Exogram vs SigmaShake

Exogram 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.

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.

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	Exogram	SigmaShake
Pricing	Paid	Paid
Price	—	$5/mo
Free trial	No	No
Open source	No	No
Has API	Yes	No
Self-hosted option	No	Yes
Platforms	SaaS, Cloud	Windows 10+, macOS 14+, Linux (Ubuntu 22.04+ / Fedora 38+ / Pop!_OS)
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.	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	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.	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

Only Exogram exposes a public API. Choose based on which difference matters most for your workflow.

Frequently asked questions

What is the difference between Exogram and SigmaShake?

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

Is Exogram 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.