Exogram vs Northbeams

Exogram and Northbeams 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.

Exogram

Exogram is an execution governance layer that intercepts AI agent actions — payments, database writes, customer emails, record updates — and applies a policy decision before anything hits your infrastructure. The vendor describes a four-way enforcement decision: allow, deny, escalate, or log. Policy rules are checked at runtime, not after the fact, which means a $25,000 invoice approval blocked against a $1,000 limit never reaches your payment system. The immutable audit trail is positioned for SOC 2, HIPAA, and financial compliance workflows. The tool is not itself an agent runner — it assumes you already have an agent; it governs what that agent is allowed to touch.

Northbeams

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.

Attribute	Exogram	Northbeams
Pricing	Paid	Paid
Price	—	$9,600/yr + $12/user/mo (Sentinel)
Free trial	No	14 days
Open source	No	No
Has API	Yes	Yes
Self-hosted option	No	No
Platforms	SaaS, Cloud	Browser (Chrome, Edge, Brave, Arc), Mac, Windows, CLI
Released	2025-05	—
Pros	Runtime policy enforcement at the tool-call boundary, so unauthorized payments and database mutations are blocked before they execute rather than flagged after the damage is done. Four-way enforcement decisions — allow, deny, escalate, log — which means regulated workflows get a human review step without building a custom approval queue on top of your agent stack. Immutable audit logs positioned for SOC 2 and HIPAA compliance, so teams in regulated industries have a defensible record of every action an agent attempted and what decision was returned. Pre-built integrations with LangChain, CrewAI, AutoGen, Vercel AI SDK, and LlamaIndex, so teams already running these frameworks add a governance layer without rewriting their agent code. An open protocol spec (EAAP) published as RFC-0001, so teams who need to audit, extend, or independently verify the governance model are not working against a black-box contract.	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	Exogram governs actions but does not orchestrate agents — teams that need branching logic, memory, or coordination between multiple agents still maintain a separate orchestration layer, which means adding Exogram adds a second system to debug when an escalation fires unexpectedly. No self-hosted deployment option is described on the vendor page, which means teams whose compliance requirements mandate on-premises data residency — common in financial services and healthcare — cannot use Exogram without routing agent traffic through external infrastructure; those teams move to building policy enforcement into their own API gateway instead. The tool launched in approximately May 2025, so production case studies at scale are not yet publicly available; teams evaluating for high-volume payment workflows are working from architecture documentation and demos rather than documented incident records from comparable deployments.	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.

Bottom line

Exogram and Northbeams are closely matched on pricing model, openness, and API availability — pick by feature set and platform support in the table above.

Comparison data is sourced and verified by the AIDiveForge data pipeline. AIDiveForge is editorially independent.