RiskKernel vs SigmaShake

RiskKernel 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.

RiskKernel

Deployed as a single Go binary, it sits in front of your existing OpenAI, Anthropic, or LangChain stack via a one-variable proxy — no rewrite required. Every call is metered and checkpointed, so a killed or crashed run resumes from the last saved state instead of re-spending from zero. The human-approval gate routes irreversible tool calls for sign-off over CLI, web, or webhook before they fire, and the LLM cannot bypass it because the gate lives in compiled code, not a prompt. The hosted dashboard is private beta only; teams that need a UI today are self-managing.

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	RiskKernel	SigmaShake
Pricing	Free	Paid
Price	—	$5/mo
Free trial	No	No
Open source	Yes	No
Has API	Yes	No
Self-hosted option	Yes	Yes
Platforms	Linux, macOS, Windows (Go binary)	Windows 10+, macOS 14+, Linux (Ubuntu 22.04+ / Fedora 38+ / Pop!_OS)
Pros	Hard per-run dollar and token ceilings enforced in compiled code, which means the kill switch fires before the overspend registers rather than after the invoice cycle closes. Crash-resumable checkpointing, so a process killed mid-run restarts from the last saved state instead of replaying every prior API call and paying for them again. Human-approval gate for side-effecting tool calls that the LLM cannot route around, so irreversible actions — deleting records, sending messages, writing to external systems — wait for a human decision before executing. One-variable proxy adoption with no code rewrite required, so existing agents running against OpenAI or Anthropic get metering and enforcement without refactoring the application. Self-hosted Apache 2.0 binary with BYO provider keys and no telemetry, so teams in regulated or air-gapped environments get full auditability without exporting run data to a third-party service.	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	The hosted dashboard is private beta only, so teams that need a web UI to monitor, review, or manage runs across agents have no production-ready option yet — they operate through CLI or build their own view against the OpenTelemetry export. SDK adapters are scoped to LangChain, the Claude Agent SDK, and the OpenAI Agents SDK; teams running CrewAI, AutoGen, or any other framework hit the proxy layer only and lose loop-count and tool-level controls until they write their own adapter. The project is maintained by a single developer with no enterprise support tier listed; teams whose compliance posture requires a support contract or SLA will find nothing on offer and will move to a vendor-backed observability or guardrails product instead.	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

RiskKernel is free while SigmaShake is paid; RiskKernel is open source; only RiskKernel exposes a public API. Choose based on which difference matters most for your workflow.

Frequently asked questions

What is the difference between RiskKernel and SigmaShake?

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

Is RiskKernel 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.