Protecto goes beyond PII masking. Built for AI and agentic workflows, it understands business context and masks or selectively unmasks sensitive data by policy across LLMs, agents, and MCP calls.
SOC 2 Type II · ISO 27001 · HIPAA, BAA available
Source text
Maya Shah renews in March with a 38% discount.
Protecto
UT Dallas and DataXpert found higher F1 than AWS Comprehend and Microsoft Presidio.
Recall across key PII and PHI categories
Semantic accuracy retained at Bank Muscat
Live enterprise tenants on Automation Anywhere’s agentic platform
A bank connects agents to contracts and case notes in English and Arabic. Pricing terms sit next to customer names, and the data must stay in its own environment.
Skyflow and Protecto both protect data in AI workflows. Teams looking for a Skyflow alternative choose Protecto for how finely policy applies, what it protects and where real values stay.
Policy applies by user, agent, task and tool, so models, agents, tool calls and MCP servers each see only what policy allows.
Protecto reads context to find and protect sensitive information beyond PII, including business-confidential content and text in languages such as Arabic.
You control where real values stay and where your data is processed.
An agent updates a renewal. The model works from tokens, and each tool gets only the real values your policy allows for that task.
Change the task and the access changes with it. Each reveal is logged.
Agent task
Pricing, deal terms and legal strategy can be sensitive because of their context, even when they contain no personal identifiers. Basic PII masking lets them through.
Protecto recognizes that context and applies the right policy for the user, the agent and the task.
“What should I know about this renewal?”
What the reader gets
DeepSight finds what is sensitive. Context-Based Access Control decides who can see it. The products below apply those decisions where your AI runs.
The agentic detection and classification engine in Protecto Vault. It finds sensitive data in unstructured text, and you can add custom entities in days.
Applies policy by user, agent and task, including business-confidential passages that entity masking misses.
Call it from your agents through LangChain, LlamaIndex or your own code. It also runs in data pipelines through a Snowflake UDF, Databricks, Kafka or Spark.
Combines hybrid search with protection during parsing, chunking and retrieval, so each reader sees only the real values they are allowed to see.
Puts masking in front of any model for staff chat, including uploads and tool calls.
Agents and models work from tokens. Real values stay in your environment when Protecto runs on-premises or in your private cloud.
SaaS is available too, with the same APIs.
Where can each one run?
The model reads <PERSON>VJYe 03W</PERSON>
Skyflow is a capable data privacy vault. Here is where the two match and where Protecto goes further, most of all in AI and agentic workflows.
| Capability | Protecto | Skyflow |
|---|---|---|
| Detection intelligence | ||
| Detection engine | Agentic detection and classification engine | Basic detection |
| Independent accuracy benchmark | 99%+ recall and higher F1 than AWS Comprehend and Microsoft Presidio (UT Dallas, DataXpert) | No |
| Custom entities | Yes. Advanced and context-based, added in days | Yes, regex-based |
| Unstructured text and business-confidential information | ||
| Business-confidential information beyond PII | Masks or rewrites passages by policy | Tokenizes personal and business identifiers. No passage-level policy |
| Context-preserving tokens | Yes, the best available. Links name variants to consistent tokens and keeps useful details such as phone area codes and email domains | Basic, using placeholders such as NAME_1 |
| Consistent, format-preserving tokens | Yes. The same value gets the same token in any session | Yes, configured per column in Skyflow’s vault |
| Anonymization | Yes, set per entity type in policy | De-identify and re-identify. No separate anonymization policy |
| PDF and other text files | Yes | Yes |
| AI and agentic workflows | ||
| Prompts, retrieved context and agents | Masks PII and business-confidential text at each step | Masks identifiers before the model and memory. No passage-level policy |
| RAG and retrieval | Protects data during parsing, chunking and retrieval, including across chunk boundaries. Policy decides what reaches the model | De-identifies documents before indexing and restores values in responses by policy |
