Comparison · agent governance · Highflame

Highflame, measured.

Highflame gives every agent a verifiable credential and checks every action it takes against one policy before the action lands. This page scores that architecture across 16 capabilities against the same capabilities in Agen.co — with the sources, the scoring ladder, and the four rows Highflame wins all on the page.

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The short answer

  • The runtime rows come out level, all three of them. Decisions are made inline before the action lands, the latency figure is published and benchmarked, and a block falls on one action while the agent keeps working. This is the closest peer on this site, and the scorecard says six to six with four to them.
  • The identity is agent-shaped and sits on top of the identity stack you already run. Agents get their own verifiable credential with owner, trust tier and delegation depth; humans and machines stay where they were. We run all three on one fabric, and that row is the widest gap in the table.
  • The enforcement points are named, and they are the IDE, the CLI, the gateway and agent-to-agent traffic. That is deep coverage for coding agents and anything routed through a gateway. An action taken somewhere else has no enforcement point standing in front of it.
  • The identity core is open source, and that row goes to them outright. ZeroID ships under Apache 2.0 on SPIFFE, OAuth 2.1, RFC 8693 and DPoP, deployable in your own VPC — a buyer can read the authority layer before deploying it.
  • Three more rows go to them: a browser extension that evaluates prompts, uploads and clipboard content against policy, inline enforcement at the network layer through a partner integration, and marketplace distribution.
  • Every solution page is written for an internal audience. Engineering, security, IT and platform, compliance. The agents your own customers point at your product are not in the documentation, and pricing is not published at all.
The long read

What the credential is part of.

Most comparisons on this site turn on whether a product can stop an agent mid-action. This one does not, because Highflame can, and the table prints three level rows saying so. The distinction is narrower and it sits one layer down: what the identity behind that verdict belongs to, and how far the enforcement reaches once the agent stops being a coding agent.

The runtime rows are level, and that is the finding

It is worth being unambiguous before anything else on this page: the runtime group does not separate. Policy is evaluated inline, out of band, before the action executes. The decision figure is published rather than implied, and there is a public gateway benchmark with methodology behind it. A block lands on the individual action while the agent carries on. Verdicts are not limited to allow and deny — actions can be shaped, paused for a human, or stopped.

Nothing in that paragraph is posture work relabelled, and a page that pretended otherwise would be wrong on the first row a technical reader checked. Three rows publish level at the top of the scale, and the argument this page makes has to survive that.

Where Highflame is strongest

Four of the sixteen rows go to them, plus the three level ones above and three more elsewhere in the table. They are worth reading as a set, because three of the four follow from the same decision: publish the substrate and meet the traffic where it already flows.

  • An identity core you can readthe identity engine ships open source under Apache 2.0, built on SPIFFE and WIMSE subjects, OAuth 2.1 grants, RFC 8693 token exchange, DPoP-bound tokens and CAE cascade revocation, and it deploys in a customer's own VPC. For a buyer who wants to inspect the authority layer rather than take a vendor's word for it, that is a genuine and checkable advantage, and this row goes to them without qualification. We make the opposite bet — a commercial platform on the same published standards, with the seven-year identity foundation it runs on already in production — and both bets are legible to a procurement team.
  • Enforcement in the browsera browser extension evaluates prompts, file uploads and clipboard content against enterprise policy, with violation metadata syncing back to the enterprise account. Our own browser coverage is in early access and scored a 3 on every comparison on this site until it reaches general availability, so this row goes to them on the published state of both products rather than on the roadmap.
  • The network layera partner integration evaluates requests inline as they cross the network and blocks them before they reach a model provider, with a monitor mode to tune against real traffic first. We do not enforce at that layer and do not claim to — we govern the action and run alongside whatever holds the network — so this row goes to them too.
  • Distribution and ecosysteman open-source identity engine, a scanner on Docker Hub and a product listed on the GitHub Marketplace put them in front of developers in places a focused platform is not. We score a 2 on that row against every vendor, and it does not move here.

One fabric, or one more fabric

The widest row in the table is the one about what agent identity is unified with, and it turns on an architectural position stated plainly in their own material: human identity systems were built for users, non-human identity was built for services and workloads, and agents are neither, so agents need an identity built for agents. The product follows that reasoning honestly. It connects to the identity provider and directory already in place and adds agent-shaped claims on top — owner, trust tier, framework, delegation depth — for the agents no existing system attributes.

