TL;DR
Pick Nightfall if you want a single vendor for SaaS DLP (Slack, M365, Google Workspace, Salesforce, Jira, Notion), email DLP, and browser AI governance, your buyer is a CISO at a 500-plus-person company, and you can sign an annual contract starting at $8K to $20K.
Pick Northbeams if your shadow-AI risk is in the browser, on Mac and PC desktops, in CLI coding agents, and in the MCP servers your developers wire up to Claude Desktop, Cursor, and Claude Code. Your buyer is the IT lead who needs visibility installed by Monday. You want a free 14-day trial that drops to a free permanent tier if you don't subscribe.
What Nightfall sells
Nightfall AI is an AI-native cloud DLP suite founded 2018, that raised a $40M Series B in August 2022 and has not raised since. They sell six product lines: Data Detection & Response (DDR), Data Exfiltration Prevention (DEX), Data Discovery, Nyx (an agentic DLP analyst, July 2025), Endpoint agents for Mac and Windows, and an Email DLP module covering Gmail and Microsoft Exchange Online. Their browser extension covers ~7 named AI platforms (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Copilot, Perplexity, Deepseek, Grok) with ~40K Chrome Web Store users.
The Windows agent watches "native executables" including Claude Desktop and ChatGPT Desktop. The Mac agent does not have an equivalent AI-app coverage list in their public release notes. CLI coding agents (Claude Code, Aider, Cursor) are not documented anywhere in their release notes or product pages.
Pricing, side by side
Nightfall AI
$8,000 – $20,000 / yr starter
Vendr median deal $24,536 · Range $10,761–$109,223 (32 deals) · Annual contract default, multi-year saves 10–20%
Quote-only. No free tier, no free trial (a "7-day proof of value" engagement instead). Per-user pricing exists but the dollar amounts are hidden behind "$" placeholders on their pricing page. Source: Vendr marketplace, May 2026.
Northbeams
$15 / user / mo ($12 annual)
No seat minimum · No annual minimum · Free 14-day Sentinel trial, no card
Self-serve sign-up. Drop to free Beam tier after trial if you don't subscribe (up to 10 users, 60 days). Sentinel tier $25 / user / mo includes audit-ready logs and EU AI Act / SOC 2 / HIPAA evidence packs. Full pricing.
Vendr's marketplace data is the cleanest public number. Across 32 Nightfall deals tracked publicly, the median was $24,536 / yr with a starter floor near $8K. Northbeams' equivalent SMB contract is $9,000 / year for a 50-person team on Lighthouse annual, or $14,400 / yr on Sentinel. We come in at roughly half the cost on a like-for-like head-count basis.
Where Nightfall wins
- SaaS DLP breadth. Slack, M365, Google Workspace, Salesforce, Jira, Confluence, Notion, Zendesk content scanning at rest. Northbeams does not cover server-side SaaS at-rest scanning. If your wedge use case is "find sensitive data sitting in Slack," Nightfall is the right tool.
- Email DLP and Gmail / Outlook redaction. Out of Northbeams' scope.
- Nyx agentic analyst (July 2025). Natural-language incident investigation and policy drafting. Genuinely differentiated. We do not have an equivalent yet.
- Computer-vision OCR for image-borne PII. Particularly useful when employees paste screenshots into AI tools. Northbeams does not yet OCR uploaded images; this is on our Q4 roadmap.
- Cloud DSPM for AWS, Azure, GCP, and on-prem databases. Northbeams has no cloud-side scan story.
- Detection accuracy claims: 100+ ML detectors, 95% precision, 90% false-alert reduction vs legacy DLP, with friendly G2 reviews specifically calling out the false-positive rate.
Where Northbeams wins
- Pricing shape. Free trial, free permanent tier, no seat minimum, no annual minimum. Nightfall is quote-only with an annual contract default.
- Mac AI desktop app coverage. Claude Desktop, ChatGPT Desktop, Cursor, Granola caught natively on Mac via process and outbound-connection events. Nightfall's release notes show Windows-only AI app coverage; Mac is a documented blind spot.
