8 Best Formal Alternatives & Competitors (2026)

Teleport delivers identity-native infrastructure access with short-lived certificates, session recording, and Kubernetes support. It excels at SSH and RDP auditing but uses a different architecture focused on cluster access rather than database-specific protocol parsing. Versus Formal, Teleport provides strong zero-trust foundations but offers less granular column-level masking and real-time query rewriting for BI and AI workloads.

Boundary focuses on secure remote access to hosts and applications with dynamic credentials and session management. It integrates well with Vault for secrets but does not parse database wire protocols for inline data masking or policy actions. In comparison to Formal, Boundary is stronger for general infrastructure brokering yet weaker on query-level compliance controls and AI agent security.

Immuta specializes in data security and governance for analytics platforms with automated policy enforcement and masking. It operates primarily at the data layer rather than as a network proxy. Relative to Formal, Immuta offers deeper data discovery and catalog integration but requires more integration effort and lacks native SSH or MCP protocol support.

Privacera delivers unified data access governance and encryption across clouds with policy-as-code capabilities. It emphasizes compliance automation for large data lakes. Compared with Formal, Privacera provides broader data catalog features but does not match Formal's sub-10ms inline proxy performance or real-time wire-level query rewriting for operational databases.

Satori offers a data security platform that discovers, classifies, and protects data with query-level controls. It focuses on self-service access requests and masking. Against Formal, Satori provides strong discovery workflows but uses a different deployment model and has less emphasis on infrastructure protocols like Kubernetes and SSH session monitoring.

Cyral acts as a database security proxy with connection management, data masking, and audit logging. It supports multiple database types and cloud environments. In direct comparison, Cyral shares Formal's proxy approach yet offers fewer policy stages, no built-in backtesting, and narrower protocol coverage beyond databases.

Apache Knox provides perimeter security for Hadoop ecosystems with authentication and proxying. It is open-source and focused on big-data clusters. Unlike Formal, Knox lacks modern database protocol parsing, AI agent controls, and enterprise policy pipelines, making it less suitable for mixed environments with Snowflake or production BI tools.