That is a reasonable design and it ships today. It also means an enterprise ends up operating agent identity as a layer above the place its human and machine identities live, with two systems that have to agree about a person for the attribution to hold. The claim on the credential names an owner. Whether that owner is still employed, still in that role, still entitled to the system the agent is reaching, is a fact held somewhere else.

Agen runs humans, machines and agents on the same fabric, on a customer identity foundation that has been in production for seven years. An agent is not a claim referring to a person in another system; the person and the agent are primitives in one place, which is why entitlement at the moment of the action is a lookup rather than a reconciliation. That is the row, and it is the only one in the identity group with real distance in it.

Where the enforcement reaches

The enforcement points are named precisely, which makes this easy to score in both directions: model traffic, the IDE, the tool gateway, and agent-to-agent calls. For coding agents that is deep coverage — policy evaluated before a prompt is submitted, before a shell command runs, before a tool call fires, across Cursor, Claude Code, Copilot, Windsurf and anything speaking MCP, with tool surfaces scanned before an agent can load them.

The endpoint row scores on what sits between those points. There is no device-side control governing an agent that is not a coding agent and not routed through the gateway, and the cloud and SaaS row scores the same way: enforcement happens where the traffic is routed, and an agent acting directly against a SaaS application outside that path has nothing standing in front of it. Discovery reaches further than enforcement does — it is agentless and continuous across clouds, IDEs, SaaS and MCP connections, and it scores level with ours at the top of the scale.

This is the ordinary shape of a product that grew from the developer surface outward, and it is not a criticism of the depth there. It is a boundary a buyer can check against their own agent inventory in an afternoon: count the agents that are neither a coding assistant nor routed through a gateway, and that count is the gap.

Internal by construction

Four solution pages are published, and all four are internal: engineering, security, IT and platform, compliance. The framing throughout is an enterprise governing the agents acting inside its own environment — discovering them, scoping them, revoking them, proving what they did.

The other half of the problem is not addressed anywhere in the published material: the agents a company's own customers point at its product, which need per-tenant governance keyed to that product's customer model rather than to its employee directory. For a company shipping an agent-facing surface, that is not an adjacent use case — it is the same policy question with a different principal on the other end, and it is the row where this table separates by three.

What is not published

The pricing row publishes on an absence rather than a number. There is no pricing or packaging page in the published URL set, and pricing appears only as an agenda item inside a booked demo. That is a normal early enterprise motion and not a criticism, but it means the cost of governing a hundred agents cannot be modelled before a sales conversation, and the row says exactly that. The total-cost row was dropped rather than scored twice off the same absence.

Two other rows were held. Their new-integration commitment is not published, and scoring an unpublished figure against our own three-day one would measure documentation habits rather than capability. Our own audit-first rollout row stays held pending internal confirmation, which is the fifth comparison in a row it has sat out — they document a monitor mode, and the row would probably be level.

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 six rows that come out level and the four Highflame wins.

Capability depthNoneCompleteHighflameAgen.co
01 · Runtime enforcement
Verdict rendered at the moment of actionHighflameInline, before the action landsComplete5/5Agen.coPer-action verdicts, <30msComplete5/5
Decision latency, published and measuredHighflame<1ms policy, tiered detectionComplete5/5Agen.co<30ms, published, no samplingComplete5/5
Blocks a single action without disabling the agentHighflameAction blocked, agent continuesComplete5/5Agen.coAction-level enforcementComplete5/5
02 · Identity & accountability
Agent identity unified with human and machine identityHighflameAgent-shaped layer atop your IdPCapable3/5Agen.coOne fabric: humans, machines, agentsComplete5/5
Each individual action attributed to that humanHighflameAttributed to agent and ownerComplete5/5Agen.coAttributed per actionComplete5/5
Identity core published as open source for inspectionHighflameZeroID, Apache 2.0Complete5/5Agen.coCommercial platform, no open coreBasic1/5
03 · Coverage
Endpoint enforcementHighflameIDE and CLI execution pathCapable3/5Agen.coAgenShield on the deviceComplete5/5
Browser enforcementHighflameExtension: prompts, uploads, clipboardStrong4/5Agen.coBrowserShield, early accessCapable3/5
Cloud & SaaS enforcementHighflameEnforced where traffic is routedCapable3/5Agen.coCloud and SaaS, one planeComplete5/5
Network-layer enforcementHighflameInline via Tailscale ApertureStrong4/5Agen.coNot our layer — works alongsidePartial2/5
Agentless discovery — no SDK, no self-registrationHighflameAgentless across clouds, IDEs, SaaSComplete5/5Agen.coAgentless, 5 surfaces, no SDKComplete5/5
External customer-facing agentsHighflameInternal personas, no external planePartial2/5Agen.coCustomer-facing agents, same planeComplete5/5
Connector and tool breadthHighflameMCP-native, no published countCapable3/5Agen.co150+ connectors · 1,000+ toolsComplete5/5
04 · Operate & buy
Pricing unit — what you are billed perHighflameNo published pricing modelBasic1/5Agen.coPer governed agentComplete5/5
First-party depth inside the productivity suiteHighflameGoverns the suite from outsidePartial2/5Agen.coGoverns the suite, doesn't live in itPartial2/5
Ecosystem and marketplace breadthHighflameOpen source, GitHub MarketplaceCapable3/5Agen.coFocused platform, not a marketplacePartial2/5
6 rows Agen.co leads6 tied4 rows Highflame leads
Levels reflect capability depth and supporting evidence. Capability descriptions based on vendor public documentation, September 2026.
What the table says

