Best AI Agents Management Platforms in 2026: Ops & Registry Compared
Managing AI agents is four jobs, not one: build them, deploy them, operate them and account for every one of them in a single registry. This guide compares seven platforms across all four — and is explicit that the vendor who builds agents best is rarely the vendor who runs a whole estate of them best.
Umberto MalesciCEO & Co-Founder, KosmoyBy mid-2026 most enterprises are not asking whether to build AI agents — they already have, on several platforms at once. The management problem is the one that followed: agents built in Copilot Studio, Salesforce, Vertex and LangGraph, plus a tail of homegrown crews, all running with real permissions and no single owner. This guide compares seven platforms across the full lifecycle a management team owns — build, deploy, operate, govern — rather than any one slice of it.
There is no single winner, because the four jobs pull in different directions. The strongest agent builders (Salesforce Agentforce, Google Vertex AI Agent Builder, CrewAI, LangSmith) are where agents get made and shipped fastest; a first-party control plane (Microsoft Agent 365) governs the agents inside its own estate with the least integration work; a governance suite (Credo AI) keeps the program of record; and one platform (Kosmoy) treats managing a cross-vendor agent estate — inventory, containment, evidence — as the product. Entries are grouped by the buyer they fit, and every competitor claim is cited to that vendor's own material.
One clarification up front. This guide is the management view, and includes the builders. Our companion best AI agent governance platforms guide answers the narrower control-and-secure question — discovery, agent identity, runtime security and, rarely, containment — and weighs security specialists (Zenity, Noma, WitnessAI, Cisco) this page does not. If your problem is 'a compromised agent must not reach anything we did not allow', start there; if it is 'we build agents in four places and cannot see, cost, contain or attest to them as one estate', start here.
What changed in this update (August 16, 2026): the roster grew from seven to eleven — ServiceNow AI Control Tower and SAP AI Agent Hub for the inventory-and-govern job, AWS Bedrock AgentCore for build-and-run with real isolation, and Databricks Unity AI Gateway for agent/MCP governance inside a Databricks estate. Existing vendors' scores are unchanged.
What counts as AI agents management platforms in 2026
An AI agents management platform helps with four jobs across an agent's life. Build — author agents, wire tools and orchestrate multi-agent workflows. Deploy — ship them to a production runtime with durable execution, identity and credentials. Operate — trace behavior, track cost and usage, evaluate quality. Register and control — inventory every agent with an owner, enforce policy at runtime, contain the ones that act, and produce audit evidence. Few products are strong at all four; most are excellent at one or two and thin on the rest. The category splits along a fault line: builder platforms (Agentforce, Vertex AI Agent Builder, CrewAI, LangSmith) are organized around making agents and cover mainly the agents built on them, while estate platforms manage agents wherever they were built — a cross-vendor registry, policy that applies to third-party agents, evidence over the whole fleet. Microsoft Agent 365 is the estate platform for the Microsoft world; Credo AI is the estate's governance program of record; Kosmoy is the vendor-neutral, self-hosted one.
The rarest capability is genuine containment — not monitoring an agent or revoking a permission after the fact, but running it inside an isolated runtime it cannot escape, with a live kill switch. Builder platforms increasingly ship code-execution sandboxes (LangSmith Sandboxes, Vertex's Code Execution sandbox), but those isolate the agent's code, not its reach into your systems. This guide scores building and containment on separate axes because a platform can be world-class at one and absent on the other — and what building depth never buys you is a picture of the agents your colleagues built elsewhere, or the ability to hold one when it misbehaves.
How we scored the field
Every product is scored 0–10 on the same ten capability axes. A 10 is reserved for categorical architectural facts; specialists are expected to outscore platforms on their own spoke, and the scores show it.
Agent Building
Can teams author, orchestrate and ship agents on the platform itself? The builders lead here by design.
AI Inventory & Discovery
Can the platform enumerate every agent in the organization — including agents built on other platforms and shadow agents — in one registry with owners? Scored across vendors, not just the platform's own agents.
Observability & FinOps
Execution tracing, tool-call visibility, quality signals and cost/usage attribution per agent — the operate job, distinct from security alerting.
Gateway & Policy Control
A runtime enforcement point on agent, LLM and MCP traffic — policy and budgets applied in-path — and whether it governs traffic from agents built elsewhere.
Guardrails & Runtime Safety
In-line blocking of prompt injection, PII leakage and unauthorized actions at runtime — controls that stop a request, not ones that only log it.
Agent Containment
Scored strictly: sandboxed execution with default-deny egress, scoped credentials and a kill switch. Code-execution sandboxes earn partial credit; permission scoping and monitoring score lower.
Compliance & Audit
Audit-ready evidence of agent governance mapped to frameworks (EU AI Act, ISO/IEC 42001, NIST AI RMF), scored above the vendor's own SOC 2 certificate.
Security & Shadow AI
Agent-level identity and credentials, least-privilege posture, and discovery of unsanctioned or shadow agents.
Testing, Evals & Red-teaming
Pre-deployment testing, evaluation and red-teaming of agents — native suites with adversarial testing score high; ad-hoc checks score low.
Deployment Sovereignty
Where the management plane runs. Single-cloud SaaS scores low; self-hosted and air-gap-capable score high; 10 is reserved for no vendor control plane at all.
