Clawvisor vs. Cyera (2026): Data Layer, Credential Layer and the Overlap

Two claims in the 12 August 2026 version of this comparison are now wrong. Cyera no longer sits only on the data side: it closed a $1 billion purchase of an identity company on 3 September 2026. And Clawvisor is no longer "free and open source" in the plain sense: it sells a $120-a-month Pro plan and ships its code under the Elastic License 2.0.

The verdict survives, with a wider overlap. Clawvisor keeps an AI agent from ever holding the API keys it uses. Cyera decides which data an agent can reach and, since September, which agents may reach it. A team that buys one has not covered the other. Cyera Identity is the new part to watch.

This rewrite is dated 28 October 2026. Hokai read each price and announcement below on a vendor page that day, unless a line says otherwise.

Hokai diagram of where the two products sit and the narrow overlap since Cyera's identity purchase. Source: Clawvisor and Cyera pages and announcements, checked 28 October 2026.

What changed since the 12 August version

Five things moved. Each is dated and sourced in the list below.

• 3 September: Cyera completed its $1 billion Oasis Security purchase. Oasis becomes "Cyera Identity".
• 22 September: Goldman Sachs Alternatives added $400 million to Cyera's Series G. Cyera says it is valued at over $12 billion.
• 16 October: Cyera joined the Claude Marketplace, where customers can apply committed Anthropic spend.
• Clawvisor pricing: the cloud now lists a Free plan of 1,000 calls and Pro at $120 a month.
• Clawvisor licence: the source ships under the Elastic License 2.0, which is source-available, not open source.

One earlier claim is gone. The August text said Clawvisor was built by one person. Hokai could not re-confirm headcount from a primary page this run, so the claim is cut and listed under the gaps near the end.

The verdict up front

Pick Clawvisor if you are a small team giving an agent real access to Gmail, GitHub or Slack, and the risk that worries you is a key leaking out of an agent's memory or a .env file. You can run it yourself at no licence cost, or start on the free cloud plan. Teams that run Claude Code against shared repositories are the typical case.

The same question reaches GitHub Copilot users once an agent can push code on their behalf.

Pick Cyera if you run security at a company with a data-security budget, and the unanswered question is where sensitive data already lives before any agent goes near it. Its identity pillar now adds a second question: which non-human identities hold standing access to that data. The AI governance directory lists the wider set of tools in that buying conversation.

If you are not sure which describes you, the Smart Match tool asks a few questions about your stack and returns a shortlist from the same directory this page draws on.

The table is the short version. The sections below cover the numbers behind each cell and the two places where the products now touch.

What each one costs

Clawvisor publishes a price list. Cyera does not. That gap is the first practical difference between a tool you can trial this afternoon and one you reach through a sales call.

Clawvisor's pricing page, captured 28 October 2026.

A "protected call" is one request an agent makes through the gateway: sending an email, reading a calendar, opening a pull request.

Packs start at $50 for 2,000 calls. On the annual plan Pro works out to about $0.006 a call.

The largest pack, 20,000 calls, costs $350 after a 30% volume discount, or about $0.0175 a call. Clawvisor's Pro plan is the cheaper route for any steady use.

Self-hosting costs nothing in licence fees. The pricing page says the gateway has no seat caps and no call limits, and that you run it on your own infrastructure. The cloud plan adds longer log retention and org accounts.

The hidden cost of self-hosting is an LLM provider key. Clawvisor uses a model to verify each request's purpose and score its risk, so a self-hosted install still pays a model provider per check.

Cyera publishes no rate. For what an agent itself costs to run, see the personal AI agent cost guide. Its buying guide on Hokai explains what a deal typically includes. The one new commercial fact is the Claude Marketplace route: customers with an Anthropic spend commitment can apply part of it to Cyera, according to Cyera's 16 October announcement.

The August version quoted a market estimate of $2,000 per terabyte scanned and a $50,000 yearly minimum. Neither number comes from Cyera, and neither could be sourced again, so both are removed.

Clawvisor is the credential layer

Clawvisor's idea is that an agent should never see a raw credential. The agent names a service and an action. The gateway attaches the real token inside its own boundary, then strips it from the result.

A request moves through the gateway in five steps:

1. The agent declares a task, such as "draft one reply to this thread".
2. Clawvisor scores the task for risk.
3. A human approves it through the dashboard, a Telegram bot, or a push notification on a phone.
4. The gateway makes the call with the vaulted credential and logs it.
5. The task expires or is revoked, and the permission goes with it.

The agent is wired in by a skill that points it at the gateway on port 25297. There is no SDK and no change to the agent's own code, according to the Clawvisor FAQ.

The integrations page lists 14 service adapters. Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Drive, Google Contacts, GitHub, iMessage, Slack, Notion, Linear, Stripe, Twilio, Dropbox, Granola and Perplexity are live. SendGrid, Jira, Salesforce and Airtable are marked "soon".

Financial adapters such as Stripe are where a leaked key costs the most. Hokai lists a related Stripe Link agent wallet skill for the spending side.

