Northbeams
Summary
Shadow AI doesn't announce itself — one week you have twelve employees, the next you have forty-two tools, three of them ingesting customer PII, and no audit trail to show your compliance officer.
Northbeams sits between your workforce and their AI tools, classifying what's running, blocking what shouldn't be, and generating the evidence chain your SOC 2 or HIPAA auditor will ask for. The browser-based agent installs without network changes, so IT doesn't need a procurement cycle to get visibility. Discovery is ungated, which means you can map your shadow AI footprint before committing to enforcement. The ceiling appears when your environment scales past a single site or when you need MCP agent governance — those capabilities are paid-only features. Teams running large multi-site deployments report that per-seat policy management becomes the operational bottleneck.
Bottom line: Northbeams earns its place as the first tool a 100-person company installs when legal asks what AI tools are in use — but engineering organizations running complex MCP server topologies or multi-region fleets will hit policy management limits before they finish their rollout.
Pricing Plans
Subscription- Price
- $9,600/yr + $12/user/mo (Sentinel)
- Free Tier
- Discovery: free forever for up to 5 users; includes 14-day full Sentinel trial, then read-only mode indefinitely. No enforcement, no per-user attribution, workspace-level visibility only.
Discovery
Free tier: up to 5 users, 14-day full Sentinel trial, then read-only mode. 24-hour AI Discovery Report, workspace-level risk totals, on-device sensitive-prompt redaction, last 7 days history.
- Free forever for up to 5 users
- 24-hour AI Discovery Report
- On-device sensitive-prompt classifier + redaction
- 7-day event history
- Browser, desktop, CLI coverage
Sentinel
For heads of security: $800/mo billed annually + $12/user/mo (SAVE 20% on annual billing). Typical customer: 150 seats (~$18,240/yr). Scales to 500 seats.
- Per-user attribution (who ran which tool, when)
- Block / sandbox / allow enforcement
- Real-time alerts via Slack
- Compliance Evidence Pack (SOC 2, EU AI Act, HIPAA, ISO 42001, NIST AI RMF)
- MCP Gateway (50K calls/month, per-tool rules)
- Browser, desktop, CLI, MCP surfaces
- Unlimited event history
- CSV export + API access
- Email + priority support
- Jailbreak + injection detection
- Per-content-category redaction tuning
Fleet
For enterprise / audit-ready: $6,250/mo billed annually (~$75K/yr base) + $14/user/mo. 200-seat minimum. 500,000 MCP calls/month included.
- Everything in Sentinel plus:
- SAML SSO + SCIM (Okta, Entra)
- SIEM streaming (Splunk HEC, Datadog Logs)
- GRC evidence automation (Vanta, Drata, OneTrust, Scytale)
- Custom DPA + DPIA support + BAA (HIPAA)
- Founder-led onboarding (dedicated CSM available)
- 99.9% uptime SLA + quarterly business reviews
- On-premises classifier option
- Multi-year prepay discounts (20% year 2, 25% year 3, 30% year 4+)
- 7-year audit log retention
View full pricing on northbeams.com →
Pricing may have changed since last verified. Check the official site for current plans.
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Pros
Sign in to edit- Agent deploys without network changes or procurement approval, so a security team can have full shadow AI inventory running in hours rather than after a six-week firewall project.
- Real-time PII, credential, and source-code interception fires before data leaves the browser, which means you catch the leak before it becomes a breach notification obligation.
- Automated generation of SOC 2, HIPAA, and EU AI Act audit evidence means compliance reviews don't require a two-week manual log reconstruction before every auditor call.
- Per-tool allow/block/sandbox policies for MCP agent access, so engineering teams using Cursor or Claude Desktop don't operate in a governance blind spot while the rest of the org is covered.
- Discovery tier is ungated, which means you can produce a complete AI tool inventory and make the business case for enforcement before spending a dollar — removing the 'prove it first' blocker most security budgets impose.