| Tool calls and MCP | Controls which tools and MCP servers get which real data | Masks and restores values by role and agent identity. No per-tool policy |
| Policy by user, agent and task | Your application passes who is asking, which agent and what task | Policies per agent and per user. No task-level policy |
| Selective unmasking | By user, agent and task, with every reveal logged | Restores values by per-user policy |
| Real values during agent runs | Can stay in your own environment. External models only receive tokens | Held in a vault run by Skyflow by default |
| AI accuracy measure | 85% semantic accuracy retained at Bank Muscat | No |
| Employee AI chat | Privacy Gateway, open source, with AD and Okta groups | Glean integration for AI search. No chat gateway |
| Deployment and data control | ||
| On-premises | Yes, with upgrades under your control | No |
| Air-gapped | Yes | No |
| Private cloud | Runs in your private cloud | Private instance run by Skyflow. Bring your own cloud as a customization |
| SaaS | Yes | Yes, run by Skyflow |
| Data residency | Deploy on-premises or in your private cloud, under your control | Choose a hosted solution managed by Skyflow |
| Compliance and cost | ||
| SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 | Yes | Yes |
| HIPAA | Signs a BAA when it hosts, manages or can access your instance | Assessed and eligible |
| Audit logs | Logs each request and reveal, stored locally when self-hosted | Logs agent, data and policy |
| Multi-tenant policy | Policy and retention per tenant. 5,000+ tenants at Automation Anywhere | Yes |
| Cost | Much more affordable than Skyflow | By quote, based on data subjects protected |
Skyflow details are based on its public website and documentation, reviewed November 2026.
Run these against your own data and network rules. The answers separate products faster than a feature list.
01
Ask which tool or MCP server gets which real value, and who sees it at each step.
02
Use a real example, such as a discount or a legal note.
03
Ask which metric was measured, then test on your own documents.
04
Ask who operates it, who controls upgrades and where audit logs live.
05
Get a written quote based on your own data, not a sample.
“Protecto enabled us to deliver data security, privacy, and compliance for our AI features at scale across 5,000+ enterprise clients, strengthening customer trust in our AI automation solutions.”
Yes. Protecto protects more than identifiers and applies policy by user, agent, task and tool. Protecto also runs on-premises or in your private cloud. If payment card storage is your main need, Skyflow is built for that.
Business-confidential information such as pricing, deal terms and legal strategy. This text can be sensitive because of its context, even with no personal identifier in it. Protecto recognizes that context and applies your policy.
Protecto keeps the relationships a model needs. If a full name appears in one place and a first or last name in another, both link to consistent tokens. Protecto can also keep selected details your application needs, such as phone area codes or email domains. Fine-tuning parameters and system prompts help models read the tokens.
Yes. Secure RAG combines hybrid search with protection during parsing, chunking and retrieval, including sensitive data that spans chunk boundaries. Policy at retrieval decides what reaches the model. If you run your own RAG, Protecto’s asynchronous APIs mask documents as they are processed. Skyflow also de-identifies documents before indexing.
Yes. Skyflow describes runtime controls for agents, MCP support and policies per agent and per user. Protecto adds policy by task and by tool, protection for business-confidential information through Context-Based Access Control, and the option to keep real values in your own environment.
Yes. Protecto runs as SaaS, in a private cloud, on-premises or air-gapped, with the same APIs. Skyflow doesn’t offer on-premises or air-gapped deployment.
Protecto is much more affordable than Skyflow. Skyflow prices by quote, based on the number of data subjects protected. Book a demo to get a quote for your volume.
Yes, through Privacy Gateway. You keep each user’s masking and unmasking access in AD or Okta groups, and Gateway issues a Protecto auth key with that access at login. If you use Protecto Vault directly, it’s a headless API, so your team can build the integration around it.
Bring a sample prompt, document or tool call, and see what each user, agent and model receives.