The field, scored
| Capability (0–10) | Kosmoy | Microsoft Agent 365 (Entra Agent ID · Foundry · Purview) | ServiceNow AI Control Tower | Amazon Bedrock | Salesforce Agentforce | SAP AI Agent Hub (delivered inside SAP LeanIX) | Google Vertex AI Agent Builder | Databricks Unity AI Gateway | LangSmith (LangChain) | CrewAI | Credo AI |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| AI Inventory & Discovery | 9 | 9 | 9 | 3 | 2 | 7 | 3 | 5 | 2 | 1 | 8 |
| Security & Shadow AI | 8 | 9 | 8 | 5 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 5 | 3 | 2 | 3 |
| Observability & FinOps | 7 | 7 | 7 | 7 | 8 | 2 | 8 | 8 | 9 | 5 | 3 |
| Gateway & Policy Control | 8 | 6 | 6 | 6 | 3 | 3 | 3 | 8 | 5 | 2 | 1 |
| Guardrails & Runtime Safety | 8 | 8 | 7 | 8 | 7 | 2 | 7 | 8 | 4 | 4 | 1 |
| Agent Containment | 9 | 7 | 6 | 8 | 4 | 2 | 5 | 5 | 7 | 3 | 1 |
| Compliance & Audit | 9 | 7 | 9 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 4 | 5 | 4 | 3 | 9 |
| Testing, Evals & Red-teaming | 7 | 7 | 5 | 7 | 7 | 1 | 7 | 4 | 9 | 3 | 4 |
| Agent Building | 6 | 9 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 6 | 9 | 2 | 9 | 9 | 0 |
| Deployment Sovereignty | 10 | 5 | 5 | 3 | 2 | 3 | 6 | 3 | 9 | 7 | 2 |
Bold marks the highest score on each row. 10 is reserved for categorical architectural facts; specialists are expected to outscore platforms on their own spoke.
Capability shape, vendor by vendor
Each panel shows one vendor across the same ten axes. Read it as area: a specialist climbs on its own spoke and falls away on the rest; a platform holds the frontier. The dashed outline is Kosmoy for reference.
From point tool to control plane
See the full enterprise AI management platform.
Inventory, observe, govern and contain models, agents and AI applications through one platform in your own infrastructure.
The vendors, by buyer type
No single 1-to-N ranking survives contact with a real shortlist — the right pick depends on who is buying. Each vendor below is labeled with the buyer it fits best.
Kosmoy
AI management platformManage, contain and govern agents built anywhere — in your own infrastructure
A self-hosted control plane for enterprise AI: one inventory, one policy gateway, one audit trail and a containment sandbox for every model, agent and MCP server a company runs.
Kosmoy is the estate platform on this list: it manages agents wherever they were built rather than building them itself. Its master agent registry harvests agent inventories from Azure AI Foundry, AWS Bedrock, Google Vertex AI, Salesforce and ServiceNow into one list, flagging the unmatched as shadow AI; agent traffic can be routed through one OpenAI-compatible gateway with RBAC, in-path guardrails and budgets; and each agent, MCP server or private model can run inside an Action Capsule — a kernel-enforced sandbox (namespaces, cgroups v2, Seccomp, Landlock) whose only egress is its paired gateway, with per-task credentials and a live kill switch. EU AI Act, ISO/IEC 42001 (aligned, not certified) and NIST AI RMF evidence come from the same event log.
It runs single-tenant in the customer's own Kubernetes, air-gap capable, with no vendor control plane — Italy's central bank and banking regulator and Europe's largest defence and aerospace group run it in production, and S&P Global initiated analyst coverage in March 2026. The honest concessions are on building: the no-code Agent Builder is shallower than the dedicated builders here, its evaluation and red-teaming suite (new in 2026) scores a 7 but trails the pure-play specialists, and there is no free tier. Teams build agents in Agentforce, Vertex, CrewAI or LangGraph and manage the resulting estate in Kosmoy.
Strengths
- Four registries — AI systems, models, MCP servers and a master agent registry that pulls agents from Azure AI Foundry, Bedrock, Vertex, Salesforce and ServiceNow into one list.
- One OpenAI-compatible gateway enforcing guardrails, RBAC, budgets and logging on every LLM, MCP and A2A call.
- Action Capsule: kernel-enforced sandboxing for agents, MCP servers and private models, with per-task credentials and a kill switch.
Limits
- Evaluation and red teaming shipped in mid-2026 — the suite is comprehensive but newer than the pure-play eval platforms, which still lead on experiment tracking, annotation queues and prompt playgrounds.
- The agent builder covers governed internal use cases; dedicated agent-development platforms go deeper.
- No free or self-service tier — procurement runs through an enterprise sales process.
Microsoft Agent 365 (Entra Agent ID · Foundry · Purview)
First-party agent governance control plane (identity, data security, threat protection)Managing and governing agents across a Microsoft-standardized estate
Microsoft's agent-governance stack — Agent 365 (control plane and registry, GA May 2026) over Entra Agent ID identities, Microsoft Foundry guardrails and evals, Purview data security and Defender threat protection — governs agents across the Microsoft estate and, increasingly, third-party stacks.
Microsoft Agent 365, generally available since May 1, 2026, is the estate control plane for the Microsoft world. Agents built in Copilot Studio and Microsoft Foundry receive Entra Agent ID identities automatically, and the Agent 365 registry inherits the tenant directory, so the fleet is inventoried without a separate intake step. Defender discovers 25+ local agent and MCP-server types on endpoints, Purview extends DLP, audit and insider-risk machinery to agent interactions, and Foundry adds guardrails, evaluations and tracing. Reports at GA describe support for agents built on AWS Bedrock and Google Vertex AI (Microsoft).
For a Microsoft-committed enterprise this is the least-integration-work answer, and Microsoft is also one of the strongest agent builders here. The limits: third-party coverage is newer and partly preview, the governance plane is Microsoft-cloud SaaS with no self-hosted or air-gapped option, containment is quarantine and policy blocking rather than a sandboxed runtime, and there is no cross-vendor LLM gateway with model routing.
Strengths
- The only vendor where agent identity is native to the enterprise directory: agents built in Copilot Studio and Microsoft Foundry automatically receive Entra Agent ID identities with conditional access and lifecycle governance.
