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Head-to-head · updated 13 September 2026

DataShield vs Secoda: who can prove what the AI data assistant actually read?

Secoda calls itself "The AI platform for data and analytics." The product lives up to it. Connect your warehouse and BI tools. You get a clean data catalog. Column and table lineage come too, plus a glossary. You also get a chat box. It answers questions for people who will never write SQL. They ship Agents that run those chats on a schedule. They ship an MCP server too. Claude or Cursor can then read the catalog. Atlassian bought them in December 2025 to feed Rovo. It is a good product. A very large company stands behind it now.

We are not a prettier version of that. DataShield is the layer under the answers. Ontology scans and classifies the data itself. It checks against 129 PII, PHI, financial and secret classes. We tokenize datasets at ingest. Agents query tokenized data over MCP. Detokenization is a privileged, audited step. Auth checks an agent's authorization on every governed tool call. It seals each decision into a hash chain. You can verify it without trusting us. Below is the honest split. Secoda wins several rows.

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DataShield vs Secoda at a glanceEight questions regulated data teams ask us. Scored from each vendor's public material. DataShield vs Secoda at a glance Eight questions regulated data teams ask us. Scored from each vendor's public material. DataShield Secoda Tamper-evident audit chain you can verify Authority re-checked on every governed tool call Break-glass access for agents GDPR erasure that keeps the chain valid PII and PHI classification on the column itself Connector breadth across the whole stack Business-user UX and AI answers Distribution, funding and SOC 2 shipped partial / roadmap not offered Sources at the bottom of this page.

The short version

Pick DataShield when

  • Someone will ask you to prove what an agent read. They will also ask you to prove the 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 authority mid-session. The very next tool call must fail. Not the next token refresh.
  • The columns themselves need work: classified, tokenized, generalized. Labels in a catalog are not enough for your privacy review. See what Ontology does.
  • Self-hosting is not a phase you are passing through. You want the catalog, the policy engine, and the evidence on your own metal. You want to see a price first, too.

Pick Secoda when

  • Your estate is wide and mixed. Their connector list covers the modern stack. Ours covers PostgreSQL and not much else yet.
  • Business users are the audience. Secoda AI answers questions all day for people who do not want a catalog at all. The reviews say it does this well.
  • You already run Jira and Confluence. The Rovo path is where your company is going anyway. That cross-sell is real money saved.
  • You want observability too: monitors, quality scores, query monitoring, data CI/CD. We do not ship any of that.

Bottom line: Secoda tells your people what the data means. DataShield decides what an agent may do with it. It keeps proof of the decision. Plenty of teams will run both. That is a fine answer.

Feature by feature

Competitor cells describe what Secoda's public site and docs say. As of the date above. Spot something wrong? Email support@myorg.ai. We will correct it, and credit you.