Hokai keeps a separate page on what Clawvisor is actually for, and the same approval idea shows up in personal agent approval gates.

Cyera is the data layer, and now the identity layer

Cyera's own about page describes an agentless design that deploys in about five minutes and a classification engine it puts at 95% accuracy. Agentless means nothing is installed on the systems it scans.

That was the whole story in August. Since then Cyera has built out an agent story in three parts.

• Agent Guardian tracks tool calls, database queries and actions, and can intercept out-of-policy commands before they run.
• Cyera Endpoint extends visibility to local agents such as Claude Code and Cursor.
• Cyera Identity is the former Oasis platform, which governs which workloads and agents can reach which systems, for how long.

Cyera's pitch for the combination is that data and identity are the two inputs to every trust decision. Its September release says non-human identities inside Fortune 500 companies grew nearly 500% in six months. That is Cyera's figure, from its own announcement, and Hokai has not checked it.

Cyera's earlier RSAC 2026 additions still stand as described in August: Browser Shield for prompts leaving the browser, Data Lineage for tracing a file's path, and an MCP server for querying the data map from inside an assistant. This run did not reopen that launch post, so treat those three as the 12 August reading.

Where the two now overlap

The overlap is real but narrow. Both products now care about what an agent is allowed to do with a credential. They get there from opposite ends.

Clawvisor works at the moment of the call. It holds the secret, approves one task, injects the token, and logs it. The agent never has a standing grant to ride on.

Cyera Identity works on the estate of identities. It answers which service accounts and agents hold access today, whether they should, and how that access changes over time. Cyera's own release says a permission granted six months ago should not be trusted without a fresh check.

In practice the two can sit together. One governs the standing inventory, the other removes the standing grant for a specific agent. Neither release claims the other's job. The Clawvisor explainer covers the single-agent case in more depth.

Neither one watches the model itself

A third layer sits beside both: the model and the application running the agent. HiddenLayer describes its platform as four parts: AI discovery, AI supply chain security, AI attack simulation, and AI runtime security. Its use-case list includes model scanning, red teaming, guardrails, and agentic and MCP protection, which HiddenLayer's runtime layer addresses.

The August version said HiddenLayer scans "more than 35" model formats. That count is not on the current homepage, so it is removed rather than carried forward.

Dynamo AI sits in the same Hokai category, which you can browse in the AI security posture directory. The same category also lists Dynamo AI. A team that locks down credentials and data can still ship a model that was tampered with upstream. Pretending the stack has two layers would be an omission. More options sit in the AI security solutions directory.

Where Clawvisor wins

Take a four-person startup building an internal agent that reads support tickets from Gmail, files bugs in GitHub and posts a daily summary to Slack. There is no security budget line and no procurement process. Three services, one agent, one approver.

The free plan covers the trial, and Pro covers a team whose agent runs every day. At 20,000 calls a month, $120 is a rounding error next to one leaked token.

The task-based approval model also saves time. The founder reviews the scope once per task instead of clicking approve on every call.

Clawvisor is also the only one of the two you can read before you buy. The code is public, the setup is documented, and the install script sets up the daemon on your own machine. The README describes make setup and make run for a local start with SQLite.

Where Cyera wins

Take the opposite case: a healthcare company whose security team answers to HIPAA and SOC 2 auditors. Patient records sit across AWS, Microsoft 365 and an on-premises file share nobody has fully mapped in five years.

Adding agents to that environment without knowing where the sensitive files sit is the real emergency. A credential gateway does nothing to locate them. Cyera's agentless scanning was built for exactly this, at a price a four-person startup was never going to pay.

Cyera also now meets large buyers where they already spend. The Claude Marketplace listing lets an enterprise with an Anthropic commitment route the purchase through an existing contract.

Who should pick which

The two products answer different first questions. Use this list as a quick filter.

• Pick Clawvisor first if the agent already exists and the worry is its keys.
• Pick Cyera first if you cannot yet say where regulated data lives.
• Pick both if an auditor asks about data and a developer asks about tokens in the same quarter.
• Pick neither yet if the agent touches one service with one narrowly scoped key.

For a wider view of agents and their costs, see the best personal AI agents and how agent protocols work. Both explain the approval and access ideas from the buyer's side.

What data each one sees

Data handling decides which of these a regulated team can run at all.

On Clawvisor's managed cloud, credentials are stored encrypted and injected at call time, never shown to the agent or the model context. Self-hosted, the vault runs inside your network and Clawvisor says it never sees your traffic.

There is one detail to plan for. The purpose and risk checks call an LLM provider. Your own key powers them, so the request context goes to whichever provider you choose.

Cyera's design is the reverse: it reads your data stores directly and classifies what it finds. The data does not leave your environment in the way a prompt does, but the platform sees far more of it. A privacy review should start there, not with the credential question.

Sponsor spot open

The case for neither

The strongest objection to both: scope each agent's OAuth key narrowly at the provider itself, such as read-only Gmail or a single GitHub repository, and skip a broker entirely. For one service, that holds.