- Agent 365 (GA May 1, 2026) unifies registry, access control, fleet observability and security over the agent estate, and per reports extends to agents built on AWS Bedrock and Google Vertex AI.
- Deep shadow-agent discovery across endpoints and network: Defender finds 25+ local agent and MCP-server types on Windows/macOS, and Entra detects unknown AI apps at the network layer (GA March 2026) (secure agentic AI end-to-end).
Limits
- Governance depth is strongest for Microsoft-built agents; third-party coverage (Bedrock, Vertex, LangChain/CrewAI) is newer, partial, and in places preview-only as of July 15, 2026.
- Requires the Microsoft cloud estate — no self-hosted or air-gapped governance plane — with capabilities spread across multiple SKUs (Agent 365, Purview, Entra, Defender, Azure).
- No general sandboxed execution environment for agents: containment levers are quarantine, conditional access and policy-based blocking (some still in preview).
ServiceNow AI Control Tower
Enterprise AI governance command center on the ServiceNow AI Platform (discover, observe, govern, secure, measure) with an AI Gateway for MCP and agent trafficEstate-wide agent inventory and governance from inside the CMDB
ServiceNow's centralized governance layer that discovers, observes, governs, secures and measures AI agents, models, prompts and datasets across ServiceNow and third-party systems — with runtime traces from the Traceloop acquisition, agent kill switches, and compliance content packs. Named a Leader in the June 2026 Gartner Magic Quadrant for AI Governance Platforms.
ServiceNow AI Control Tower does the inventory-and-govern job at estate scale: roughly 30 discovery integrations pull agents, models, prompts and datasets from AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, SAP, Oracle and Workday into the platform where change, risk and workflow already live (press release). The Traceloop acquisition traces every LLM call and agent reasoning step, Knowledge 2026 added deviation detection with automatic blocking and per-agent kill switches, and its AI Gateway proxies MCP connections with OAuth 2.1 validation and instant deactivation. A Leader in the June 2026 Gartner MQ for AI Governance Platforms.
It does the govern job, not build or contain: the platform requirement is a per-quote ServiceNow commitment; the AI Gateway is MCP-scoped rather than a universal LLM proxy; containment is kill-switch-based with no sandboxed execution documented as of August 16, 2026; and its view of AI spend across heterogeneous stacks drew public press criticism.
Strengths
- Cross-vendor AI discovery at estate scale: roughly 30 enterprise integrations — AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, SAP, Oracle, Workday and more — inventorying agents, models, prompts and datasets (expansion press release).
- A real enforcement point for agentic traffic: the AI Gateway proxies MCP-server connections with OAuth 2.1 token validation, central policy enforcement and instant deactivation of MCP servers (AI Gateway overview).
- Runtime LLM and agent observability from the Traceloop (OpenLLMetry) acquisition — every LLM call tracked, agent reasoning traces, evaluation automation (Traceloop announcement).
Limits
- Requires the ServiceNow platform: governance value is tied to a per-quote platform commitment, with no standalone lightweight SKU and no public pricing as of August 16, 2026.
- Runtime enforcement is strongest for ServiceNow-hosted agents and MCP traffic routed through its AI Gateway — it does not document sitting inline as a universal proxy for third-party LLM API calls made outside ServiceNow (discovery integrations cover those instead).
- Containment is kill-switch and deactivation based: does not document sandboxed execution environments for agents as of August 16, 2026.
Amazon Bedrock
Managed foundation-model and agent platform (hyperscaler AI service) on AWS — model access, Guardrails, Agents/AgentCore, Knowledge Bases and evaluationsThe build-and-run stack with real per-session isolation
AWS's fully managed service for building generative-AI applications and agents, providing single-API access to foundation models from many providers plus Bedrock Guardrails, Bedrock Agents and the AgentCore agent runtime, managed Knowledge Bases and model/agent evaluations.
Amazon Bedrock's AgentCore stack does the deploy-and-operate job at AWS scale — and its containment is genuine architecture, not policy: AgentCore Runtime isolates every user session in its own Firecracker microVM, sanitizing memory on termination, backed by a scoped-token identity vault (isolated sessions). The stack matured through 2026 (Harness GA, Managed Knowledge Base, Web Search), Bedrock Guardrails add Automated Reasoning checks that formally verify factual claims, and the managed model catalog spans a dozen providers under one API.
The inventory job stops at the account boundary: visibility is IAM- and CloudTrail-scoped, with no cross-platform agent registry or shadow-AI discovery. It is AWS-only — sovereignty is limited to region choice and GovCloud — and it does not document EU AI Act, ISO/IEC 42001 or NIST AI RMF evidence tooling as of August 16, 2026; governance is assembled from primitives.
Strengths
- Broad managed model catalog under one API and set of controls — models from AI21, Anthropic, Cohere, DeepSeek, Luma, Meta, Mistral, OpenAI, Qwen, Stability, TwelveLabs, Writer and Amazon Nova (supported models).
- Differentiated runtime guardrails: six safeguard types including Automated Reasoning checks that use formal logic to prevent factual errors, plus content, denied-topic, PII and contextual-grounding filters (Bedrock Guardrails).
- Category-leading agent containment: AgentCore Runtime isolates each user session in its own Firecracker microVM with isolated compute, memory and filesystem, sanitizing memory on termination, backed by the AgentCore Identity scoped-token vault (isolated sessions).
Limits
- Single-cloud lock-in: Bedrock is an AWS-only managed service with no self-hosted, customer-VPC, on-prem or air-gapped deployment target documented as of July 15, 2026, so deployment sovereignty is inherently low and the data path is AWS-bound.