What mattersDataShieldSecodaEdge
Catalog and connector breadthWe register a provider over a live connection. We scan it, then profile assets and columns in place. No rows leave the source. That is PostgreSQL today. Snowflake, BigQuery, Databricks, S3, and Salesforce are declared. Not built yet.The core of the product, and broad. Warehouses, BI tools, and transformation tools. Plus a Chrome extension that puts context where people work.◇
LineageTyped lineage you traverse as edges. Access gating sits at every hop. It comes from the pipelines that own the data. It is not a stored column graph. Honest limit: it is narrower than theirs.End to end, column and table level. A headline feature since their Series A. Better than ours.◇
PII and PHI classification129 field classes cover PII, PHI, financial data, and secrets. That includes all 18 HIPAA Safe Harbor identifiers. We use regex plus checksum validation: Luhn, NPI, Verhoeff, ABA, IBAN. We also use column-name lexicons and anti-pattern suppressors. There is no model, so verdicts are reproducible from a config digest. It shipped this month, and we say so.PII scanning is listed as a Premium plan feature. Their 2023 launch described an assistant that tags personal data for docs. We found no published class list or method.◆
Tokenization and generalizationTokens are deterministic, join-preserving, and vault-reversible, set at ingest. We also do quasi-identifier generalization. Dates become year, decade, or age band. ZIPs become 3 or 4 digits. Phones, SSNs, and emails go partial. Each column gets a measured cardinality-reduction score. Masking and generalization are switches you turn on, not defaults.Not vocabulary they use. A catalog labels columns. It does not transform them.◆
Sample values in the catalogDefault policy is omit. No column value gets copied into the catalog. Storing plaintext samples needs a clear sign-off. It also writes an audit row.Not described in their public docs. Worth asking. A catalog that previews values makes a copy of your sensitive data. That copy sits in a second place.◆
Audit evidenceSHA-256 hash chain with Ed25519-signed checkpoints that are themselves chained. The verdict is three-valued: clean, attested damage, or tampered. Verification names the failure. Try the verifier.Audit logging and SIEM log export on Enterprise. We found no cryptographic tamper evidence in their docs.◆
Agent authorizationEvery governed tool call passes a scope ceiling. It also passes a consented-tool allowlist and an authority tier. We also re-check it for revokes before dispatch. It fails closed. Delegation uses RFC 8693 token exchange with an enforced scope ceiling.Their MCP server inherits the logged-in user's workspace permissions and RBAC. That is a sensible floor. It is not a per-call decision point. You cannot point an auditor at it.◆
Break-glassScoped, time-boxed emergency access for agents. It is admin and step-up gated, IP allowlisted, and fully audited. It auto-revokes.Not covered in their public info.◆
GDPR erasureWe crypto-shred per-subject key material. We also issue ISO 27560 consent receipts. Actor identities in the chain are HMAC-committed. The evidence still verifies after the subject is gone.Policies and access request workflow. They do not explain how erasure works.◆
MCP and agentsMore than 200 MCP tools span Ontology, Auth, Corpus, and Lighthouse. Auth issues MCP tool tokens with scope ceilings. It meters every call and attributes it to the agent.A live MCP server since August 2025 for Claude, Cursor, and VS Code. It serves search, docs, lineage, and glossary. It can also run SQL on your linked warehouse. Plus scheduled Agents: saved AI chats that run on a cadence. Each has a run history.◈
Observability and qualityProfiling and anomaly checks on datasets we hold. No monitors, no quality score, no query monitoring, no data CI/CD.All four ship. This is a real product area for them. It is a blank on our roadmap.◇
DeploymentSelf-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 checks the signed deploy manifest. 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. We do not ship that connection yet. HMAC tokenization keys sit in your setup today, not in a KMS.SaaS first. Self-hosting is documented and real (ECS Terraform, EKS, GKE, Helm, Docker Compose). It is gated to the Enterprise plan, though. Their buyout post says something else. Their systems will slowly move to Atlassian's Cloud Platform.◈
Maturity signalsLive in production, with Guardian and Lighthouse since April 2026. SOC 2 not yet certified, and we will not imply otherwise. Small team, with source escrow on design-partner terms.Founded 2021, Y Combinator, about $16.3M raised. SOC 2, a long logo wall, and strong G2 ratings. Now owned by Atlassian.◇
PricingPublished model and a scoped instant quote, no sales wall.Core, Premium and Enterprise, all listed as contact sales. Third-party sites still quote an older $99 Starter tier. Secoda's own page publishes no numbers today.◆

◆ DataShield leads◇ Secoda leads◈ comparable

Secoda claims come from secoda.co, docs.secoda.co, and Secoda's own blog posts. Last checked 13 September 2026. We link them below, rather than work from memory.

Three things you get here that you won't get from a data catalog

Proof that survives an audit

A log that can be quietly edited proves nothing. Ours is a hash chain with signed checkpoints. The verifier tells you what broke: tampering, insertion, deletion, or truncation. That is the property reviewers care about. Think EU AI Act Article 12 and HIPAA §164.312(b). Try it in your browser, no signup.

Authority that can change mid-flight

An analyst resigns on a Friday. Their agent is 20 minutes into a 40-minute job. With DataShield, we re-check the next governed tool call against current authorization. It fails closed. A catalog with RBAC will let that job finish. Then it logs it neatly. How Auth does it.