Cons
Sign in to edit- Browser-agent coverage means any AI workload running outside the browser — CLI tools, server-side agents, API integrations — is invisible to Northbeams; teams with significant non-browser AI usage will maintain a separate inventory for those surfaces and live with two parallel governance systems.
- MCP agent governance and Fleet (multi-site policy management) are paid-only features, so organizations that deploy on the free tier and then discover their primary risk is in coding agents or distributed sites face a forced upgrade decision mid-rollout rather than before it.
- Teams that outgrow per-tool policy management at scale — typically when seat counts push into the hundreds across multiple locations — report that policy administration becomes a recurring manual burden; at that inflection point, organizations with dedicated security engineering staff typically migrate to a network-layer DLP or CASB that handles enforcement at the infrastructure level rather than the browser.
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About
- Platforms
- Browser (Chrome, Edge, Brave, Arc), Mac, Windows, CLI
- API Available
- Yes
- Self-Hosted
- No
- Last Updated
- 2026-06-05T12:23:58.429Z
Best For
Who it's for
- Security teams at SMBs (50–500 seats) inheriting shadow AI governance without budget
- Companies needing EU AI Act, SOC 2, or HIPAA readiness evidence before audits
- Engineering organizations using coding agents (Cursor, Claude Desktop, Aider) and MCP servers
- IT leaders rolling out AI governance without procurement cycles or network changes
- Mid-market enterprises standardizing AI governance across multiple sites and teams
What it does well
- Inventory and classify all AI tools employees use without IT approval
- Prevent credential, PII, and source-code leakage into AI tools in real-time
- Generate audit-ready compliance evidence for SOC 2, HIPAA, EU AI Act reviews
- Govern MCP agent access and enforce per-tool allow/block/sandbox policies
- Monitor and classify AI agent coding sessions and link to git commits
Integrations
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Frequently Asked Questions
- Is Northbeams free?
- Northbeams is a paid tool ($9,600/yr + $12/user/mo (Sentinel)). A 14-day free trial is available.
- Is Northbeams open source?
- No — Northbeams is a closed-source tool. Source code is not publicly available.
- Does Northbeams have an API?
- Yes. Northbeams exposes a developer API. See the official documentation at https://northbeams.com for details.
- What platforms does Northbeams support?
- Northbeams is available on: Browser (Chrome, Edge, Brave, Arc), Mac, Windows, CLI.
Hours Saved & ROI Stories Community
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Most AI governance projects stall because they require a network appliance, a six-month procurement cycle, or an agent that IT won’t approve before the audit date arrives. Northbeams addresses this by deploying a browser-side agent that observes AI tool usage across the workforce, classifies each tool, intercepts outbound data in real time to block credential or PII leakage, and writes the resulting activity log into audit-ready compliance evidence — all without touching network infrastructure. The core workflow is: install agent, surface the shadow AI inventory, set allow/block/sandbox policies per tool, and export the evidence package when the auditor calls.
The differentiating feature is the MCP layer. As engineering teams adopt coding agents — Cursor, Claude Desktop, Aider — and connect them to MCP servers, Northbeams claims to govern which agents can reach which tools and enforce per-tool access policies. The vendor also describes linking coding agent sessions directly to git commits, giving security teams a traceable record of what an agent touched and what it shipped. This positions Northbeams specifically for organizations where the AI risk is not just browser-based chat tools but autonomous coding sessions running against internal repositories.
For SMBs inheriting a shadow AI problem without a dedicated security team, the ungated Discovery tier removes the barrier to starting. For companies preparing EU AI Act, SOC 2, or HIPAA evidence, the automated audit trail solves the most time-consuming manual step. Where it breaks: teams with more than a few hundred seats, or with AI deployments spread across multiple physical sites, report that managing per-tool policies at scale becomes a hands-on administrative task. Organizations that need API-level enforcement rather than browser-side interception — or that run AI workloads entirely outside the browser — will find the coverage model insufficient and will need a network-layer or endpoint solution instead.