- No org-wide AI inventory or shadow-AI discovery: visibility is AWS-account-scoped via IAM and CloudTrail, not an enterprise registry of AI systems, agents and MCP servers or detection of unsanctioned AI use across the org.
- No dedicated AI-governance/compliance workflow suite: infrastructure certifications exist, but there is no built-in EU AI Act / ISO 42001 / NIST AI RMF risk-classification, model-documentation or audit-evidence tooling as of July 15, 2026 — governance is assembled from primitives.
Salesforce Agentforce
Enterprise AI agent platform — build, deploy, observe and govern AI agents on the Salesforce (Agentforce 360) platformBuilding and operating customer- and employee-facing agents on Salesforce data
Salesforce Agentforce is Salesforce's platform for building, deploying, observing and governing AI agents that run on the Salesforce platform and act on CRM and connected enterprise data.
Salesforce Agentforce is a builder-first platform for agents grounded in CRM and connected data. Agentforce Builder (low-code, one-click simulation) plus the Agent Script scripting language make it one of the strongest building experiences here, and its operate story is genuinely good: Command Center rolls up agent activity with OpenTelemetry session tracing in Data Cloud that exports to Datadog, Splunk and New Relic. The Einstein Trust Layer adds runtime guardrails (PII/PCI masking, toxicity scanning, prompt-injection defense), and Testing Center runs synthetic tests as CI/CD gates that can block a deployment (Salesforce).
The management ceiling is scope: it governs and observes only agents built on the Salesforce platform, documents no cross-vendor inventory or shadow-AI discovery, and is SaaS-only on Hyperforce — the EU Operating Zone gives data residency, not a customer-controlled data path. Salesforce holds an ISO/IEC 42001 certification covering Agentforce, but EU AI Act support is guidance-level and there is no documented production kill switch or runtime sandbox.
Strengths
- Category-leading agent building: the low-code Agentforce Builder (conversational, one-click simulation) plus Agent Script for deterministic, code-like control of agent behavior (Agentforce 360 features).
- Native, standards-based observability: Command Center with OpenTelemetry session tracing in Data Cloud, health monitoring and consumption analytics that export to Datadog, Splunk and New Relic (Agentforce Observability).
- Runtime guardrails via the Einstein Trust Layer: PII and PCI masking before prompts reach the model, toxicity scanning with confidence scores, prompt-injection defense and audit logging (Trusted AI).
Limits
- Not a cross-vendor runtime gateway or org-wide AI inventory: it governs and observes only agents built on the Salesforce platform, not arbitrary third-party LLM/MCP traffic or AI in other clouds, and does not document shadow-AI discovery as of July 15, 2026.
- SaaS-only deployment: no self-hosted, on-prem, customer-VPC or air-gapped option; Hyperforce and the EU Operating Zone give regional data residency but not a customer-controlled data path.
- No documented production kill switch or runtime sandbox isolation for autonomous agents as of July 15, 2026; containment relies on least-privilege 'running user' permissions and monitoring.
SAP AI Agent Hub (delivered inside SAP LeanIX)
AI agent governance system-of-record anchored in enterprise architecture (SAP LeanIX)The registry job for SAP-centric estates
SAP AI Agent Hub — announced at SAP Sapphire 2026 and delivered inside SAP LeanIX — is a vendor-agnostic system of record for AI agents, LLMs and MCP servers that grounds agent governance in enterprise-architecture context and integrates with Joule Studio, the Joule runtime and SAP Signavio; SAP appears in the inaugural 2026 Gartner Magic Quadrant for AI Governance Platforms as a Niche Player per independent analyses.
SAP AI Agent Hub, delivered inside SAP LeanIX, does the inventory job with an enterprise-architecture accent: a vendor-agnostic registry of agents, LLMs and MCP servers with auto-discovery across Microsoft, Google, AWS, ServiceNow and SAP AI Core (Q2 2026 release highlights), each agent mapped to the business capabilities and process steps it touches — a view no runtime tool offers. A verification badge gates which agents and MCP servers integrated runtimes may use, and Joule Studio embeds the Hub's governance into SAP's own build path.
It is early: two of six planned capabilities were generally available at Sapphire 2026, with runtime observability and identity controls scheduled from Q3 2026. It has no inline enforcement, traces or containment of its own as of August 16, 2026, and delivery is SaaS-only inside the SAP ecosystem.
Strengths
- A vendor-agnostic AI agent registry: a system of record covering agents, LLMs and MCP servers regardless of who built the agent (AI Agent Hub).
- Automated AI asset discovery through integrations with Microsoft, Google, AWS, ServiceNow and SAP AI Core (Q2 2026 release highlights).
- Business-context governance from its enterprise-architecture heritage: each agent is mapped to business capabilities and process steps via LeanIX APM and SAP Signavio (AI Agent Hub with LeanIX APM).
Limits
- Early product: only two of six planned capabilities were generally available at Sapphire 2026, with runtime observability, identity/access control, agent-in-process-mining and workforce impact mapping scheduled from Q3 2026, per third-party coverage.
- No inline runtime enforcement of its own — the verification badge gates other runtimes.
- Does not document LLM/agent traces as of August 16, 2026.
Google Vertex AI Agent Builder
Cloud-native platform and open framework for building, deploying and governing AI agents on Google CloudBuilding and scaling agents on Google Cloud, with an on-prem path
Google Cloud's suite for building, deploying and governing AI agents — the open-source Agent Development Kit (ADK), the managed Agent Engine runtime, a low-code Agent Studio and enterprise agent surfaces — expanded at Cloud Next 2026 as the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform.
