Squidbrake vs Kontext: AI agent control compared
Squidbrake and Kontext both sit in front of what AI agents do and decide, before an action runs, whether it may. The difference is what happens to the actions in between "obviously fine" and "obviously not": Kontext allows or denies them automatically; Squidbrake can hold them for a person.
We make Squidbrake, so read this with that in mind. Everything about Kontext comes from its public website and docs as of 29 October 2026; where they don't say, we say "not stated" rather than guess. If something here is wrong or out of date, tell us and we'll fix it.
At a glance
| Squidbrake | Kontext | |
|---|---|---|
| Checks an action before it runs | Yes, outside the model | Yes, in the agent's pre-tool hook |
| Decisions | Allow, deny, or hold for a person | Allow or deny; risk flags don't change the decision |
| Human approval | Yes: dashboard, Slack, Discord, phone, with signed one-tap links | Not described |
| Second-person approval | Yes, routed by role (for example finance for refunds) | Not described |
| Try before enforcing | Shadow mode | Observe mode |
| Session-aware rules | Yes: sequences (for example a delete after backups were turned off) | Not stated |
| MCP servers | Yes: squidbrake proxy wraps any server; tokens stay on the gateway | Not listed as an integration |
| Agents | Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Gemini CLI, VS Code Copilot, Antigravity and more, plus your own code over HTTP | Claude Code, Codex, Claude Cowork |
| Audit record | Hash-chained, signed checkpoints, verifiable offline | Decision records and policy history; tamper protection not stated |
| Undo copies | Yes, for files, git and API calls through it | Not stated |
| Open source | Yes, Apache-2.0 | Not stated |
| Self-hosted | Yes: laptop, Docker or your own server, SQLite or Postgres | Not stated; workspace at app.kontext.security |
| Public benchmark | 12 real incidents replayed, code included | Not published |
| Price | Free self-hosted; Team $499/month; Enterprise custom | Free up to 5,000 transactions/month; Team $500/month for 100,000, then $1 per 1,000; Enterprise custom |
The real difference: what happens to the gray area
Most agent actions are clearly fine (read a file, run the tests) and a few are clearly not (delete a home folder). The hard ones are in between: a refund, a database migration, a message to a customer, a delete through a cloud API. Sometimes they're exactly what you wanted; sometimes they're a disaster.
With allow or deny only, every gray-area action forces a choice in advance: deny it and the agent can't do real work, allow it and the one bad instance runs. Squidbrake adds a third answer, review: the action waits, a teammate sees what it will change ("deletes 4,312 rows") and the rule that held it, and says yes or no. The person running the agent doesn't have to be the one who approves.
rules:
- id: review-stripe-money-out
action: review
reason: Refunds and payouts require finance approval
approvers: ["role:finance"]
match:
name: ["stripe.*refund*", "stripe.*payout*"]
That's also what auditors mean by change management: a change is authorized by a policy or approved by a person, with a record of who approved it. Squidbrake maps that to SOC 2 CC8.1 and EU AI Act Art. 14 on its security page.
Where Kontext is a good fit
- You want automatic allow and deny only, with no one in the loop.
- You roll software out to many laptops through MDM; Kontext documents a signed package for that.
- You want agent discovery, risk flagging and spend management in one hosted console, and you use Claude Cowork.
Where Squidbrake is a better fit
- Some actions should wait for a person, and the approver should be someone other than the person running the agent.
- Your agents use MCP servers (Stripe, Linear, GitHub, your database) as well as the shell.
- Data has to stay inside your network: run it yourself, and read the source, because it's open source.
- You need evidence an auditor can check: a tamper-evident log with signed checkpoints, verifiable offline.
- You want to see how it does on real incidents before you trust it: the benchmark replays 12 of them, 14 of 15 harmful actions stopped, and the one miss is explained.
Try it on your own agents. pipx install squidbrake, then
squidbrake connect all. Start in shadow mode: nothing is blocked in week one, you see what would have been.
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