If you are researching Formal.ai alternatives, you have probably noticed the search results are unhelpful — most of them are about form builders and sales compensation software. This page is about the security company: Formal.ai, the protocol-aware proxy that sits inline between identities and data stores.
Formal is a good product for a specific problem. It is not the right product for every problem that gets described as "securing AI agent access," and the alternatives differ from it more than they resemble it. Some compete on data-layer masking. Some compete on identity and authorization. Only a few overlap meaningfully with both.
This guide compares six options across licensing, enforcement layer, deployment model, and pricing transparency, with a clear statement of which buyer each one fits. It is written by the team behind Pomerium, one of the six. We have tried to be accurate about where the others are stronger, because a comparison that is not accurate is not useful to anyone evaluating.
Product details reflect public documentation as of September 2026.
The main Formal.ai alternatives are Pomerium for open-source agent and identity-based access control, StrongDM for credential-free infrastructure access, Teleport for certificate-based infrastructure access, Varonis DAM for enterprise database activity monitoring, and Cloudflare Access for ZTNA-first environments.
Formal.ai does two jobs that buyers often conflate:
Access control — deciding whether an identity may reach a resource at all.
Payload governance — deciding what a permitted query is allowed to return, by masking columns, filtering rows, or rewriting the query inline.
Most tools in this space do one of these well and the other poorly or not at all. Before comparing vendors, work out which of the two is your actual requirement — our explainer on data-layer vs identity-aware proxies covers the architectural distinction in detail. If your risk register says "an agent could exfiltrate the customer table," that is usually an access problem wearing a data problem's clothes — the agent should not have reached that database.
If it genuinely says "our analysts need production access but must never see unmasked SSNs," that is a payload problem and the shortlist is different.
Tool | Layer | License | Self-hosted control plane | Public pricing | Best for |
Formal.ai | Data / wire protocol | Proprietary | No (hosted management plane) | No | Column masking across many database protocols |
Pomerium | Context / application | Apache 2.0 | Yes | Yes | Agent and human access control, MCP, regulated environments |
StrongDM | Infrastructure access | Proprietary | No | Partial | Credential-free access with session recording |
Teleport | Infrastructure access | Open core (AGPL / proprietary) | Yes (community) | Partial | Certificate-based SSH and Kubernetes access |
Varonis DAM | Data / database activity | Proprietary | No | No | Enterprise DAM replacing Imperva or Guardium |
Cloudflare Access | Network / application | Proprietary | No | Yes | Teams already standardized on Cloudflare |
Best for: teams that need every AI agent action tied to a verified human identity, across an access surface that is larger than databases.
Pomerium is an open-source identity-aware proxy released under Apache 2.0. It authorizes every individual request against context — identity, group, device posture, time, origin, request path, session claims — rather than establishing trust once at a tunnel and letting traffic through.
For agentic deployments, its distinguishing control is identity provenance. Pomerium binds an agent's actions to the verified human identity that authorized them, producing an auditable delegation chain. Wire-protocol proxies see an authenticated connection; they cannot see who consented to it, because that information is not in the protocol.
Where it is stronger than Formal.ai: full source availability, a self-hostable control plane with no vendor service inline on production traffic, one policy model spanning web apps, Kubernetes, SSH, internal services and MCP servers, published pricing, and a free tier you can test without contacting sales. That deployment model is what makes it viable in government and other environments where a vendor-operated control plane is disqualifying.
Where Formal is stronger: Pomerium does not parse SQL or mask columns. If inline payload rewriting is a hard requirement, Pomerium does not replace that control.
Pricing: free and open source; published pricing for the managed Pomerium Zero control plane.
Best for: column-level data masking enforced inline across a heterogeneous fleet of databases.
Formal is a single stateless Go binary deployed in the customer's VPC that natively parses more than fifteen wire protocols, including Postgres, MySQL, MongoDB, Snowflake, SSH, Kubernetes, HTTP, and MCP. Policies are written in Rego and evaluated at session, request, and response stages, with nine inline actions available: allow, block, mask, filter, rewrite, quarantine, suspend, MFA, and impersonate.
Two features are worth noting even if you buy something else. Policy backtesting lets you evaluate a proposed policy against up to 31 days of historical logs before enforcing it, which meaningfully de-risks rolling out an inline proxy. And the breadth of response-path actions is wider than most competitors offer.
