AGEF vs SigmaShake

AGEF and SigmaShake are both guardrails & safety tracked by AIDiveForge. Below is a side-by-side comparison of pricing, capabilities, platforms, and ownership — sourced from each tool's live website and verified before publishing.

AGEF

The specification defines a content-addressed, Merkle-linked event structure so every decision in an agent session can be hashed, bundled, and checked offline — no live service required. The reference implementation is Akmon (v2.0.0 and later), which handles bundle export, import, and journaling via akmon-journal. AGEF is a format standard, not a deployed platform: there is no SaaS, no API, and no hosted verification service. Teams adopting it are taking on the work of building or integrating bundle-producing substrates into their existing agent infrastructure. At v0.1.1, the spec is pre-stable — conformance profiles and bundle structure are defined, but tooling outside the Akmon reference implementation is essentially absent.

SigmaShake

SigmaShake intercepts tool calls from agents running in Claude Code, Cursor, VS Code Copilot, and Gemini CLI, evaluating each action against a rule set before it executes. The vendor states decisions resolve in roughly 85 ms using deterministic native evaluation — no model inference, no GPU, no token spend. Rules follow an Allow/Ask/Deny pattern, where Ask routes the action to a human approval queue rather than blunting everything with a hard block. The desktop app installs in about 30 seconds with no admin rights; the CLI drops into any shell or CI hook chain. Self-hosting is supported, which means the guardrail layer stays offline and never sends your code or commands to a third-party model.

Attribute	AGEF	SigmaShake
Pricing	Free	Paid
Price	—	$5/mo
Free trial	No	No
Open source	Yes	No
Has API	No	No
Self-hosted option	Yes	Yes
Platforms	Cross-platform (specification language-agnostic)	Windows 10+, macOS 14+, Linux (Ubuntu 22.04+ / Fedora 38+ / Pop!_OS)
Released	2024	—
Pros	Offline, cryptographic bundle verification — no live service required — so an auditor or regulator can independently confirm session integrity without access to your internal systems or trusting your logging infrastructure. Merkle-linked event structure means the record is tamper-evident by construction, which means you hand a regulator a bundle and the math proves whether it was altered, rather than asking them to take your word for it. Deterministic session replay against recorded tools and providers, so incident responders can reconstruct exactly what the agent did during an outage or compliance event without relying on mutable runtime state. Apache-2.0 code license and CC BY 4.0 spec license, which means regulated organizations can adopt, implement, and distribute the format without commercial licensing friction or vendor lock-in. Two defined conformance profiles (Bundle and Substrate) give implementers a clear contract for what 'compliant' means, so independent tools from different vendors can interoperate around the same audit record.	Deterministic local evaluation at roughly 85 ms per check, so you avoid the latency and per-token cost of routing every agent action through a model-based policy guard. Ask mode holds a risky action in a human approval queue rather than blocking it outright, which means your agent keeps moving on safe tasks while you review the one call that needs a second look. PreToolUse hook integration for Claude Code and MCP server integration for Cursor, Codex, and VS Code Copilot, so the guardrail wires into agents your team is already running without a custom shim. Self-hosted deployment with no model inference, so your code, file paths, and shell commands never leave the machine — critical for teams with data-handling obligations. Per-user install with no admin or UAC rights required, which means individual developers can adopt it without waiting for IT to sign off on an organization-wide rollout.
Cons	The only shipped bundle exporter is Akmon v2.0.0 and later — teams not running Akmon must implement the spec themselves from SPEC.md, which means committing engineering time to build and maintain a conforming substrate before a single audit bundle gets produced. At v0.1.1, the spec is explicitly pre-stable, so the bundle structure and conformance requirements are subject to change before a stable release; teams that ship a production implementation against v0.1.1 inherit the maintenance cost of tracking and absorbing breaking changes. There is no SaaS verification service, no hosted tooling, and no API — organizations that need a drop-in audit trail solution with minimal integration lift will abandon AGEF for a commercial agent observability platform that ships its own tamper-evident logging and verification UI out of the box.	No API is exposed, so teams building custom agent runtimes or embedding safety checks inside their own orchestration code cannot call SigmaShake programmatically — they wrap the CLI binary, which introduces a process boundary and complicates error handling at scale. The SHAKEDOWN benchmark that positions SigmaShake as the top-ranked guardrail was authored by SigmaShake, and competitor scores were modeled from public docs rather than measured runs; teams doing their own evaluation should run independent tests before treating the benchmark as a neutral comparison. Fleet management and team-level policy enforcement are paid-only features, which means a free-tier team cannot centrally audit what rules individual developers are running — a gap that matters the moment more than one engineer is using an AI coding agent on shared infrastructure. Windows support is the primary release target based on page emphasis and download prominence; macOS and Linux builds are listed but community reports on edge cases outside Windows are sparse, so teams running heterogeneous developer environments should validate on non-Windows machines before committing.

Bottom line

AGEF is free while SigmaShake is paid; AGEF is open source. Choose based on which difference matters most for your workflow.

Frequently asked questions

What is the difference between AGEF and SigmaShake?

AGEF is Free and open source, while SigmaShake is Paid. Compare pricing, free trial, API, platforms, and pros/cons in the table above on AIDiveForge.

Is AGEF better than SigmaShake?

It depends on your workflow. Use the side-by-side attributes (pricing, open source, API, self-hosted, platforms) to decide. AIDiveForge does not rank a universal winner — we publish verified facts so you can choose.