- CLI coding-agent coverage out of the box. Claude Code, Aider, Cursor agent mode caught via process events. Nightfall has no documented CLI coverage.
- MCP Gateway on Sentinel. An in-path proxy for the MCP servers Claude Desktop, Cursor, and Claude Code call. Per-tool allow / warn / block on 10 catalogued servers (filesystem, GitHub, Postgres, Stripe, Slack, and the rest). Nightfall's release notes mention a Mac MCP profile but do not document an in-path MCP gateway with per-tool policy.
- ~700 AI tool sites in the browser catalogue with a public coverage scorecard, vs ~7 named platforms on Nightfall's Chrome Web Store listing.
- On-device classifier with no prompt content ever leaving the device. Nightfall's classifier architecture is not transparently documented; the most likely default is a cloud round-trip.
- Productized EU AI Act Article 4 evidence pack and one-click SOC 2 / HIPAA evidence exports. Nightfall does not surface these as productized binders on their public pages.
- Vanta and Drata one-click integration in our Fleet tier. Nightfall does not advertise these integrations.
- Install in an afternoon, no procurement cycle. Sign up, install, see findings by Friday. Nightfall requires a sales call.
The feature checklist
| Capability | Northbeams | Nightfall |
|---|---|---|
| Free 14-day trial, no card | Yes | No (7-day POV) |
| Free permanent tier | Yes (Beam) | No |
| Annual contract minimum | None | Yes |
| Public per-user pricing | Yes | Quote only |
| Browser extension coverage | ~700 tools | ~7 platforms named |
| Mac AI desktop app coverage (Claude Desktop, ChatGPT Desktop, Cursor, Granola) | Yes | No (Windows-only) |
| Windows AI desktop app coverage | Yes | Partial (Claude, ChatGPT named) |
| CLI coding-agent coverage (Claude Code, Aider) | Yes | No |
| MCP Gateway (in-path, per-tool allow / warn / block) | Yes (10 servers, 3 clients, Sentinel-tier) | Mac MCP profile only, no per-tool policy |
| On-device classifier, no prompt content leaves the device | Yes | Architecture not documented; cloud likely |
| OCR for image / PDF prompt uploads | No (Q4 roadmap) | Yes |
| SaaS at-rest scanning (Slack, M365, Drive) | No | Yes |
| Email DLP / encryption | No | Yes |
| Cloud DSPM (AWS, Azure, GCP) | No | Yes |
| Agentic incident analyst | No | Yes (Nyx) |
| Public coverage scorecard | Yes | No |
| Productized EU AI Act Article 4 evidence pack | Yes (Sentinel) | No |
| Vanta / Drata one-click integration | Yes (Fleet) | Not advertised |
| SAML SSO + SCIM | Yes (Fleet) | Yes |
Which one should you pick?
Pick Nightfall if your wedge is "we have sensitive data sitting in Slack and Google Drive and Salesforce, and we want one vendor to scan all of it plus the AI tools." Their SaaS DLP breadth is real and Northbeams does not compete on that surface.
Pick Northbeams if your wedge is "our team is on Macs, uses Claude Code and Cursor, and the AI risk is at the endpoint." We catch what Nightfall's Mac agent and missing CLI coverage do not, at roughly half the price, with no annual contract.
A common pattern: companies start with Northbeams for AI governance ($15 / user / mo, install today), and consider Nightfall later if they need Slack and Salesforce content scanning. The two products do different jobs even where their marketing overlaps.
Try Northbeams free for 14 days.
Full Sentinel features. No card. No annual contract. Drops to the free Beam tier if you don't subscribe.
Sources
- Vendr marketplace data for Nightfall (median deal, range, deal count)
- Nightfall pricing page (quote-only, 7-day POV)
- Nightfall release notes (Windows AI app coverage, Mac MCP profile)
- Nightfall Chrome Web Store listing (~40K users, named platforms)
- VentureBeat: Nyx launch (Jul 2025)
- Crunchbase: Nightfall AI ($60M total raised, last round Aug 2022)
Last updated 2026-05-09. Pricing and features change; we re-verify quarterly. If something here is out of date, email hello@northbeams.com and we'll fix it.