Comparison · agent governance · Astrix Security

Astrix Security, measured.

Astrix connects to your environment without an agent or a proxy and returns an inventory of the AI agents, MCP servers, machine identities and secrets already running in it, each mapped to a responsible human owner. This page scores that architecture across 16 capabilities against the same capabilities in Agen.co, with the sources, the scoring ladder, the four rows that come out level and the one Astrix wins all on the page.

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The short answer

  • The discovery is the best in the field and the table says so. Agentless, non-proxy, connected in five minutes, correlating cloud, SaaS, on-prem, databases, vaults, CI/CD and AI platforms to surface shadow agents and the integrations hiding behind tokens and ephemeral sessions. Level with us at the top of the scale, twice.
  • They name an owner for every agent, automatically. That is their signature capability, it is a genuinely hard problem, and it is scored a 5 — level with us. Most products in this category cannot do it at all.
  • Four of sixteen rows come out level and one goes to them outright. Astrix is now part of Cisco, so ecosystem breadth is theirs against our deliberately focused platform — a row we score a 2 on every comparison we publish.
  • This is not a passive posture tool. Their own material says allow, flag and block rules, scoped by user, department, platform and resource type, are evaluated before an action executes. Policy scope scores a 4 and the runtime row a 3, not a 1.
  • The verdict is about the agent's standing, not about the action. The platform is non-proxy by design, so what the agent does with access it already holds is observed, risk-scored and remediated afterwards — rotate the secret, cut the permission, revoke the access, open the ticket. Masking a response, stepping up authentication or holding a write for a person are not verdicts in that model.
  • An owner is not an attribution. Knowing who answers for an agent is upstream of knowing who a particular write was made for, and their audit trail is per agent rather than per action. When one agent serves a department, those are two different people.
The long read

Standing is not the same thing as the action.

Astrix built the most complete picture of the agent and machine-identity estate that anyone in this category publishes, and it arrives in an afternoon with nothing installed. It is worth being precise about what that picture is for, because it is worth a great deal — and about the one step it stops short of.

What the product actually is

Worth stating plainly, because the category name attracts products that do much less than this one. Astrix is three things that fit together, and the first of them is the reason the other two exist.

  • Discoverconnect over APIs — agentless, non-proxy, metadata only, minimal permissions — and within hours hold a real-time inventory of AI agents that are custom, third-party or home-grown, managed and shadow, plus MCP servers, service accounts, OAuth apps, API keys, SSH keys, IAM roles and secrets inside and outside the vaults. An identity graph maps each one to the platforms and the specific resources it can reach, and to a responsible human owner.
  • Securerisk-score everything in that inventory, then fix it. Excessive permissions removed, weak configurations corrected, shadow agents onboarded and unused ones offboarded, owners assigned. Machine-learning baselines flag unusual access patterns and out-of-scope activity, and access policy — allow, flag and block, scoped by user, department, platform and resource type — is evaluated before an action executes.
  • Deploytheir Agent Control Plane applies policy at creation. An administrator defines least-privilege permission profiles, a developer launches an agent against a pre-approved one, and the agent runs on short-lived, precisely scoped, auto-expiring tokens with an audit trail per agent and drift detection on top.
  • And now, Ciscothe acquisition has completed, and the capabilities are moving into Identity Intelligence, Secure Access, Duo and Splunk. For a buyer weighing whether a young vendor will still be here in three years, that is a real answer, and it is why one row of the sixteen goes to them.

Where Astrix is strongest

One of the sixteen rows below goes to Astrix and four more are level. They follow from a real difference in where each product places itself: theirs is beside the environment, reading it completely; ours is on the path of the action.

  • Discovery, level at the top twiceagentless discovery and shadow-agent discovery are both even, and they are even at 5. Nothing installs, nothing self-registers, nothing has to be filed first, and the correlation across vaults, CI/CD and ephemeral sessions finds the agents that were never anybody's project. This is the capability the category is bought for and they are as good at it as anyone.
  • A named owner on every agent, levelassigned automatically, from the graph, rather than requested in a spreadsheet nobody fills in. Most products we score cannot answer who is responsible for an agent at all; this one answers it for the whole estate on the first day. Even, and printed as even.
  • Time to a first governed agent, levelfive minutes to connect and an inventory within hours is the fastest start we have scored. We govern in days rather than minutes because our first action is a verdict rather than a read, and both of those are honest ways to reach a first governed agent — so the row ties.
  • Ecosystem breadththis row goes to them and it is earned. Remediation already runs through the buyer's own ITSM, SIEM and SOAR tooling, and the platform now carries Cisco's distribution and its security portfolio behind it. We are a focused platform rather than a marketplace presence, and that row is a 2 for us on every comparison we publish.

