Comparison · Checked November 6, 2026
Govern your agents on any cloud, not just one. Start governing your agents today, free, then add enforcement and isolated execution, configured for your workflows, on AWS, Azure, GCP or a private environment. AgentCore is AWS’s managed agent platform, priced per request.
The differences that matter
Sentience
AgentCore says
A fully managed AWS service; runtime instances run in your own AWS account.
Sentience
AgentCore says
Policies cover agent traffic through AgentCore Gateway, and can require that an approval happened earlier in the session.
Sentience
Yes, and the correction is yours. Runtime Enforcement follows your policy book, configured for each workflow: redirect an email to a draft, hand a payment to a person for approval, steer the agent back to its declared task.
AgentCore’s pages
Allows, denies or logs. Correcting or steering the agent is not described on the pages we checked.
Sentience
A local record of what was checked and what happened, stored as files you own. Each record names the governance profile that governed the run, by its content hash. No telemetry on the default path; governance works with the network off. Every layer includes Governor.
AgentCore says
Metrics, spans and logs stored in Amazon CloudWatch in your AWS account, in an OpenTelemetry-compatible format.
Sentience
A custom service. Your policy book can be mapped to ISO/IEC 42001 and EU AI Act requirements for your workflows. Because the map starts from your policy book, it reflects your own controls, not a generic checklist.
Mapping supports your assessment. It is not a certification.
AgentCore says
“Stay aligned with numerous AWS compliance programs.”
Sentience
Governor installs beside the coding agents and frameworks you already run. Nothing to migrate.
Records stream to standard output, files or a local endpoint, so you can forward them to the guardrails, evaluation and observability tools you already use.
Enforcement runs where your agents already run, on AWS, Azure, GCP or a private environment, alongside your models and LLM gateways.
AgentCore says
LangChain, LangGraph, CrewAI, LlamaIndex, Strands, OpenAI Agents SDK, Claude Agent SDK and Google ADK; MCP and A2A; on AWS.
Sentience
Nothing to start.
Governor is free and Apache-2.0. Enforcement is configured for your workflows and priced per governed workflow; the per-workflow price drops as you scale. Secure Runtime is custom-built for your environment, starting with a proof of concept.
pipx install sentience-governorAgentCore’s pages
Consumption pricing with no minimum: policy $0.000025 per request; gateway $0.005 per 1,000 invocations.
Amazon Bedrock AgentCore entries are the vendor’s own claims, from its website as of November 6, 2026. They have not been independently tested. This page makes no claim about whether Sentience and AgentCore can be used together.
Same call, two approaches
The agent is declared to fix a failing test. It edits a local configuration file and runs a shell command. Neither call passes through a gateway.
Captured by the coding-agent integration before dispatch, flagged as outside the declared scope, recorded locally.
Your policy book holds the deploy command and asks a developer.
Back to the failing test. Nothing was deployed.
Ask your AWS team: After a deny, does the run continue, or can the agent be corrected?
Before you decide
Each one turns an advertised claim into something you can see working on your own agents.
Each layer does one job
Hold any vendor, including AgentCore, to the same clarity.
Governor does not stop or alter an action. It records and flags.
Runtime Enforcement redirects, pauses or stops it.
Governor flags actions outside the declared scope. It cannot judge an in-scope action against an objective nobody approved.
Your policy book, enforced at runtime.
A record supports investigation. It does not prevent incidents.
Enforcement and Secure Runtime act before the action takes effect.
Governor says nothing about runs it did not observe.
Secure Runtime runs the workflow’s actions inside its isolated, governed environment, built for production from day one.
Keep comparing
Questions
Sentience governs agents wherever you run them, on AWS, Azure, GCP, a private environment or a developer's machine: Sentience Governor is open source and runs locally beside your agents, and Runtime Enforcement and Secure Runtime are configured for your workflows. Amazon Bedrock AgentCore is AWS's managed agent platform; its policies allow, deny or log the calls that pass through AgentCore Gateway, priced per request. For teams evaluating alternatives to Amazon Bedrock AgentCore, Sentience can be tried today, free.
A gateway governs the traffic that passes through it: model calls, MCP tool calls and agent-to-agent calls. Agents also act locally, writing files, running shell commands and calling local tools that never cross the network. Sentience governs at the execution boundary, beside the agent, so its integrations see and record those actions too. It runs alongside the models and LLM gateways you already use.
Yes. Sentience Governor is open source under Apache-2.0 and runs locally beside your agent, with no account. It records and flags; it does not block.
Yes, with Runtime Enforcement, configured for your workflows: it redirects, pauses or stops actions at control points integrated with your environment, following your custom policy book. Sentience Governor, the free layer, is observe-only and fail-open; it records and flags.
As a custom service, your policy book can be mapped to ISO/IEC 42001 and EU AI Act requirements. Mapping supports your own assessment; it is not a certification.
Sentience Governor works with Claude Code, Codex and other coding agents, Pydantic AI, MCP clients, LangChain and LangGraph. Runtime Enforcement runs where your agents already run, on AWS, Azure, GCP or a private environment, alongside your models and LLM gateways. Records can be forwarded to the guardrails, evaluation and observability tools you already use.
Next step
Need to stop actions, not just see them? How the layers work together