For a direct technical comparison of Formal against an identity-layer proxy, see Pomerium vs Formal.
Limitations to weigh: the product is closed source, the management plane is a hosted service, and pricing is not published — every call to action routes to a demo request. As of September 2026 we found no public sector offering listed on their site, which matters if you are in government or defense.
Best for: eliminating standing credentials for engineers accessing databases and servers, with session recording for audit.
StrongDM operates in the dynamic access management category as a control plane for managing and monitoring access to databases, servers, and Kubernetes clusters. Its distinguishing strength is session recording for TCP-based services — a CCTV-style record of what was actually done in a session, which auditors tend to like.
Where it beats Formal.ai: a longer operating history, a more mature enterprise access management story, and stronger just-in-time credential workflows.
Where Formal.ai beats it: StrongDM controls and records access rather than rewriting query payloads. It does not do inline column masking the way Formal does.
Where Pomerium differs: StrongDM is proprietary with a vendor-hosted control plane. See our StrongDM comparison for detail.
Best for: replacing SSH keys with short-lived certificates across servers and Kubernetes clusters.
Teleport is an infrastructure access platform built around a certificate authority. Rather than proxying and inspecting protocol payloads, it issues short-lived certificates so that credentials expire rather than accumulating. It has an open-source community edition alongside a commercial offering.
Where it beats Formal.ai: it eliminates long-lived credentials structurally rather than governing what those credentials can see, and the open-core model gives you more visibility than a closed binary.
Where Formal.ai beats it: no data masking, no query-level policy, and a narrower protocol surface on the data side.
Where Pomerium differs: Teleport focuses on infrastructure access; Pomerium focuses on context-aware authorization for applications, services, and agents. Many organizations run both. See our Teleport comparison.
Best for: enterprises replacing legacy database activity monitoring from Imperva or IBM Guardium.
Cyral was frequently named alongside Formal as a data-layer proxy competitor. It no longer exists independently — Varonis acquired Cyral in March 2025 and now sells the technology as next-generation database activity monitoring inside its broader data security platform.
If you see Cyral on a competitive matrix or in an older comparison article, that is why. The agentless, stateless interception approach survives inside Varonis.
Where it beats Formal.ai: it arrives as part of a mature, publicly traded data security platform with discovery and classification for unstructured data alongside structured.
Where Formal.ai beats it: Formal.ai is purpose-built for the agent and MCP use case and moves considerably faster on it. Varonis is an enterprise platform purchase with the procurement cycle to match.
Best for: organizations already routing traffic through Cloudflare that want application-level access control without another vendor.
Cloudflare Access is Cloudflare's zero trust network access offering, positioned primarily as a VPN replacement for self-hosted, SaaS, and non-web applications.
Where it beats Formal.ai: breadth of edge network, simplicity for teams already inside the Cloudflare ecosystem, and published pricing.
Where Formal.ai beats it: no data-layer inspection at all. Cloudflare Access governs reachability and authentication, not query contents.
Where Pomerium differs: Pomerium runs in your own infrastructure and decrypts and inspects traffic there rather than at a vendor's edge, which matters when data residency or sovereignty is a requirement. See our Cloudflare Access comparison.
The forcing function is the volume of non-human access.
Palo Alto Networks reports that, based on responses from 2,930 cybersecurity decision-makers for its 2026 Identity Security Landscape report, organizations manage an average of 109 machine identities for every human identity, of which 79 are AI agents — and that 90% suffered an identity-related breach in the past twelve months. Machine identities are projected to grow 77% over the following year while AI agent identities grow 85%, per Help Net Security's coverage.
Published machine-to-human ratios vary considerably between vendors, so treat the specific figure as directional.
Agents add a failure mode that service accounts never had: their behavior is shaped by text they read at runtime. CVE-2025-6514, a vulnerability in the widely used mcp-remote client, scored 9.6 (Critical) on CVSS and allowed an untrusted MCP server to trigger OS command execution on the connecting machine across versions 0.0.5 through 0.1.15.
Every vendor on this list is selling into that gap. They are filling different parts of it.
If your requirement is column-level masking across many database protocols, Formal.ai is the most direct answer and you should evaluate it.
If your requirement is controlling what AI agents can do and proving who authorized them, Pomerium is the stronger fit, and it is the only fully open-source option on this list.