Google Vertex AI Agent Builder — folded into the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform at Cloud Next 2026 — pairs the open-source Agent Development Kit (Apache-2.0, ~20.6k GitHub stars) with a managed Agent Engine runtime, a low-code Agent Studio and 200+ models including Anthropic Claude (GitHub). Building and operating are the strengths: multi-agent orchestration, a monitoring dashboard for tokens, latency and tool calls, a Gen AI Evaluation Service with a User Simulator, and Model Armor for prompt-injection screening. Unusually for a managed agent platform, Gemini is GA on Google Distributed Cloud air-gapped (authorized for US Government Secret/Top Secret).
As a management plane it is Google-Cloud-centric: tool governance is a configuration and access-control layer (Cloud API Registry, Apigee API Hub), not a cross-vendor runtime gateway; discovery is limited to agentic assets within Google Cloud; and there are no documented EU AI Act, ISO 42001 or NIST AI RMF agent-evidence packs or a discrete kill switch as of July 15, 2026.
Strengths
- Open-source ADK (Apache-2.0, more than 20,000 GitHub stars) across Python, Java, Go and JS with multi-agent orchestration, lowering lock-in for the framework layer (ADK repository).
- Strong cloud-native observability: dashboards for token spend, latency, error rates and tool calls, plus trace visualization and a playground for deployed agents (Agent Builder updates).
- Integrated runtime safety via Model Armor (prompt-injection protection, tool-call and response screening) plus Native Agent Identities for least-privilege IAM (Agent Builder updates).
Limits
- No documented cross-vendor runtime LLM/MCP policy gateway as of July 15, 2026; tool governance is a configuration/access-control layer (Cloud API Registry, Apigee API Hub), not a runtime control plane for arbitrary agent traffic.
- No org-wide, cross-cloud AI/agent/MCP inventory or shadow-AI discovery as of July 15, 2026; discovery is limited to agentic assets within Google Cloud.
- No documented EU AI Act / ISO 42001 / NIST AI RMF agent-specific compliance-evidence packs or risk-classification tooling as of July 15, 2026 (broad GCP certifications and audit logs exist, but not AI-governance evidence artifacts).
Databricks Unity AI Gateway
Enterprise AI gateway and runtime AI governance layer built on Unity Catalog (formerly Mosaic AI Gateway)Agent and MCP governance for the Databricks estate
Databricks' runtime governance layer, built on Unity Catalog, that routes, secures, meters and controls traffic to Databricks-hosted and external models, agents, MCP servers and tools — with budgets, guardrails, service policies and centralized usage and cost tracking. GA since August 2026.
Databricks Unity AI Gateway (formerly Mosaic AI Gateway, GA August 4, 2026) governs the agents-and-tools layer where Databricks workloads live: external MCP servers register as Unity Catalog securables with tool-level permissions and central audit, agent endpoints and reusable skills register and are discoverable, and Contextual Service Policies (Beta) allow, deny or require approval for agent actions such as file edits and code pushes (MCP governance). Budgets that hard-block and per-principal rate limits put a real brake on runaway agents.
It is workspace-scoped and opt-in: it governs what routes through it, with no discovery of agents living elsewhere. It is not a builder — Agent Bricks and the Agent Framework are separate Databricks products — and it documents no sandbox or kill switch in the gateway as of August 16, 2026. Databricks-managed only; no self-hosted option.
Strengths
- Budgets with hard spend caps: hit a threshold and the gateway can alert — or block further requests until the budget resets or an admin raises it, with per-user and per-budget spend views (budgets docs; AI spend controls blog).
- Deep cost observability via system tables: per-request usage with custom tags, hourly external-model spend by provider service, target model and requesting principal, and enriched billing records for attribution across users, teams, applications, models and providers (cost observability docs).
- Multi-provider routing with reliability controls: fronts OpenAI (incl. Azure OpenAI), Anthropic, Cohere, Amazon Bedrock, Google Vertex AI and any OpenAI-compatible provider, with automatic fallbacks, traffic splitting and Smart Routing (Beta) by quality, cost, performance and budget (external models docs; GA blog).
Limits
- Governance requires traffic to opt in: apps and coding agents outside Databricks are governed only if they repoint their base URL at the workspace gateway — no passive interception or governance of AI traffic that bypasses it is documented as of August 16, 2026.
- Does not document EU AI Act, ISO/IEC 42001 or NIST AI RMF evidence generation, framework mapping or use-case risk-classification workflows as of August 16, 2026 — compliance support is generic audit/system tables, not framework-specific.
- Does not document agent sandboxing or a kill switch inside the gateway as of August 16, 2026: sandboxed execution is a separate product (Databricks Sandbox), and containment is approximated via permissions, hard budget blocks and contextual service policies.
LangSmith (LangChain)
LLM observability, evals & agent engineering platformEngineering teams building, tracing and evaluating agents
LangSmith is LangChain's commercial platform for agent engineering — tracing, evaluation, prompt management, agent deployment, sandboxes and a no-code agent builder, plus an LLM gateway in private beta — layered on the MIT-licensed LangChain and LangGraph frameworks.
LangSmith is the agent engineer's platform. LangChain and LangGraph (roughly 141.8k and 37.3k GitHub stars) feed it; tracing and evaluation are category-leading — datasets, online and multi-turn evaluators, annotation queues, and the Engine (public beta) that mines production traces and proposes fixes. LangSmith Deployment runs agents in production, Fleet is a no-code builder with human-in-the-loop approvals, and Sandboxes (GA May 2026) isolate agent code execution. A self-hosted Kubernetes option with an offline air-gapped license is a sovereignty story most builders cannot match (LangChain).
It is an engineering platform, not an estate manager. Visibility covers what is built on or instrumented with LangSmith; there is no org-wide inventory or shadow-agent discovery; the LLM Gateway is private beta; and there is no EU AI Act, ISO 42001 or NIST AI RMF tooling — compliance is SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 plus audit logs. Teams run LangSmith to build and improve agents, and a platform like Kosmoy or Credo AI to govern the estate.
