TL;DR
Pick Harmonic if you are a 500-plus-person regulated enterprise with an existing CISO-led procurement process, an annual contract budget of $30K and up, and primary use cases in clinical PHI or embedded-AI inside Microsoft 365 / Google Workspace.
Pick Northbeams if your IT lead needs visibility installed by Monday, a free 14-day trial with no card, no annual contract, no seat minimum, and CLI coding-agent coverage out of the box.
What Harmonic sells
Harmonic Security is an enterprise browser-first AI DLP product, founded August 2023 by ex-Digital Shadows CEO Alastair Paterson. They sell three products that ladder up to one another: Explore (shadow-AI discovery), Guide (real-time inline DLP with coaching), and Command (governance pane). In October 2025 they added an MCP Gateway, a locally-installed daemon that intercepts MCP traffic from Cursor and Claude Code.
Their wedge is on-device classification using small language models (SLMs), which is a legitimate technical advantage over legacy DLP. Their go-to-market is fully sales-led: every CTA on the site is "Book a Demo," there is no free tier, and their AWS Marketplace listing is the only public price you can find.
Pricing, side by side
Harmonic Security
$163 / user / yr
200-seat minimum · $32,600 / year floor · 12 / 24 / 36-month contracts
Sales-led only. No free trial. Quote required for any deviation. Source: AWS 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). Full pricing.
The smallest team that can buy Harmonic costs $32,600 / year. The smallest team that can buy Northbeams costs $0 (Beam, free) or $180 (one-user Lighthouse, annual). We are not the same product if you have fewer than 200 people.
Where Harmonic wins
Honest list, because every comparison page that pretends one product is better at everything is lying:
- MCP Gateway head start. Harmonic shipped their MCP Gateway in October 2025 and has had six months of production deployments to harden it. Northbeams shipped MCP Gateway in May 2026 with 10 catalogued servers, three supported clients (Claude Desktop, Cursor, Claude Code), and per-tool allow / warn / block. Both are on-device proxies. Harmonic's added "agent retry" feedback loop is more mature today.
- Specialist PHI / clinical-trial / EHR detectors. Three dedicated PHI models added September 2025. If you are a healthcare SaaS with regulated clinical content, Harmonic has rules we do not.
- Firefox and Safari browser support. Northbeams is Chromium-only on the browser side (Chrome, Edge, Brave, Arc); the desktop app catches the rest, but if you must have a Safari extension, Harmonic ships one.
- Enterprise references. BILL (Rinki Sethi, CISO), Bain Capital (Mark Sutton, board). We have composite quotes; they have logos.
- Embedded-AI-in-SaaS coverage. Grammarly, Canva, Gamma, Google AI mode embedded surfaces are explicitly named in their product pages.
- Third-party validation. ESG study claiming 96% fewer alerts and 75% lower TCO than legacy DLP.
Where Northbeams wins
- MCP Gateway you can actually buy. Both products ship a local MCP Gateway. Theirs is part of an enterprise contract with a $32,600 / year floor. Ours is included in Sentinel at $25 / seat / mo with a 14-day free trial and no seat minimum. A 10-person dev team can govern MCP for $3,000 / year. With Harmonic, that team cannot buy the product at all.
- Pricing shape. Free trial, no seat minimum, no annual minimum, self-serve sign-up. Harmonic's $32,600 marketplace floor structurally locks them out of every company under 200 people.
- Native CLI coverage on top of MCP. Claude Code and Aider are caught by the Mac and PC desktop app via process and outbound-connection events even when they make direct API calls (no MCP). Harmonic's CLI coverage is mediated by the MCP Gateway only. Direct API calls from a CLI script are invisible to Harmonic.
- 700+ AI tool sites in the browser catalogue, with a public coverage scorecard refreshed quarterly. Harmonic publishes browser names, not a tool catalogue.
- Productized EU AI Act Article 4 evidence pack. Sentinel-tier export plus a public lead-magnet PDF. Harmonic does not productize EU AI Act evidence as a binder.
- Vanta and Drata one-click integration in our Fleet tier. Harmonic does not advertise either integration on public pages.
- Install by Monday morning. Sign up, install the extension and the desktop app, see the AI Discovery Report by end of week. The MCP Gateway turns on automatically on Sentinel. Harmonic requires a sales call, a POV, and an MDM playbook.
The feature checklist
| Capability | Northbeams | Harmonic |
|---|---|---|
| Free 14-day trial, no card | Yes | No (demo only) |
| Free permanent tier | Yes (Beam) | No |
| Seat minimum | None | 200 |
| Self-serve sign-up | Yes | No |
| Browser extension (Chromium) | Yes (~700 tools) | Yes |
| Firefox / Safari | No | Yes |
| Mac & PC desktop app (process + outbound conn) | Yes | Yes |
| CLI coding-agent coverage (Claude Code, Aider) | Yes (native) | Partial (via MCP Gateway only) |
| MCP Gateway (in-path proxy) | Yes (May 2026, Sentinel-tier, $25/seat/mo, 10 servers) | Yes (Oct 2025, enterprise-only, $32.6K floor) |
| Per-tool MCP allow / warn / block | Yes | Yes |
| MCP Gateway accessible to teams under 200 people | Yes (no seat minimum) | No (200-seat floor) |
| On-device classifier, no prompt content leaves the device | Yes (regex/rules) | Yes (small language models) |
| Specialist PHI / clinical / EHR detectors | No | Yes (3 dedicated models) |
| Public coverage scorecard | Yes (/coverage) | No |
| Productized EU AI Act Article 4 evidence pack | Yes (Sentinel) | No |
| Vanta / Drata one-click integration | Yes (Fleet) | Not advertised |
| SAML SSO + SCIM (Okta, Entra) | Yes (Fleet) | Yes |
| SIEM streaming (Splunk, Datadog) | Yes (Fleet) | Yes |
| MDM kits (Jamf, Intune, Kandji) | Yes (Sentinel) | Yes |
Which one should you pick?
Pick Harmonic if you are a 500-person-plus regulated enterprise with a CISO-led procurement process, an existing Microsoft E5 / Purview stack, and primary use cases in clinical PHI or embedded AI inside Word, Outlook, Teams, Gmail. Harmonic is built for that buyer specifically and they will close that deal cleanly.
Pick Northbeams if the person buying is the IT lead, the founder, or the head of security wearing three hats. We are built for the install-by-Monday motion. You get browser, desktop, CLI, and MCP coverage under one per-user price, no annual contract, and a 14-day free trial that drops to a free tier if you don't subscribe. The MCP Gateway lights up the moment your developers install the desktop app.
If you are between 200 and 500 people and looking at both, the question is whether you want to sign a $30K-plus annual contract today, or pay $15 / user / mo as you go. The features overlap enough that the procurement shape is usually the deciding factor.
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
- AWS Marketplace listing for Harmonic Security (per-seat price, seat minimum, contract length)
- harmonic.security homepage (product line, sales-led CTA)
- BusinessWire: Harmonic Security MCP Gateway launch (Oct 2025)
- Harmonic September 2025 product update (PHI / clinical / EHR specialist models)
- FintechGlobal: Series A coverage (Oct 2024)
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.