Comparison · Checked November 6, 2026
Start governing your AI agents today, free. Sentience is one product that grows with you: governance you can run today, then enforcement and isolated execution, configured for your workflows, when you need them. Zenity starts with a demo.
The differences that matter
Sentience
Zenity says
Security and governance across SaaS agents, home-grown agent platforms and end-user devices, with a live inventory of agents.
Sentience
Zenity 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.
Zenity says
“Write policy to steer agents at the decision layer.”
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.
Zenity says
“Every boundary decision, allowed, blocked, or escalated” generates an auditable record of the agent, the action and the policy that fired.
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.
Zenity 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.
Zenity says
Copilot Studio, Salesforce Agentforce, ChatGPT Enterprise, AWS Bedrock, Google Vertex AI, coding agents and MCP connections; identity from Okta and Microsoft Entra.
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-governorZenity’s pages
No price on the pages we checked. Starts with a demo request.
Zenity 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 Zenity can be used together.
Same call, two approaches
The agent is declared to resolve support tickets, with refunds up to $100. Midway through a ticket, it calls the refund tool for $450.
Captured before dispatch, flagged as outside the declared scope, recorded locally.
Your policy book caps the refund at $100 and routes the rest to a person.
The ticket is resolved. The customer is told a manager will review the rest.
Ask in the demo: Show this on our agent. When the agent is redirected, who defines the new path, and does the run continue?
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 Zenity, 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 is one product you can start using today for free: Sentience Governor is open source and runs locally beside your agents, and Runtime Enforcement and Secure Runtime are configured for your workflows when you need to correct or stop actions. Zenity describes itself as an AI agent security platform that steers, blocks or shuts down agents, and starts with a demo request; its pages state no price. For teams evaluating alternatives to Zenity, Sentience can be tried today, free.
It depends on the action. Stopping is right for an attack. For most policy violations, such as a refund over a limit, the better outcome is a corrected action and a finished task. Runtime Enforcement follows your policy book and can correct, escalate or stop, configured per workflow. Sentience Governor keeps a local record of what happened.
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