Gateplex vs Northbeams

Gateplex 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.

Gateplex

Gateplex is governance middleware: it does not run your agents, it watches them. The vendor describes it as a policy enforcement layer that intercepts agent actions — API calls, approvals, data sends — checks them against defined rules, and blocks or flags violations before execution completes. That distinction matters for regulated environments where post-hoc logging is not enough. The free tier covers three agents and a capped intercept volume per month, which fits a proof-of-concept but runs short the moment a second team deploys. Beyond that ceiling, teams move to a paid tier or hit a wall.

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	Gateplex	Northbeams
Pricing	Paid	Paid
Price	$199/month	$9,600/yr
Free trial	No	14 days
Open source	No	No
Has API	Yes	Yes
Self-hosted option	No	No
Platforms	Cloud-based middleware; integrates with agent frameworks on any platform running OpenAI, Anthropic, LangChain, CrewAI, AutoGen, Vertex AI, or AWS Bedrock	Browser (Chrome, Edge, Brave, Arc), Mac, Windows, CLI
Pros	Real-time action interception before execution completes, which means a procurement agent cannot approve an out-of-policy spend and then get flagged about it afterward — the action is stopped in the moment. PII detection at the intercept layer, so customer data does not reach a third-party API before a policy check has cleared it — without this, a misconfigured agent integration becomes a data leak that logging discovers too late. Duplicate transaction detection for financial agents, which prevents a refund or payment from issuing twice due to a retry loop or race condition — the kind of error that is trivial to miss and expensive to reverse. Audit trail output formatted for legal and compliance review rather than raw telemetry, so the evidence package a regulator or procurement committee requests does not require a data engineering sprint to produce. API access to the enforcement layer, which means policy rules can be managed programmatically and integrated into existing deployment pipelines rather than configured only through a UI.	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	No self-hosted deployment option is documented — every agent action routed through Gateplex passes through vendor infrastructure. Teams with data residency requirements, air-gapped environments, or legal restrictions on externalizing sensitive financial or health data have no workaround: this is a hard architectural incompatibility, not a configuration problem, and those teams evaluate on-premises alternatives instead. The free tier caps at three agents and a fixed intercept volume per month. A team piloting with two agents clears that ceiling the moment a third team onboards or production traffic spikes — at which point the choice is a paid tier commitment or a freeze on agent expansion, and the evaluation timeline compresses. Gateplex enforces policy on agent actions but does not itself define what your agents should do — teams that want policy logic tightly coupled to agent orchestration (branching based on what a prior step returned, approval gates wired into the agent graph) end up maintaining Gateplex as a separate enforcement layer alongside their orchestration framework, which is two systems to debug when something breaks.	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

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

Frequently asked questions

What is the difference between Gateplex and Northbeams?

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

Is Gateplex better than Northbeams?

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.