Both products authorize the action. One of them already knows the person.

Read the four groups in order and the shape is unusual for this site. Runtime enforcement is level across the board. Identity is level on attribution and on the delegation chain, and separates on one row: what the agent's identity is unified with. Coverage is level on discovery, goes to them on the browser and the network, and separates on the device, on cloud and SaaS, on connector breadth, and on customer-facing agents. Operate and buy splits three ways.

That is not a gap in feature scope, and this page has not argued that it is. An agent-shaped credential layered onto an existing directory answers who the agent is and names the human it belongs to. Answering whether that human is entitled to this action right now means the human and the agent have to be primitives in the same system — and reaching the action at all means being present where the agent acts, not only where its traffic was routed.

The findings

Four groups, four boundaries.

One per group in the table above, each traceable to the rows beneath it.

01

Level, and worth saying first

Inline decisions before the action lands, a published and benchmarked latency figure, verdicts beyond allow and deny, and a block that stops one action without taking the agent offline. All three published runtime rows come out level at the top of the scale. This comparison does not turn on whether there is a runtime verdict.

runtime rows published3 of 3 level
decision pathinline, out of band
02

An agent layer above your identity stack

Agents get their own verifiable credential carrying owner, trust tier and delegation depth, added on top of the identity provider already in place. Humans and machines stay where they were, so attribution depends on two systems agreeing about a person. The delegation chain and per-action attribution are level rows; what the identity is unified with is not.

identity fabricagents only
human entitlementheld elsewhere
03

Deep at the IDE, bounded past the gateway

Enforcement points are named: model traffic, the IDE, the CLI, the tool gateway and agent-to-agent calls, with tool surfaces scanned before load. Discovery reaches further, agentlessly and continuously, and ties us at the top. Between those points there is no device-side control for a non-coding agent, and no customer-facing agent deployment anywhere in the documentation.

enforcement pointsIDE · CLI · gateway
external agents documentednone
04

Open at the core, unpriced at the edge

The identity engine is published open source under Apache 2.0 and deployable in your own VPC, which is a real advantage and a row they win. What cannot be planned is the bill: no pricing or packaging page exists in the published URL set, and pricing appears only as an agenda item inside a booked demo.

identity coreApache 2.0
published pricing unitnone
Watch it happen

Every action resolved to the human who answers for it.

Not a claim on a credential pointing at a person in another system — the human and the agent as primitives on one fabric, with every individual action judged against that person's entitlement in the moment it happens, including the agents that run with nobody watching.

agent ownership · live product scene
What closes the gap

Keep the authorization. Add the fabric that already holds the person.

Nothing about authorizing an agent's action at the gateway or in the IDE conflicts with governing it from a layer that holds identity. Agen adds what a credential layered onto a directory cannot carry on its own: humans, machines and agents as primitives in one place, every action judged against that person's entitlement as it happens, and enforcement that reaches the device and the cloud as well as the path — 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-three scored rows, on one 0–5 ladder applied to both columns. Five rows were dropped rather than guessed: our own audit-first rollout row, held pending internal confirmation; the new-integration commitment and the total platform cost, unpublished on their side, where scoring an absence twice would double-count one gap; and two rows that scored level at the top of the scale — the delegation authority chain and gateway enforcement — cut for length alone, both strong on their side. Ties and the four rows Highflame wins are printed rather than filtered.