Work done on the column, not the label

Tagging a column email is docs. Turning it into a token an agent can join on is control. So is generalizing the birth date to a year. We do the second part, then record that we did. What Ontology ships.

Where Secoda is genuinely stronger

Their connector coverage is wider than ours, and will stay that way. Their lineage is column level across a full stack. Ours is typed edges over the pipelines we own. Gated per hop, and narrower. The chat front door is the part we admire most. A business user asks a question in plain English. They get a trusted answer. The ROI dashboard they shipped in 2025 exists because that keeps happening. They have SOC 2. We do not. They have Atlassian's balance sheet. They have a path into every Jira tenant on earth. We have a small team. We also have a verifier you can run in a browser tab.

Here is the push-back. It is one sentence long, in their own buyout post. Their systems will slowly move to Atlassian's Cloud Platform. Maybe you picked Secoda partly because you could run it yourself. If so, ask what that migration means for your self-hosted install. Ask for it in writing. Then ask the second question. Their MCP server can run SQL against your linked warehouse. That is scoped to the user's permissions. Permissions are the right floor and the wrong ceiling. They tell you a query was allowed at the time. They do not re-check authorization on the next call. Nor do they fail closed when someone is revoked mid-job. They do not hand you proof. An examiner cannot verify it on their own. That layer is what we sell. It sits under a catalog like theirs without complaint.

Questions worth asking both of us

These are the questions we would want answered. Imagine 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 signed and chained. Verification tells deletion apart from truncation and from tampering. Run it against a sample chain at /verify. Secoda: Enterprise plans include audit logging and SIEM export. We found no tamper-evidence mechanism in their public docs. Ask them to show one.

What happens to a revoked agent mid-session?

DataShield re-checks authorization on every governed tool call. A revoke lands on the next call. Secoda's MCP server honors the logged-in user's workspace permissions and RBAC. We could not find a mid-session revoke option in their docs. Ask how long a revoked agent keeps working. Ask whether the answer is measured in calls or in hours.

How does GDPR erasure interact with the audit trail?

DataShield crypto-shreds per-subject key material and issues an ISO 27560 consent receipt. Actor identities in the chain are HMAC-committed. The evidence still verifies once the subject is gone. Secoda ships policies and access requests. What happens to the underlying data is not spelled out. Neither is the history. Ask how it works, not just the workflow.

Is DataShield a Secoda alternative, or do we need both?

It depends what you are buying it for. Want a catalog for the whole estate? Want an AI front door for business users too? Buy Secoda, because we cannot cover that estate yet. Is your problem that agents read regulated columns? Can nobody prove what they saw? That is ours. Does a team run a warehouse on PostgreSQL? Do they need classification, tokenization, and evidence in one self-hosted stack? They can reasonably run us alone. Most others will run both.

Secoda ships an MCP server too. What's different?

Theirs has been live since August 2025. It gives an AI assistant search, docs, lineage, and glossary. It can also run SQL against your linked warehouse. This is under the user's permissions. That is a good design for a catalog. Ours is where the governed data is queried. The tool token carries a scope ceiling. The call gets authorized before dispatch. The agent is attributed and metered. The decision is sealed into the chain. Different jobs. One gives an agent context. The other gives you an account of what it did.

Now that Atlassian owns Secoda, does that change the comparison?

It cuts both ways. We will not pretend it is all bad news for them. They gained distribution, money, and a roadmap inside Rovo. What changed for a regulated buyer is the hosting question. Their own post, from 4 December 2025, says their systems will slowly move. It moves to Atlassian's Cloud Platform. Does your data residency rule depend on where the thing runs? Or your BAA? Get the self-hosted commitment in your contract. We are independent. We ship Docker images. No second company sets our cloud strategy.

Does DataShield have SOC 2?

Not yet, and Secoda does. That is a fair point against us. We are not going to talk around it. What we offer instead: a public threat model. Also a verifier anyone can run. Also source escrow on design-partner terms. That way a small vendor is not a single point of failure. Details on the security page.

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Every comparison

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See both mechanisms run in your browser. Break a live audit chain. Revoke an agent mid-session. Then decide what your catalog still owes you. Demo Center access is free with a work email.

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