A policy about standing, and a policy about the action

Their access policy is real and the table scores it as real. Rules are evaluated before an action executes, and they can be written about the user, the department, the platform and the resource type. Every one of those is a property of the agent's standing: who it belongs to, what it is entitled to reach, which class of thing it may touch.

The platform is non-proxy by its own description, which is a deliberate design choice and the reason onboarding takes five minutes instead of a quarter. The consequence is that it is not in the request path. A rule can decide that this agent may reach this platform and this class of resource; the individual write, export or delete then happens between the agent and the system, and comes back to Astrix as activity to score rather than as a request to adjudicate.

That is why the remediation verbs are the ones they are — rotate the secret, cut the permission, revoke the access, offboard the identity, open the ticket. All of them change what the agent will be able to do next. None of them is available while the action is in flight, which is where masking a response, stepping up authentication or holding a write for a named person have to happen if they are going to happen at all.

An owner answers for the agent; someone else answers for the write

Automatic owner assignment across a whole estate is a hard problem solved well, and it ties at the top of the scale for that reason. It is worth separating from the question next to it, because the two get used interchangeably and they are not the same.

An owner is who answers for the agent existing: who created it, who maintains it, who is called when it misbehaves. That is a property of the agent, and it holds still. Attribution is who a particular action was taken for, and it changes with every call. Their own policy scope names departments, which is the tell — an agent serving a department has one owner and many people it acts on behalf of, and the audit trail is kept per agent.

It matters at the two moments this is usually bought for. In an investigation, the owner tells you who to ring and the per-action record tells you what happened and for whom; only one of those closes the question. In an approval, a verdict that has to reach a person in seconds needs to know which person this specific write concerns, not who filed the agent.

What the acquisition changes, and what it does not

It settles the vendor-risk question, which for a security buyer is not a small thing, and it is scored where it belongs rather than used as an argument. The capabilities are stated as moving into an identity intelligence product, a secure access product, an access management product and a data platform. For customers already in that estate, that is compounding value.

For everyone else it is a consideration on the operating row. Remediation already runs through the buyer's own service management, SIEM and orchestration tools by design, and an integration path into four more products is a surface count that grows rather than shrinks. Neither of those is a criticism of the architecture; both are things to ask about on the call.

What is not published

Three things were dropped rather than guessed. There is no pricing or packaging page, so the pricing unit is scored on that absence once and total platform cost is not scored at all. There is no published decision latency, so that row is not on the page. And agent-to-agent authority chaining and delegated on-behalf-of access do not appear in the product material in either direction, so neither is scored — an absence from a marketing site is not evidence of an absence from a product.

The scored comparison

Sixteen capabilities, scored side by side.

Runtime enforcement, identity and accountability, coverage, and what it costs to operate — each scored 0–5 on capability depth against vendor documentation, including the four rows that come out level and the one Astrix Security wins.

Capability depthNoneCompleteAstrix SecurityAgen.co
01 · Runtime enforcement
Verdict rendered at the moment of actionAstrix SecurityChecked pre-execution, non-proxy pathCapable3/5Agen.coPer-action verdicts, <30msComplete5/5
Masking or redaction at action timeAstrix SecurityBlocks and flags, no maskingBasic1/5Agen.coMasking at action timeComplete5/5
Blocks a single action without disabling the agentAstrix SecurityScoped by platform and resourceCapable3/5Agen.coAction-level enforcementComplete5/5
Policy scope — what you can write a rule aboutAstrix SecurityUser, department, platform, resourceStrong4/5Agen.coAny policy you writeComplete5/5
02 · Identity & accountability
A named human accountable for each agentAstrix SecurityOwner assigned automatically, every agentComplete5/5Agen.coNamed owner, every agentComplete5/5
Each individual action attributed to that humanAstrix SecurityOwner at agent level, not actionCapable3/5Agen.coAttributed per actionComplete5/5
Access evaluated at action time, not only at grant timeAstrix SecurityPolicy at creation, scoped credentialsCapable3/5Agen.coJudged in context, per actionComplete5/5
03 · Coverage
Endpoint enforcementAstrix SecurityAgentless by design, no endpointBasic1/5Agen.coAgenShield on the deviceComplete5/5
Browser enforcementAstrix SecurityNo browser enforcement pointBasic1/5Agen.coBrowserShield, early accessCapable3/5
Agentless discovery — no SDK, no self-registrationAstrix SecurityNon-proxy, API-based, five minutesComplete5/5Agen.coAgentless, 5 surfaces, no SDKComplete5/5
Shadow-agent discoveryAstrix SecurityShadow agents and hidden integrationsComplete5/5Agen.coShadow AI surfacedComplete5/5
MCP tool governanceAstrix SecurityMCP servers inventoriedPartial2/5Agen.coMCP tools governed per callComplete5/5
04 · Operate & buy
Pricing unit — what you are billed perAstrix SecurityNo published pricing modelBasic1/5Agen.coPer governed agentComplete5/5
Consoles to operateAstrix SecurityRemediation runs through your toolsCapable3/5Agen.coOne console, one policy planeComplete5/5
Time to first governed agentAstrix SecurityFive minutes to connectComplete5/5Agen.coDays to a first governed agentComplete5/5
Ecosystem and marketplace breadthAstrix SecurityCisco distribution, integration underwayStrong4/5Agen.coFocused platform, not a marketplacePartial2/5
11 rows Agen.co leads4 tied1 row Astrix Security leads
Levels reflect capability depth and supporting evidence. Capability descriptions based on vendor public documentation, September 2026.
What the table says

