Northbeams vs PreFlight

Northbeams and PreFlight 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.

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.

PreFlight

PreFlight installs via npm and runs as a pre-commit gate, scanning AI-generated code for security vulnerabilities in auth flows, database logic, and SQL patterns — then offering deterministic or AI-assisted patches inline. It integrates with VS Code, Cursor, and MCP clients, so the scan happens in the environment where the AI code was written. The free tier caps patches at ten, which is sufficient for evaluation but stops short of daily use on an active codebase. Teams that exceed that ceiling without a pro key lose the fix-application step and are left with scan output only. The repo is open-source and self-hosted, so the scan never phones home.

Attribute	Northbeams	PreFlight
Pricing	Paid	Paid
Price	$9,600/yr	$19/mo
Free trial	14 days	No
Open source	No	Yes
Has API	Yes	No
Self-hosted option	No	Yes
Platforms	Browser (Chrome, Edge, Brave, Arc), Mac, Windows, CLI	CLI, npm, VS Code, Cursor
Pros	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.	Runs entirely locally with no cloud dependency for scanning, so code never leaves the machine during the security check — which matters for teams under data-residency or compliance constraints. Pre-commit integration means vulnerabilities surface before they enter the repository rather than at PR review, so the team avoids the back-and-forth of post-commit security findings. RLS and SQL safety checks are explicitly scoped, so the specific class of vulnerability that AI tools most often miss in database logic gets dedicated coverage rather than a generic lint pass. MCP client support lets other tools and editor workflows invoke the scanner directly, so the security gate can be embedded in automated flows without requiring a separate manual step. Open-source codebase allows teams to audit the scan rules themselves, so trust in the tool does not depend solely on vendor claims about what it detects.
Cons	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.	The free tier caps patch application at ten — once that limit is hit, the tool continues to surface findings but stops applying fixes. A team using AI coding tools daily will exhaust this on a single feature branch, forcing a licensing decision before they have enough production signal to evaluate the tool's accuracy. The scanner is scoped to auth, database, and SQL vulnerability classes. Teams that need coverage across a broader attack surface — dependency vulnerabilities, secret detection, SSRF, or injection beyond SQL — will need a separate tool running in parallel, which means maintaining two scan configurations and reconciling their output. The project shows a single star and no forks on GitHub at the time of curation, with an open issue logged. Teams evaluating this against established SAST tools with large community rule sets and documented false-positive rates will find precious little external evidence of production use — which is the condition under which a security-conscious team switches to a competitor with a longer track record.

Bottom line

PreFlight is open source; only Northbeams exposes a public API. Choose based on which difference matters most for your workflow.

Frequently asked questions

What is the difference between Northbeams and PreFlight?

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

Is Northbeams better than PreFlight?

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.