Sources12 primary
Evidence ledger
  1. Highflame — platform overviewTier AThe Agent Control Fabric is described as verifiable agent-shaped credentials plus per-action authorization: SPIFFE and WIMSE subjects, RFC 8693 delegated authority with scope attenuation, just-in-time ephemeral access, DPoP proof-of-possession and cascade revocation in seconds. One Cedar policy is enforced across model traffic, the IDE, the tool gateway and agent-to-agent calls, against 30+ detectors emitting 150+ typed signals per run, with tiered detection and early exit, OpenID CIBA human-in-the-loop, and out-of-band enforcement under 1ms. The Rust Agent Gateway binds each request to a verifiable identity at the wire and is deployable as SaaS, in a private cloud or fully on-prem.
  2. Highflame — why HighflameTier AStates that identity and access management authenticates humans, apps, services and workloads and does not govern agent lineage, delegation depth, tool intent or the on-behalf-of chain, describing the gaps as architectural rather than configuration. Positions the product as purpose-built for agents rather than as one fabric spanning humans, machines and agents, and as a layer that plugs into any proxy or gateway rather than replacing it.
  3. Highflame — code agent securityTier AEnforcement attaches at the gateway, the IDE and the CLI across Cursor, VS Code, Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, Windsurf, Claude Desktop and any MCP client or server, with policy evaluated before a prompt is submitted, before a shell command runs and before an MCP tool fires. Under 1ms is added per action, decided inline and out of band. MCP servers and Skills are scanned before agents load them, with findings mapped to the OWASP MCP Top 10. Integrates with Okta, Entra and other major identity providers; deployable as SaaS, private cloud or on-prem.
  4. Highflame — for security teamsTier AAgent actions, IDE actions and model, agent-to-agent and MCP calls are checked against one policy engine before they execute, with Cedar decisions evaluating out of band in under 1ms and detection under 10ms. Includes 150+ typed signals per agent run, cascade revocation across the fleet, and continuous adversarial scanning mapped to OWASP, NIST and MITRE.
  5. Highflame — for IT and platformTier ADescribes continuous, agentless discovery across clouds, IDEs, SaaS and MCP connections. States that the product does not replace the identity provider but extends it to agents, connecting the directory already in place and adding agent-shaped claims and lifecycle on top, minting verifiable identities for agents no existing system attributes. Just-in-time scoped credentials, attribute-based access keyed to identity, owner and trust tier, full joiner-mover-leaver lifecycle, and real-time cascade revocation.
  6. Highflame — for compliance and GRCTier AEvery action is attributed to the agent that took it and the human who owns it, recorded as signed, tamper-evident evidence and exportable to a SIEM. Framework mappings ship by default for OWASP LLM and Agentic, MITRE ATLAS, NIST AI 600-1, the EU AI Act, SOC 2 and ISO 42001, with a non-human identity registry carrying owner, scope and history for every agent.
  7. Highflame — ZeroID (open source)Tier AThe identity core is published open source under Apache 2.0, built on SPIFFE and WIMSE identities, OAuth 2.1, RFC 8693 token exchange, DPoP-bound tokens, OpenID CIBA approval and CAE/SSF cascade revocation, and deployable in a customer's own VPC. The security stack above it remains commercial.
  8. Highflame — network-layer enforcement with Tailscale ApertureTier ARequests passing through Tailscale Aperture are evaluated inline against policy for secret leakage, prompt injection, data exfiltration and high-risk inputs, and are allowed or blocked in real time before the model provider receives them. Any rule can run in monitor mode first and be switched to blocking once the team is confident in it.
  9. Highflame — AI gateway benchmarksTier AA published benchmark of four AI gateways on a two-host AWS rig with five-minute sustained runs and full methodology, covering sustained throughput, p99 latency under a 5,000-connection rush, and behaviour past the throughput ceiling.
  10. Highflame — Browser Security extension disclosureTier AA Highflame Browser Security extension processes user prompts, file uploads and clipboard content locally in the browser and evaluates them against enterprise security policies, sending prompts to the Shield API for policy evaluation when configured with an enterprise key. Violation metadata syncs to the enterprise account for administrator reporting.
  11. Highflame — published sitemapTier BThe published URL set contains no pricing or packaging page; /pricing and /plans both return 404. No billing unit, tier or rate appears anywhere in the public material, and pricing appears only as an agenda item within a booked demo. This is the basis for scoring the pricing unit row on an absence rather than a figure.
  12. Highflame — GitHub Marketplace listingTier APalisade is distributed through the GitHub Marketplace, alongside the Ramparts MCP scanner published on Docker Hub, forming the ecosystem and distribution basis for that row.