Strengths
- The deepest ecosystem gravity in the category: LangChain (~141.8k stars) and LangGraph (~37.3k stars) are MIT frameworks feeding the commercial platform, backed by a $125M Series B at a $1.25B valuation (October 2025).
- Category-leading evaluation tooling: datasets with splits, experiments and pairwise comparison, LLM-as-judge, code and composite evaluators, online and multi-turn thread evaluators, and annotation queues with rubrics (evaluation docs).
- Framework-agnostic observability with native OpenTelemetry ingestion, automatic token/cost tracking with per-model pricing, dashboards and alerts (observability docs).
Limits
- The LLM Gateway is private beta (waitlist) with a narrow policy surface — spend limits plus PII/secrets redaction across 7 providers; no routing, failover or fine-grained content policies documented as of July 15, 2026.
- No org-wide AI inventory or shadow-AI discovery — visibility covers applications instrumented with LangSmith or routed through its gateway.
- No EU AI Act, ISO/IEC 42001 or NIST AI RMF governance tooling documented as of July 15, 2026; the compliance story is security certifications (SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, HIPAA, GDPR) plus audit logs.
CrewAI
Open-source multi-agent framework plus a commercial Agent Management Platform (AMP) for deploying and governing agentsOpen-source multi-agent building with a managed control plane
CrewAI is an open-source Python framework for orchestrating multi-agent 'crews' and 'flows', paired with a commercial Agent Management Platform (AMP, formerly CrewAI Enterprise) for deploying, monitoring and governing those agents in production.
CrewAI is one of the most popular open-source multi-agent frameworks (MIT, roughly 55,600 GitHub stars), paired since January 2026 with the commercial Agent Management Platform (AMP) for deploying, monitoring and governing the crews you build (GitHub). AMP adds one-click deployment, real-time execution traces, RBAC, SSO and a secret manager, plus private deployment via 'AMP Factory' onto on-prem servers and customer VPCs. Framework-level Task Guardrails validate task outputs, and the Trust Center reports SOC 2 Type 1 (November 2025) and a HIPAA audit (February 2026).
For estate management it is the narrowest entry: AMP manages only CrewAI's own crews, with no cross-vendor inventory, gateway or shadow-AI discovery and no EU AI Act / ISO 42001 / NIST AI RMF evidence tooling. On containment, note the history — CrewAI's built-in Docker code-execution sandbox had disclosed sandbox-escape vulnerabilities (CERT/CC VU#221883) and is reportedly being replaced by external sandboxes (E2B, Daytona); there is no documented kill switch.
Strengths
- Leading open-source multi-agent framework: over 55,000 GitHub stars, MIT license and active maintenance (v1.x GA), with Crews of role-playing agents and event-driven Flows (CrewAI repository).
- Commercial AMP (Agent Management Platform, launched January 2026) adds one-click deployment, real-time execution traces and observability, RBAC, SSO and enterprise support on top of the framework (AMP launch).
- Flexible deployment sovereignty: OSS self-hostable anywhere, and AMP supports managed cloud plus private VPC / on-premise via AMP Factory with SSO (Entra/Okta) and dedicated VPC networking (AMP docs).
Limits
- No org-wide, cross-tool AI inventory or shadow-AI discovery as of July 15, 2026; AMP only registers and manages CrewAI's own crews and agents.
- No cross-vendor runtime LLM/MCP gateway or policy-enforcement proxy on agent traffic as of July 15, 2026; the framework calls LLMs directly and AMP is not a traffic gateway.
- Compliance evidence is limited to SOC 2 Type 1 and HIPAA; no EU AI Act, ISO 42001 or NIST AI RMF evidence or risk-classification tooling is documented as of July 15, 2026.
Credo AI
AI governance, risk & compliance platformThe agent-management program of record
Credo AI is a SaaS AI-governance platform that inventories AI systems, agents and vendors, applies regulation-derived Policy Packs (EU AI Act, NIST AI RMF, ISO 42001) and produces risk assessments and audit-ready compliance evidence.
Credo AI manages agents from the governance side. Its AI Registry catalogs use cases, models and systems org-wide; the Agent Registry (public preview since September 2025) inventories internal and third-party agents with risk assessments and human-oversight intervention points; and Policy Packs translate the EU AI Act, NIST AI RMF, ISO 42001 and SOC 2 into controls. It is a Visionary in Gartner's 2026 Magic Quadrant for AI Governance Platforms (Credo AI). For the committee that must show regulators a defensible agent program spanning every builder, it is a natural anchor.
It does not touch the runtime and does not build agents. There is no gateway, no in-line guardrails and no containment — Credo AI's own May 2026 GAIA announcement places runtime enforcement on the roadmap — and it is SaaS-only with no documented self-hosting. It is the complement to the builders and to Kosmoy, not their replacement: the program of record that the operate-and-contain layers feed.
Strengths
- Named a Leader in The Forrester Wave: AI Governance Solutions, Q3 2025, with the highest possible scores in 12 criteria including AI Policy Management and AI Regulatory Compliance Audit (announcement).
- A Visionary in the inaugural Gartner Magic Quadrant for AI Governance Platforms (June 16, 2026), and No. 6 in Applied AI on Fast Company's Most Innovative Companies of 2026 (recognition page).
- Deep regulation-to-control translation: Policy Packs for the EU AI Act, NIST AI RMF, ISO 42001, SOC 2 and NYC Local Law 144, with intake-based risk classification, fundamental-rights impact assessments and CE-marking support (EU AI Act tooling).
Limits
- No shipped runtime enforcement — no gateway, in-line guardrails or agent containment as of July 15, 2026; Credo AI's own GAIA GA announcement (May 2026) describes runtime governance ('policy enforcement and intervention at the point of use') as next on its roadmap.
