Comparison · Checked November 6, 2026
Govern what your agents do, not only the traffic they send. Start governing your agents today, free, then add enforcement and isolated execution, configured for your workflows. Kong governs the LLM, MCP and agent-to-agent traffic that passes through its gateway.
The differences that matter
Sentience
Kong says
Managed through Kong Konnect, self-hosted on your own infrastructure, or hybrid.
Sentience
Kong says
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.
Kong’s pages
Blocks, filters and fails over. 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.
Kong says
Tamper-evident audit trails of every agent-to-agent call; audit logging on Enterprise.
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.
Kong says
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.
Kong says
LLM calls from Claude Code, Codex CLI and Qwen Code CLI; MCP and agent-to-agent traffic; OpenAI, Anthropic, Azure AI, Amazon Bedrock and Gemini.
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-governorKong’s pages
30-day free trial. Plus from $25 per month plus usage; Enterprise custom pricing.
Kong AI Gateway 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 Kong 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 in the demo: Show this on our agent. Which of its actions never pass through the gateway?
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 Kong, 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 what agents do wherever you run them, on any cloud, a private environment or a developer's machine, including actions that never pass through a gateway: Sentience Governor is open source and runs locally beside your agents, and Runtime Enforcement and Secure Runtime are configured for your workflows. Kong AI Gateway governs LLM, MCP and agent-to-agent traffic that passes through it, with authentication, quotas, guardrails and logs. For teams evaluating alternatives to Kong AI Gateway, 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