Complete knowledge of the estate, delivered beside it rather than on the path.

The four level rows and the row Astrix wins are all consequences of one decision, and it is a good decision: connect over APIs, install nothing, sit beside the environment and read all of it. That is what makes five-minute onboarding, whole-estate shadow discovery and automatic ownership possible at once, and no product that puts itself in the request path gets those for free.

The rows that separate us follow from the same decision. A platform beside the path can decide what an agent is allowed to hold and can change that afterwards; it cannot render a verdict on the write while the write is happening, mask what comes back, step a person up, or hold the action for the human it concerns. Agen does that part, and it does not require the picture to be taken down to do it.

Four findings

The same argument, one card per group.

Each card takes one group of the scored table and says what the rows in it add up to.

01

The verdict decides standing

Allow, flag and block rules evaluated before an action executes, scoped by user, department, platform and resource type — a real decision, and scored as one. The platform is non-proxy by design, so the individual write happens between the agent and the system: the response cannot be masked, a person cannot be stepped up, and the remediation verbs all change what happens next rather than what is happening now.

decision pointaccess, not action
verdict typesallow / flag / block
02

An owner, not an attribution

Every agent is mapped to a responsible human owner automatically, from the identity graph — a hard problem solved well, and level with us. The record is kept per agent. Who a particular write was made for is a different question, and it is the one an investigation and an approval both turn on when a single agent serves a whole department.

owner per agentautomatic
audit recordper agent
03

Discovery that misses nothing

Agentless, non-proxy, five minutes to connect, correlating cloud, SaaS, on-prem, databases, vaults, CI/CD and AI platforms to surface shadow agents and the integrations hiding behind tokens and ephemeral sessions. Level with us at the top of the scale on both discovery rows. What the inventory does not extend to is an enforcement point on the device or in the browser, or governance of an MCP tool call.

shadow discoverylevel, top of scale
enforcement surfacesnone native
04

Cisco behind it, your tools around it

The acquisition has completed and the capabilities are moving into Identity Intelligence, Secure Access, Duo and Splunk — the row where they beat us outright, and a real answer to the staying-power question. Two things to ask on the call: nothing is published about price, and remediation lands in your own service management, SIEM and orchestration tooling by design.

ecosystemtheir row
published pricingnone
Watch it happen

A verdict on the action itself, while it is still happening.

Not a permission trimmed afterwards or a secret rotated tomorrow — an inline decision on the write, with step-up authentication and human approval reaching the person it concerns in seconds, and an audit chain that runs request, approval, action performed.

action brokering · live product scene
What closes the gap

Keep the inventory. Add the verdict on what those agents do next.

Nothing about a complete, agentless picture of the estate conflicts with governing the action. Agen adds what a platform beside the path cannot carry: every action judged against your policy at the moment it happens, in under 30ms, with five verdict types including step-up authentication, human approval and masking — and a named accountable human resolved on each one, for internal agents and the ones facing your customers on the same plane.

Select a capability

Continuous discovery across your IdP, gateway, devices, cloud, and registries. Nothing has to self-register: agents are found, risk-scored, and resolved to a named human before they act.