If your requirement is eliminating standing credentials for engineers, look at StrongDM or Teleport before either of the above.
If you are replacing legacy DAM in a large enterprise, Varonis is the platform play.
If you are already all-in on Cloudflare, Access is the lowest-friction starting point, with the understanding that it does not touch the data layer.
A practical sequencing note: access control is the prerequisite for payload governance, not the reverse. Masking a column for an agent that should never have had a database session is a second line of defense protecting a failure that already happened.
Vendor demos in this space look similar because everyone shows a blocked query. These questions produce different answers across products and surface the architectural differences that matter:
Where does the agent's identity come from? If the agent presents a static credential, the audit log cannot tell you which human's request caused an action. Ask to see the log entry for an agent action and check whether a user appears in it.
What happens to my traffic if your control plane is unreachable? Fail-open and fail-closed are both defensible answers. Not knowing which one you get is not.
Can I read the source of the thing sitting inline on production? Open source, source-available under a commercial license, and closed binary are three different risk positions. Only one of them survives most government reviews.
What are p50 and p99 latency on a workload like mine? Vendor benchmarks run on vendor workloads. Ask for the methodology, then run your own.
Can I test a policy before enforcing it? Backtesting against historical traffic is the single best predictor of whether a rollout breaks production. Formal does this well; ask everyone else how they handle it.
What does this cost at our scale, in writing? Two vendors on this list publish pricing. For the others, get the number in a document before the evaluation consumes a quarter.
Which of these controls is preventive and which is detective? Some products in this category monitor and alert rather than block. Both have value, but only one stops the action, and the marketing does not always distinguish.
Security lead at an AI-native startup running agents in production. The urgent requirement is knowing which human authorized an agent action when something goes wrong, across a surface that includes internal apps and MCP servers rather than just databases. Pomerium fits; a data-layer proxy will record the query but not the authority behind it.
Data platform owner at a regulated healthcare or fintech company. The requirement is field-level masking enforced without touching application code, with evidence for an auditor. Formal is the most direct fit, with Varonis as the enterprise-platform alternative if you are already replacing legacy DAM.
Infrastructure team eliminating standing SSH and database credentials. Neither masking nor MCP is the priority; the goal is that credentials expire. Teleport's certificate model or StrongDM's just-in-time access solves this, as does Pomerium’s clientless, native SSH access with session recording, monitoring and revocation functionality all built in.
Public sector integrator or defense contractor. Deployment model decides this before features do. Self-hosted, source-available, no vendor control plane in the request path narrows the list to Pomerium and Teleport's community edition.
Is there a free or open source alternative to Formal.ai? Pomerium is the main open-source alternative, released under Apache 2.0 and fully self-hostable including the control plane. Teleport offers an open-core community edition for infrastructure access. Formal itself is closed source, with a hosted management plane.
How much does Formal.ai cost? Formal does not publish pricing. All calls to action on its website route to a demo request, so cost is determined through a sales process. Among the alternatives listed here, Pomerium and Cloudflare Access publish pricing.
Who are Formal.ai's main competitors? On the data layer, Varonis (which acquired Cyral in 2025), Satori, and Immuta. On the access and identity layer, Pomerium, StrongDM, and Teleport. Formal's repositioning toward AI agent governance has moved it into competition with identity-layer proxies it did not previously overlap with.
What happened to Cyral? Varonis acquired Cyral in March 2025 and integrated the technology into its data security platform as next-generation database activity monitoring. Cyral no longer operates as an independent company, though it still appears on older competitive comparisons.
Can one tool cover both access control and data masking? Not cleanly today. Formal is closest on the data side and does have access controls; Pomerium is closest on the identity side and does not mask payloads. Teams with both requirements commonly deploy an identity-aware proxy for access decisions and a data-layer tool for payload governance.
Which alternative works in federal or air-gapped environments? Pomerium and Teleport's community edition are self-hostable without a vendor control plane inline on production traffic, which is typically a requirement in government deployments. Formal, StrongDM, Varonis, and Cloudflare Access each rely on vendor-operated management infrastructure.
Whichever vendor you end up with, the first question is which layer your actual risk lives at. If the answer is "an agent is doing things nobody authorized," that is an identity and authorization problem, and you can test the solution today without a sales call.
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