- SaaS-first: no vendor-documented self-hosted or air-gapped deployment option as of July 15, 2026; third-party sources conflict on private-cloud availability.
- No public pricing — enterprise quotes only, with no free tier or self-serve evaluation path.
Questions buyers ask
Which platform is best for building AI agents?
One of the builders, not Kosmoy. Salesforce Agentforce leads for agents grounded in CRM data, Google Vertex AI Agent Builder for Google-Cloud teams wanting an open framework (ADK), CrewAI for open-source multi-agent development, and LangSmith for engineering teams who need deep tracing and evaluation on top of LangGraph. Kosmoy's no-code Agent Builder is deliberately shallower — its value is managing and containing the agents those platforms produce.
How is this different from your AI agent governance platforms guide?
This guide takes the management view — the full lifecycle of build, deploy, operate and govern — and includes the builders where agents are made. Our [AI agent governance guide](/resources/blog/best-ai-agent-governance-platforms-2026/) takes the narrower control-and-secure view: discovery, agent identity, runtime security and containment, weighing security specialists (Zenity, Noma, WitnessAI, Cisco AI Defense) this page does not. Buyers with a build-and-operate problem start here; buyers whose problem is holding a compromised agent start there.
Can Kosmoy manage agents we built in Salesforce, Vertex or LangGraph?
That is its design center. The master agent registry harvests agent inventories from Azure AI Foundry, AWS Bedrock, Google Vertex AI, Salesforce and ServiceNow into one list and flags unmatched agents as shadow AI; their traffic can be routed through the Kosmoy gateway for policy and budgets; and any agent or MCP server can be wrapped in an Action Capsule with a kill switch. It manages the estate the builders create rather than replacing them.
Is Microsoft Agent 365 enough to manage all our agents?
If your agents live in Copilot Studio and Foundry and your estate is Microsoft-centric, often yes — the registry inherits the directory, identities and data security attach automatically, and Defender discovers endpoint agents. You may still need more if agents span Bedrock, Vertex, Salesforce or homegrown frameworks (third-party coverage is newer and partly preview), if you need a management plane in your own infrastructure, or if you need kernel-enforced containment and EU AI Act / ISO 42001 agent evidence, which Microsoft does not document for agents as of July 15, 2026.
What does an AI agents management platform cost?
The range is wide. CrewAI and LangSmith have free developer tiers with paid plans; Vertex AI Agent Builder is consumption-based with a free tier; Salesforce Agentforce sells on consumption (Flex Credits or per-conversation) or per-user; Microsoft licenses Agent 365 per user; and Credo AI and Kosmoy are enterprise quote only. Budget for the platform plus the token costs of the agents themselves — most builders have you bring your own model keys.
Can I run Kosmoy together with CrewAI or LangSmith?
Yes, and it is the intended pattern. Engineering teams build and evaluate agents in LangSmith or CrewAI; Kosmoy then registers those agents with owners and risk tiers, routes their traffic through a policy gateway, contains the autonomous ones in Action Capsules, and exports the compliance evidence. There is no conflict because the builders do not provide a cross-vendor estate layer.
Methodology
Each vendor was scored 0-10 on the ten axes above from a dossier of its own documentation, changelogs, repositories and press, verified as of July 15, 2026. Competitor numbers are reported as the vendor's claims with citations, never as our measurements. A 10 is reserved for categorical architectural facts, any score of 7 or higher must be defensible from cited evidence, and gaps are phrased 'does not document X as of July 15, 2026'.
The scoring separates building from managing. Four vendors here score 9 on Agent Building against Kosmoy's 6 — the builders genuinely lead, and this guide says so. Containment is scored strictly: a code-execution sandbox is not a runtime an agent cannot escape, so LangSmith and Vertex earn partial credit while Kosmoy's Action Capsule and kill switch score at the top. Inventory is scored across vendors, which is why the builders — excellent at cataloging their own agents — score low on an org-wide register.
Disclosure: Kosmoy publishes this guide, and it is not the pick for building agents — the verdict names a competitor for three of the four buyer types. Every competitor claim is cited to that competitor's material, and every entry carries its limits, including ours. See also managing AI agents in production and the research on shadow AI risk that motivates the inventory axis.
Sources
Every factual claim about another vendor on this page traces to that vendor's own published material or a named third-party source below.
