Northbeams vs SigmaShake

Northbeams 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.

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.

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	Northbeams	SigmaShake
Pricing	Paid	Paid
Price	$9,600/yr	$5/mo
Free trial	14 days	No
Open source	No	No
Has API	Yes	No
Self-hosted option	No	Yes
Platforms	Browser (Chrome, Edge, Brave, Arc), Mac, Windows, CLI	Windows 10+, macOS 14+, Linux (Ubuntu 22.04+ / Fedora 38+ / Pop!_OS)
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.	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	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.	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 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 SigmaShake?

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

Is Northbeams 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.