Kastra vs Velane: Features, Pricing & Which Is Better (2026)

A side-by-side comparison of Kastra and Velane — features, pricing, and ideal use cases — to help you decide which AI tool fits your workflow.

Kastra

Kastra Labs Inc

Freemium

Kastra is the runtime authorization layer for AI: it decides in sub-milliseconds what agents, models, and tools are allowed to do before they act.

Sub-Millisecond Policy Decisions: Every prompt, tool call, and API request is evaluated in under a millisecond so enforcement never becomes the bottleneck.
Deterministic Policy Engine: Rules are written and evaluated deterministically, not by an LLM judge, so the same input always produces the same allow/deny.
Kastra Edge (Local Enforcement): A local enforcement component that runs next to the agent so decisions happen even without a network round-trip.
Cryptographic Audit Trails: Signed logs of every decision give security and compliance teams tamper-evident evidence of agent behavior.
Coding Agent Integrations: First-class hooks for Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, and OpenClaw let policies wrap the tool calls those agents already make.
Kastra Recon: Discovers what actions an agent actually attempts in a codebase or environment, so policies can be authored from observed behavior instead of guesses.
Zero Implicit Trust Model: Nothing an agent asks to do runs until it is explicitly allowed by policy, aligning agent access with zero-trust principles.

Guardrails for Coding Agents: Prevent an autonomous coding agent from dropping tables, force-pushing to main, or leaking secrets during long runs.
Enterprise Rollout Approvals: Give security teams a control plane before letting employee-facing AI agents access internal APIs.
Regulated-Industry Agent Deployments: Provide the auditable authorization trail required in finance, healthcare, or government agent pilots.
Multi-Agent Systems: Enforce per-agent scopes so a research agent can read data but only a deploy agent can trigger production changes.
Incident Forensics: Reconstruct exactly what an AI agent was allowed or blocked from doing after a suspicious action.

Freemium

Open-source integration infrastructure for AI agents — 800+ OAuth-connected APIs, sandboxed runtimes, and dev/staging/prod promotion via MCP.

800+ OAuth Integrations: One connection lets agents call Salesforce, Stripe, Slack, HubSpot, Notion, GitHub, Linear, Zendesk and hundreds more via the Nango catalog.
MCP-Native Interface: Agents connect to mcp.velane.sh and drive discovery, code generation, execution, and deployment through a single MCP server.
Bun & Python Sandboxes: Every invocation runs in an isolated ephemeral runtime, so agent code can be tested safely without touching production state.
Dev / Staging / Prod Environments: Promote workflows through three environments with agent-issued publish_snippet calls and stable versioned HTTP endpoints.
Shared Credential Store: One OAuth connection per provider is reused across every team member's agent — no secret ever appears in code.
Invocation Logs & Audit Trail: Per-tenant execution logs let agents call get_logs to debug failures and give teams a full audit history.
Role-Based Access: Invoke, manage, and admin scopes control what each teammate's agent is allowed to do.
Self-Host or Hosted: Run Velane on your own infrastructure under AGPL-3.0 or use the managed mcp.velane.sh endpoint.

Agent-Built Stripe→HubSpot Automations: An agent in Cursor writes a Bun workflow that reads Stripe customers and pushes them into HubSpot, tests it in dev, and promotes to prod in one conversation.
Solo Developer Shipping SaaS Integrations: A single developer wires up Slack, Notion, and GitHub actions without maintaining an OAuth backend.
Multi-Tenant B2B Agent Products: A team runs Velane per tenant so each customer's agent has isolated credentials, sandboxes, and audit logs.
Safe Refactors of Live Workflows: Deploy a new version of a workflow to staging, verify with logs, then roll to prod with instant rollback.
MCP-First Prototyping: Prototype an entire integration pipeline from an IDE chat without spinning up backend infrastructure.