- Microsoft Agent 365 general availability (May 1, 2026) — accessed July 15, 2026
- Salesforce Agentforce 3 announcement (Command Center, MCP; June 23, 2025) — accessed July 15, 2026
- Google ADK (adk-python) GitHub repository — accessed July 15, 2026
- LangSmith Interrupt 2026 launches (Sandboxes GA, Engine beta) — accessed July 15, 2026
- CrewAI GitHub repository (MIT, framework) — accessed July 15, 2026
- CERT/CC VU#221883 — CrewAI code-execution sandbox vulnerabilities — accessed July 15, 2026
- Credo AI Agent Registry — accessed July 15, 2026
- Kosmoy Agents Master Registry — accessed July 15, 2026
- Kosmoy Platform — accessed July 15, 2026
- Kosmoy AI Gateway — accessed July 15, 2026
- Kosmoy Action Capsule — accessed July 15, 2026
- Kosmoy AI Compliance — accessed July 15, 2026
- Kosmoy AI Evaluation & Red Teaming — accessed July 31, 2026
- Microsoft Agent 365 overview (Microsoft Learn) — accessed July 15, 2026
- Entra Agent ID — what are agent identities — accessed July 15, 2026
- Secure agentic AI end-to-end (Microsoft Security Blog, Mar 20, 2026) — accessed July 15, 2026
- Microsoft Foundry guardrails overview — accessed July 15, 2026
- Purview for Agent 365 — accessed July 15, 2026
- AI Control Tower product page — accessed August 16, 2026
- ServiceNow expands AI Control Tower (press release) — accessed August 16, 2026
- ServiceNow AI Gateway (community blog) — accessed August 16, 2026
- Traceloop is joining ServiceNow — accessed August 16, 2026
- The Register — agent kill switches at Knowledge 2026 — accessed August 16, 2026
- ServiceNow Private Stack launch (self-hosted platform) — accessed August 16, 2026
- CIO — AI Control Tower's view of AI spend — accessed August 16, 2026
- Amazon Bedrock product page — accessed July 15, 2026
- Supported foundation models in Amazon Bedrock — accessed July 15, 2026
- Bedrock Guardrails product page — accessed July 15, 2026
- AgentCore now supports Bedrock Guardrails in policy (GA, June 2026) — accessed July 15, 2026
- AgentCore Runtime — isolated sessions (Firecracker microVM) — accessed July 15, 2026
- Bedrock Agents — accessed July 15, 2026
- Bedrock Evaluations — accessed July 15, 2026
- Bedrock security and compliance — accessed July 15, 2026
- Model support by AWS Region (deployment/sovereignty) — accessed July 15, 2026
- Agentforce product home — accessed July 15, 2026
- Agentforce Observability — accessed July 15, 2026
- Einstein Trust Layer (Trusted AI) — accessed July 15, 2026
- Agentforce Testing Center use cases — accessed July 15, 2026
- Build and optimize agents with Agentforce 360 (Builder, Agent Script) — accessed July 15, 2026
- AI Agent Security — accessed July 15, 2026
- Salesforce earns first ISO 42001 certification (Agentforce) — accessed July 15, 2026
- Hyperforce EU Operating Zone (data residency) — accessed July 15, 2026
- SAP AI Agent Hub (SAP LeanIX) — accessed August 16, 2026
- SAP Business AI release highlights Q2 2026 (SAP News) — accessed August 16, 2026
- SAP AI Agent Hub with SAP LeanIX Application Portfolio Management — accessed August 16, 2026
- New Joule Studio for enterprise-scale agentic development (SAP News, May 2026) — accessed August 16, 2026
- SAP AI Agent Hub analysis — GA scope and roadmap (The New Stack) — accessed August 16, 2026
- SAP LeanIX announces launch of AI Agent Hub and key industry partnerships (LeanIX blog) — accessed August 16, 2026
- AI Agent Hub dashboard (SAP Help Portal) — accessed August 16, 2026
- Agent Builder product page (Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform) — accessed July 15, 2026
- Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform (formerly Vertex AI) — accessed July 15, 2026
- More ways to build and scale AI agents with Vertex AI Agent Builder (Nov 2025) — accessed July 15, 2026
- New enhanced tool governance in Vertex AI Agent Builder (Dec 2025) — accessed July 15, 2026
- Run Gemini and AI on-prem with Google Distributed Cloud — accessed July 15, 2026
- Google Distributed Cloud air-gapped (sovereign/on-prem) — accessed July 15, 2026
- Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform pricing — accessed July 15, 2026
- AI governance with Unity AI Gateway (Databricks docs) — accessed August 16, 2026
- Unity AI Gateway product page — accessed August 16, 2026
- Unity AI Gateway is Generally Available (Databricks blog, Aug 4, 2026) — accessed August 16, 2026
- Manage budgets for Unity AI Gateway — accessed August 16, 2026
- Monitor Unity AI Gateway cost — accessed August 16, 2026
- External models in Model Serving (provider list) — accessed August 16, 2026
- What's new: service policies, guardrails, observability and cost controls — accessed August 16, 2026
- Unity AI Gateway pricing — accessed August 16, 2026
- Mosaic AI Gateway updates (former product name; Databricks blog) — accessed August 16, 2026
- LangSmith self-hosted overview (docs) — accessed July 15, 2026
- LangSmith self-hosted egress & air-gapped licensing (docs) — accessed July 15, 2026
- LangSmith LLM Gateway (docs, private beta) — accessed July 15, 2026
- LangSmith Sandboxes (docs) — accessed July 15, 2026
- LangSmith Fleet overview (docs) — accessed July 15, 2026
- LangSmith Deployment overview (docs) — accessed July 15, 2026
- LangSmith pricing — accessed July 15, 2026
- Fortune — LangChain raises $125M at $1.25B valuation — accessed July 15, 2026
- CrewAI on PyPI (release cadence) — accessed July 15, 2026
- CrewAI AMP / Enterprise docs introduction — accessed July 15, 2026
- CrewAI AMP launch blog (Jan 2026) — accessed July 15, 2026
- CrewAI pricing page — accessed July 15, 2026
- CrewAI Trust Center (SOC 2, HIPAA) — accessed July 15, 2026
- CrewAI Tasks / Guardrails docs — accessed July 15, 2026
- Credo AI homepage — accessed July 15, 2026
- Credo AI EU AI Act tooling — accessed July 15, 2026
- GAIA general availability announcement (May 13, 2026 — runtime-governance roadmap statement) — accessed July 15, 2026
- Forrester Wave: AI Governance Solutions, Q3 2025 — Credo AI named a Leader (Businesswire) — accessed July 15, 2026
- Gartner Magic Quadrant for AI Governance Platforms 2026 — Credo AI recognition page — accessed July 15, 2026
- Credo AI Python SDK launch (January 2026) — accessed July 15, 2026
- WorkOS — Credo AI runtime-gap analysis (third party) — accessed July 15, 2026
- AWS Marketplace listing (SaaS) — accessed July 15, 2026
Shortlisting for a regulated environment?
Kosmoy puts an inventory, a policy gateway and a containment sandbox around every AI your teams run — in your own Kubernetes.
Or email sales@kosmoy.com.