Published model, scoped instant quote, no sales wall. | Quote-only. Agentic Fabric sells in Agentic Business and Agentic Business Plus suites, with no numbers shared. | ◆ |
◆ DataShield leads◇ SailPoint leads◈ comparable
SailPoint claims are drawn from sailpoint.com and SailPoint's own press releases, last checked 13 September 2026. We link them below rather than paraphrase from memory.
Three things you get here that you won't get from an identity governance platform
Proof, not just a trail
A log you control can be silently edited. That log has weak evidence value. Ours is a hash chain with signed checkpoints. The verifier tells you what went wrong, not just that something did: tampering, insertion, deletion, 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.
A decision at the tool call, not the entitlement
A review tells you an agent could hold a right last quarter. It doesn't tell you if this call, at 14:03 on a Tuesday, was inside the scope ceiling. We check that before dispatch. We record the answer. How Auth does it.
An erasure you can defend
GDPR says delete. Your auditor says keep the log. Crypto-shred solves that. The subject's key material is destroyed. The data becomes unreadable. The chain still verifies. See the diagram.
Where SailPoint is genuinely stronger
Let's be blunt about the size gap. SailPoint has shipped ID control for twenty years. They claim more than half the Fortune 500 as customers. In June 2026 they bought Entro Security to pull real non-human ID and secrets work in-house. That buys them something we can't fake: coverage. Their sensors find agents, service accounts, API keys and MCP servers that nobody wrote down. They map each one back to a human owner. Then they run the review campaigns your auditors already know how to read. Say you're starting from "we think there are about forty agents, maybe." That is exactly the right first purchase.
The push-back is narrow, but it matters. Finding agents and reviewing them both happen on a schedule. An agent's behavior doesn't wait for a schedule. Gartner expects most unauthorized agent transactions through 2028 to be internal rule breaks, not attacks. That means the real threat is a legitimate agent making a legitimate-looking call it shouldn't have made. Knowing the agent exists doesn't catch that. Neither does a quarterly review. You need a check at the call itself. You also need a record of that check someone outside your company can verify. SailPoint's public docs describe the trail. They don't describe what makes it tamper-evident. We'd ask them for that in writing.
Questions worth asking both of us
These are the questions we'd want answered if we were buying. Ask them on every 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. Checkpoints are signed with Ed25519 and chained to each other. Verification tells deletion apart from truncation and from tampering. Run it against a sample chain at /verify. SailPoint: their docs describe audit trails, compliance reports, and a feed into CrowdStrike Falcon Next-Gen SIEM. We found no tamper-evidence mechanism on their site. Ask them to show one.
When the kill switch fires, what happens to a call already in flight?
This is the real question. DataShield re-checks access on every governed tool call. The cutoff takes effect on the next call, and the session context drops. SailPoint's central kill switch is a genuinely good board-level story. But their public pages don't say if it lands right away or at the next token refresh. Ask how many minutes a compromised agent keeps working after you press it.
Do we have to choose between SailPoint and DataShield?
No, and we'd usually tell you not to. They cover different jobs. SailPoint governs ID lifecycle: finding agents, ownership, entitlements, reviews. We govern the runtime call and the proof. DataShield Auth federates over SAML and OIDC. SailPoint stays the source of truth for who the agent is. We record what it was allowed to do. We're not asking anyone to rip out their IGA.
Is DataShield a SailPoint Agentic Fabric alternative for finding non-human IDs?
Honestly, no. Say your need is finding shadow agents and unmanaged secrets across cloud, CI/CD and endpoints. Buy a tool built for that. Agentic Fabric plus Entro is a strong one. We govern the agents you register with us. Where we'd compete for the same budget: per-call access, mid-session cutoff, break-glass, and a chain you can verify.
How does GDPR erasure interact with the audit trail?
DataShield crypto-shreds per-subject key material and issues an ISO 27560 consent receipt. Actor IDs in the chain are HMAC-committed. So the proof stays checkable after the subject is gone. We couldn't find wipe steps in SailPoint's non-human ID docs. Ask if wiping a subject's data breaks the agent log. In most log stores, it does.
Does DataShield have SOC 2?
Not yet, and we won't imply otherwise. Against a public company with twenty years of audit history, that's a real gap. You should weigh it. What we offer instead: a public threat model, and a verifier anyone can run. Guardian and Lighthouse have run live in production since April 2026. Design-partner terms include source escrow. That way a small vendor isn't a single point of failure. Details on the security page.
- SailPoint Agentic Fabric leads with "Identity security built for AI and NHIs." It pairs that with a rule-driven kill switch to neutralize rogue agents. - sailpoint.com, 13 Sep 2026
- Agentic Fabric reached general availability with MCP server scans and endpoint and browser sensors. It also added inline prompt security that redacts PII before it reaches the LLM. - SailPoint press release, 4 Aug 2026
- SailPoint completed its buyout of Entro Security. It adds scans for over 1,200 types of secrets, tokens and certificates. - SailPoint press release, 29 Jun 2026
- Unified Platform Access lets nine launch partners build native applications on the SailPoint Atlas platform. - SailPoint press release, 16 Jun 2026
- SecOps Identity Intelligence feeds ID control and risk context into CrowdStrike Falcon Next-Gen SIEM. - SailPoint press release, 31 Aug 2026
- ≥80% of unauthorized agent transactions through 2028 will be internal policy violations, not attacks. - Gartner, 2026
Other head-to-heads
DataShield vs Entro
The engine that finds NHIs, bought by SailPoint in June 2026, read on its own terms.
AdjacentDataShield vs CyberArk
Secrets and privileged access next to per-call agent authority.
AdjacentDataShield vs Okta
They tell you who the agent is. We prove what it did was allowed.
AllEvery comparison
One honest scorecard per vendor, sources at the bottom.
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