  • Agentless and API-based across five surfaces
  • First-party, custom, and third-party agents alike
  • Every agent mapped to an owner, approver, and escalation
Agen Discover AI agent discovery flow: any identity provider, productivity suites and assistants, cloud, gateway, endpoints, and MCP server registries all feed one agent registry where every AI agent is inventoried, risk-scored on arrival, given a named human owner, and shadow AI is surfaced.
Discovery pulls from five surfaces into a single agent registry — no SDK self-registration required.
ClosesWhich agents are running that nobody registered?
no SDK required5 surfacesowner-mapped
Discover in depth →

Methodology

How these scores were reached.

Sixteen capabilities publish from a worksheet of forty-one scored rows, on one 0–5 ladder applied to both columns. Rows were dropped rather than guessed: decision latency, because no vendor page publishes a figure; gateway enforcement, because the non-proxy architecture is the same fact the endpoint row already scores and one design choice should not be counted twice; agent-to-agent authority chaining and delegated on-behalf-of access, neither documented in the product material; connector breadth, dropped on fairness because connectors that read and remediate a platform and connectors that govern calls through it do not measure the same thing; new-integration turnaround, total platform cost and deployment model, none of them published on the vendor side; and our own audit-first rollout row, held pending internal confirmation. Ties and the row Astrix Security wins are printed rather than filtered.

Sources8 primary
Evidence ledger
  1. Astrix Security — product overviewTier AOnboarding takes five minutes: “We are a non-proxy API-based solution”, reading metadata only and asking for minimal permissions. Discovery correlates cloud, SaaS, on-prem, databases, vaults, CI/CD and AI platforms to uncover shadow agents and their owners, including those hidden behind tokens, ephemeral sessions and SaaS apps, and inventories AI agents that are custom, third-party or home-grown, MCP servers, service accounts, OAuth apps, API keys, SSH keys and IAM roles, and secrets inside and outside vaults.
  2. Astrix Security — secureTier A“Granular identity-based access policies for AI agents. Allow, flag, and block rules can be scoped by user, department, platform, and resource type, and are evaluated before any action is executed.” Posture management additionally removes excessive permissions, onboards shadow agents, assigns human owners automatically and corrects weak configurations.
  3. Astrix Security — threat detection and remediationTier AMachine-learning engines analyse access patterns, calling IP addresses, permission changes, secret usage and connected apps to surface anomalies against behavioural baselines. Out-of-the-box remediation workflows automate safe secret rotation, offboard agents and identities for departing employees, revoke agent access after policy violations, and automate assignment, permission reduction and configuration changes, delivered through ITSM, SIEM and SOAR integrations and collaboration tools.
  4. Astrix Security — Agent Control PlaneTier APolicy is applied at creation: security administrators pre-define least-privilege permission profiles, developers launch an agent from their own tooling against a pre-approved profile, and administrators then view and manage the deployed agent in the inventory. Managed agents receive short-lived, precisely scoped, auto-expiring tokens, with environment-bound policies tied to context such as IP addresses, tags and teams, a full audit trail per agent, and drift detection on excessive or unusual access.
  5. Astrix Security — discoverTier AThe identity graph visualises relationships between AI agents, MCP servers, non-human identities, secrets, permissions, owners and resources, and “automatically maps each agent and NHI to a responsible human owner for accountability”, showing exactly which platforms an agent can access down to the specific resource — a Drive folder, an S3 bucket, a Git repository, a Slack channel. Risk scoring is based on dynamic access and usage analysis, security findings and breach-likelihood analysis.
  6. Cisco — acquisition announcementTier ACisco announced its intent to acquire Astrix Security on 4 May 2026 and posted an update confirming the acquisition completed on 29 June 2026. The stated rationale is that Astrix secures the identities and credentials that AI agents use to gain access and execute work — API keys, service accounts and OAuth tokens — and the named capabilities are discovery and governance for AI agents, agentic access and lifecycle management, threat detection and response, and secrets management across vaults and cloud. Capabilities are to be integrated into Cisco Identity Intelligence, Cisco Secure Access and Duo.
  7. Astrix Security — joining CiscoTier AAstrix states that its capabilities will be integrated across the Cisco Security platform including Identity Intelligence, Secure Access, Duo and Splunk, and tells existing customers that “nothing changes today” — deployments, support and the team they work with remain fully in place.
  8. Astrix Security — packagingTier BNo pricing or packaging page is published: astrix.security/pricing returns HTTP 404, no tiers, units or bundled allowances appear anywhere on the site, and every commercial path is a demo request.

Vendor capabilities change. If a row is out of date or wrong, tell us and we will re-score it — corrections are published with the date they were made.

FAQ

Questions, answered.