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 Highflame?
Highflame builds what it calls the Agent Control Fabric: one identity, policy and enforcement layer for AI agents. It has two halves. Identity gives every agent a verifiable credential carrying its owner, trust tier, framework and delegation depth, with scope attenuation across delegation hops, just-in-time credentials, proof-of-possession tokens and cascade revocation. Authorization checks every action — tool call, model request or agent-to-agent hop — against one Cedar policy and a stream of typed signals from a detector suite, then allows, shapes, pauses or blocks it. A Rust gateway carries the enforcement for LLM, MCP and agent-to-agent traffic, and the identity core ships open source as ZeroID.
Does Highflame enforce policy at runtime, or only observe?
It enforces, and this page scores it that way. Policy is evaluated inline and out of band before the action executes, the published decision figure is under a millisecond with detection tiered above it and a public gateway benchmark with full methodology behind the throughput claims, and enforcement can block a single action while the agent keeps running. Verdicts go beyond allow and deny to shaping, redaction and a human approval pause built on OpenID CIBA. All three published runtime rows on this page come out level with Agen at the top of the scale.
Where does Highflame score better than Agen.co?
Four rows of sixteen, and six more are level. The identity core is published open source under Apache 2.0 on SPIFFE, OAuth 2.1, RFC 8693 and DPoP and deploys in a customer's own VPC, which we do not offer. A browser extension evaluates prompts, file uploads and clipboard content against enterprise policy, while our own browser coverage is still in early access. A partner integration enforces inline at the network layer, which is not a layer we work at. And an open-source engine plus marketplace listings give them ecosystem reach a focused platform does not have.
How does Highflame handle agent identity, and how is that different from Agen.co?
Highflame's stated position is that human identity systems were built for users and non-human identity for services and workloads, so agents need a purpose-built identity of their own. It connects to the identity provider and directory a company already runs and adds agent-shaped claims on top — owner, trust tier, framework, delegation depth — minting verifiable identities for agents nothing else attributes. Agen takes the other route: humans, machines and agents are primitives on one fabric, running on a customer identity foundation that has been in production for seven years. The practical difference is where a person's entitlement lives at the moment of a verdict — in the same system as the agent, or in the directory the credential points back to.
What surfaces does Highflame enforce on?
The named enforcement points are model traffic, the IDE, the CLI, the tool gateway and agent-to-agent calls, plus the network layer through a partner integration and a browser extension for prompts and clipboard content. For coding agents that is deep coverage: policy is evaluated before a prompt is submitted, before a shell command runs and before a tool call fires, across Cursor, Claude Code, Copilot, Windsurf and any MCP client, with MCP servers and Skills scanned before an agent loads them. The boundary is what sits between those points — an agent that is not a coding agent and is not routed through the gateway has no enforcement point in front of it, which is why the endpoint and cloud rows score below the discovery rows.
Does Highflame cover customer-facing agents?
Not in the published material. All four solution pages are written for internal audiences — engineering, security, IT and platform, and compliance — and the framing throughout is an enterprise governing agents acting inside its own environment. Governing the agents a company's own customers point at its product needs per-tenant policy keyed to that product's customer model rather than to its employee directory, and nothing on the site describes it. Agen covers internal and customer-facing agents on the same plane, which is the widest coverage row in the table.
How is Highflame priced?
It is not published. There is no pricing or packaging page in the published URL set, and pricing appears only as an agenda item inside a booked demo. This is a normal early enterprise motion, and it is why the pricing unit row on this page scores on an absence rather than a number — a buyer cannot tell from public material what they would be billed per. The total platform cost row was dropped rather than scored a second time off the same absence. Agen is priced per governed agent with no prerequisite tier.
Can Agen.co run alongside Highflame?
Yes, and on this pairing that is a more serious answer than usual. The two products overlap heavily at the runtime layer and diverge on what the verdict resolves to and where it can reach. If a team has already standardised its coding agents on Highflame's IDE and gateway enforcement, Agen governs the agents that never cross that path — on the device, in cloud and SaaS applications directly, and on the customer-facing side — with a named accountable human behind every agent and every action judged against that person's entitlement in under 30ms. Nothing you already run has to be removed.

See the row that decides it.

Bring the agent you are least comfortable with. We will show you the named human behind every action it takes, judged against what that person is actually entitled to, in a working environment, in under a day.

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