It stops working once an agent touches more than one service. Then you either hand-roll policy code for every integration or grant broad standing scopes "just in case". That is the credential sprawl Clawvisor exists to remove.

It also answers nothing for Cyera's question. A narrow key says nothing about where an organisation's sensitive data sits, or how many other service accounts can reach it.

What switching or stacking costs

Moving off Clawvisor is cheap. Self-hosted, you stop the daemon and rotate the credentials it held. On the cloud plan you rotate the same secrets and cancel the plan.

Leaving Cyera costs more, mostly in organisational terms. Months of classification and lineage data do not travel to a competitor, and the identity pillar now ties it to how access is reviewed.

Running both is the common outcome for a larger team. Clawvisor's free plan makes stacking it under a Cyera deployment close to free. For the tradeoffs of the whole category, the agent builders guide and the agentic AI roundup show where these tools plug in.

The risks that remain

Clawvisor's own README is blunt about it: the software "has not been audited for security", and the maintainers say not to use it as your sole safeguard for sensitive data or critical systems. The repository shows 761 commits as of 28 October 2026.

The licence is the second risk. The Elastic License 2.0 lets you run and modify the code, but it limits offering the software to others as a hosted service. It is not an OSI-approved open source licence, and a team with a strict open source policy should read it before adopting.

For Cyera the risk is financial and strategic. It told TechCrunch in June that it is spending faster than it earns, and since then it has taken on a $1 billion acquisition. The $400 million September extension lowers the near-term risk. Integrating a second platform is its own execution test.

Neither company has published a head-to-head comparison with the other, and Hokai has not run either product in production. The views here come from vendor documentation, not a hands-on benchmark.

Gaps in this version

• Clawvisor's team size is unverified this run, so the August "one person" claim is cut.
• Cyera's RSAC 2026 launch details, ARR figure and certifications were not reopened and carry the 12 August reading.
• Neither vendor publishes an independent security audit that Hokai could read.
• Cyera Identity's feature list is described only at the level of Cyera's press release.

What would change this verdict

Watch two things. If Cyera Identity grows a per-task credential injection feature, the overlap with Clawvisor stops being narrow, and the "both" advice would change to "Cyera alone" for large buyers.

If Clawvisor publishes an independent security audit, the strongest reason for a cautious team to wait disappears. Either event would date this page faster than any price change.

Frequently asked questions

Are Clawvisor and Cyera direct competitors?

Not mostly. Clawvisor keeps credentials away from agents and approves each task, while Cyera finds sensitive data and, since its September 2026 Oasis purchase, governs non-human identities. They now overlap on agent access, but a team can reasonably run both.

How much does Clawvisor cost?

Clawvisor lists a Free plan with 1,000 protected calls a month and Pro at $120 a month on annual billing, or $150 monthly, for 20,000 calls. Extra calls cost $0.025 each in packs. The source is also self-hostable under the Elastic License 2.0.

What does Cyera cost?

Cyera publishes no price list, so quotes come from sales. Since 16 October 2026 its AI security platform is also in the Claude Marketplace, where customers with an Anthropic spend commitment can apply part of it to a Cyera purchase.

Is Clawvisor open source?

Its code is public but licensed under the Elastic License 2.0, which is source-available rather than OSI-approved open source. You can run and modify it, but the licence limits offering it to others as a hosted service. Check the licence text against your policy.

Is Clawvisor safe to run in production?

Its README says it has not been audited for security and should not be the sole safeguard for sensitive systems. That makes it a fit for testing and low-risk agents today. Teams with regulated data should add a second control and watch for an independent audit.

Covered in this guide

• clawvisor: Open-source authorization gateway for AI agents that vaults credentials and enforces purpose-based access control. YC Spring 2026-backed, free cloud trial.
• cyera: AI data security platform for enterprises: agentless DSPM, AI-SPM, and DLP at 95%+ classification precision across cloud and on-premises data stores.
• anthropic: Anthropic is a Public Benefit Corporation started by 7 ex-OpenAI researchers. It builds the Claude model family and counts Amazon and Google among its largest backers.
• cursor: Cursor is an AI code editor built on VS Code, widely adopted across large enterprise engineering teams, with Agent Mode, Tab completion, and Cloud Agents.
• dynamo-ai: Enterprise AI guardrail platform whose AgentWarden cut a tested MCP deployment's attack surface by 97% in under 5 minutes.
• github-copilot: GitHub's AI coding assistant with agent mode, Copilot Fusion model routing and MCP support across 6 IDEs, plus a free plan with no credit card required.
• hiddenlayer: AI security platform that scans 35+ ML model formats for backdoors, blocks runtime prompt injection, and tracks agentic AI behavior. SOC 2 Type II certified.
• stripe-link-agent-wallet: Stripe's Link Agent Wallet lets an agent pay online with one-time-use credentials you approve, in three credential types, for US and Canadian customers.

Sources