What is Astrix Security?
It is an identity security platform for AI agents and non-human identities, structured as discover, secure and deploy. It connects to an environment over APIs — agentless, non-proxy, reading metadata only — and builds a real-time inventory of AI agents, MCP servers, service accounts, OAuth apps, API keys, IAM roles and secrets, mapping each to the resources it can reach and to a responsible human owner. It then risk-scores that inventory, fixes hygiene issues, detects anomalous activity, and provisions new agents with short-lived, precisely scoped credentials against policy set at creation. Cisco completed its acquisition of Astrix and the capabilities are being integrated into Identity Intelligence, Secure Access, Duo and Splunk.
Where does Astrix Security score better than or level with Agen.co?
One row of sixteen goes to Astrix outright and four more are level. Ecosystem breadth is theirs: remediation runs through the buyer's own ITSM, SIEM and SOAR tooling and the platform now carries Cisco's distribution, against our deliberately focused platform, a row we score a 2 on everywhere. Level with us on agentless discovery, on shadow-agent discovery, on assigning a named human owner to every agent, and on time to a first governed agent — where five minutes to connect is the fastest start we have scored.
Does Astrix Security enforce policy at runtime?
It renders a real decision, and where it sits is worth being exact about. Their material states that allow, flag and block rules, scoped by user, department, platform and resource type, are evaluated before any action is executed, and the Agent Control Plane issues short-lived scoped credentials against policy set at creation. The distinction the table carries is that the platform is non-proxy by design, so the verdict is about what the agent is allowed to hold and reach rather than about the specific write performed with it. That is why the remediation actions are rotation, permission reduction, revocation and offboarding — each changes what happens next — and why masking a response, stepping up authentication and holding a write for approval are not verdicts in the model.
How does Astrix Security identify the human behind an agent?
By ownership, and it does it better than almost anything else we have scored. The identity graph automatically maps every agent and non-human identity to a responsible human owner, across the whole estate, with nothing installed — which is why that row ties at the top of the scale. The gap is between an owner and an attribution. An owner answers for the agent existing and holds still; attribution is who a particular action was taken for, and changes with every call. Their audit trail is kept per agent, so when one agent serves a department the record tells you which agent acted, not which person it acted for.
What does the Cisco acquisition mean for an Astrix evaluation?
It answers the vendor-risk question, which is why the ecosystem row goes to Astrix. The acquisition has completed and the stated plan is to integrate the capabilities into Cisco Identity Intelligence, Secure Access, Duo and Splunk, with Astrix telling existing customers that their deployments, support and team remain in place. Two things worth asking on the call. First, how the packaging and pricing land once the capabilities sit inside a suite, since nothing about price is published today. Second, how many surfaces you end up operating: remediation already runs through your own service management, SIEM and orchestration tools by design, and an integration path into four more products adds to that rather than consolidating it.
How is Astrix Security priced?
It is not published. There is no pricing or packaging page, and every commercial path on the site is a demo request, so the unit you are billed per cannot be verified from public material. That scores a 1 on the pricing-unit row and it is the only place the absence is counted — total platform cost is left off the table rather than scored twice from the same silence. Agen is priced per governed agent with no prerequisite tier, so the bill tracks the population being governed.
Can Agen.co run alongside Astrix Security?
Yes, and the two sit at different points, so it is a natural shape. Astrix keeps doing what it is good at: nothing installed, the whole estate inventoried, shadow agents surfaced, permissions right-sized, an owner on every agent, and new agents provisioned with short-lived scoped credentials. Agen governs what those agents do next — every action judged against your policy in under 30ms, with five verdict types including step-up authentication, human approval and masking, a named accountable human resolved per action, and enforcement on the device, in the browser, at the gateway and across cloud and SaaS. Nothing you already run has to be removed.
What is the difference between fixing an agent's permissions and governing its actions?
Fixing permissions answers what an agent will be able to do from now on; governing an action answers whether the specific thing it just did was permitted. The first is a change to standing — remove the excess scope, rotate the secret, revoke the token — and it takes effect for everything the agent does afterwards. The second is a decision made about a write, an export or a delete at the moment it is attempted, and it can depend on things only the action knows: what is in the payload, how much of it there is, who it concerns, whether a person should approve it first. Both are worth having. Only one of them is available while the action is still in flight.

See the row that decides it.

Bring an agent you already have an inventory entry for — one with an owner's name on it and a permission set somebody has already trimmed. We will show you a verdict on the next action it takes, resolved to the person that action was for, in a working environment, in under a day.

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