DepScope vs Shieldly: Which is Better in 2026?
A comprehensive comparison of DepScope and Shieldly covering features, pricing, use cases, and which tool is the right choice for your needs.
⚡ Quick Verdict
Choose DepScope if:
- →You need a broader feature set (8 features vs 6)
- →You need hallucination guard verifies packages against live registries in 19 ecosystems or typosquat detection by levenshtein distance to popular package names
Choose Shieldly if:
- →You want more affordable paid plans (from $19/mo)
- →You need detects wildcards, risky passrole, notaction traps and public principals or privilege escalation path detection across chained policies
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DepScope vs Shieldly: At a Glance
Pricing Comparison: DepScope vs Shieldly
Understanding the pricing differences between DepScope and Shieldly is crucial for making the right choice. Here's how their plans compare side by side.
Shieldly Pricing
💡 Pricing takeaway: Both DepScope and Shieldly offer free tiers, making it easy to try before you buy. Compare the specific plans to find the best value for your use case.
Feature-by-Feature Comparison
Here's how every feature from DepScope and Shieldly stacks up.
What Makes Each Tool Unique
🔵 Unique to DepScope
Features available in DepScope but not in Shieldly:
- ✓Hallucination guard verifies packages against live registries in 19 ecosystems
- ✓Typosquat detection by Levenshtein distance to popular package names
- ✓Live CVE intel from OSV, CISA KEV, EPSS, and the OpenSSF malicious feed
- ✓Severity, fix version, and migration path returned in one call
- ✓~300-token briefs replacing 4–8k tokens of scraping per decision (−74%)
- ✓8.5M packages, 19 ecosystems, 22 MCP tools
- ✓Remote MCP with zero install in Claude Desktop, Cursor, and Windsurf
- ✓Browser manifest scan plus a published 10-model hallucination benchmark
🟣 Unique to Shieldly
Features available in Shieldly but not in DepScope:
- ✓Detects wildcards, risky PassRole, NotAction traps and public principals
- ✓Privilege escalation path detection across chained policies
- ✓Graded score per analysis, usable as a workflow gate
- ✓Five analyses with no signup; browser-only linter and trust-policy explainer
- ✓Compliance panel mapping findings to CIS, SOC 2 and NIST
- ✓AWS account connect with auto-scan, webhooks and Slack alerts on the Team tier
Use Case Recommendations
Best for: DepScope
DepScope is a free MCP server that screens every package an AI agent suggests before it reaches npm install. It targets three specific failure modes. The first is hallucination: LLMs invent plausible-sounding package names, and DepScope verifies each one against live registries across 19 ecosystems and flags typosquats by Levenshtein distance to popular packages — the exact mechanism attackers rely on when they register a name a model is likely to hallucinate. The second is vulnerability exposure, covered by live lookups against OSV, CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities list, EPSS scores, the OpenSSF malicious-package feed, and a deprecated-package index, returning severity, fix version, and migration path in one call. The third is token cost: pre-curated briefs of roughly 300 tokens replace the four-to-eight thousand tokens an agent would otherwise burn scraping registry and CVE pages per decision, a reported 74% reduction. It covers 8.5 million packages across 19 ecosystems — npm, PyPI, Cargo, Go, Composer, Maven, NuGet, RubyGems, pub, hex, Swift, CPAN, Hackage, CRAN, conda, Homebrew, JSR, and Julia — with 22 MCP tools, no auth, no API key, and no rate limit. Remote MCP works out of the box in Claude Desktop, Cursor, and Windsurf, with a curl one-liner for everything else, and the SDKs are open source. There is also a browser paste-a-manifest scan and a published ten-model hallucination benchmark.
Ideal use cases:
- •Teams or individuals who need hallucination guard verifies packages against live registries in 19 ecosystems
- •Teams or individuals who need typosquat detection by levenshtein distance to popular package names
- •Teams or individuals who need live cve intel from osv, cisa kev, epss, and the openssf malicious feed
- •Teams or individuals who need severity, fix version, and migration path returned in one call
- •Anyone focused on mcp workflows
- •Anyone focused on supply-chain workflows
Best for: Shieldly
Shieldly analyses AWS policy documents — IAM policies, CloudFormation templates, S3, Lambda, SQS, KMS and SNS resource policies, plus cost policies — and returns a graded security assessment rather than a raw linter dump. The specific things it looks for are the ones that do not show up as syntax errors: wildcard actions and resources, risky PassRole grants, NotAction traps, public principals, and privilege escalation paths where a policy that looks bounded chains into something that is not. Each analysis returns a score, which is the part that makes it usable as a gate in a workflow rather than a report someone reads once. There is a genuinely low-friction on-ramp: paste an IAM policy JSON into the homepage and get a graded analysis with no signup at all, five free analyses before an account is needed, plus browser-only free tools — an IAM policy linter and a trust-policy explainer — that upload nothing and log nothing. Paid tiers add a cost advisor, analysis history, a compliance panel mapping findings to CIS, SOC 2 and NIST, a watchlist with alerts, a policy diff viewer, and at the team level a direct AWS account connection with automatic scanning, webhooks, Slack alerts and multi-account support.
Ideal use cases:
- •Teams or individuals who need detects wildcards, risky passrole, notaction traps and public principals
- •Teams or individuals who need privilege escalation path detection across chained policies
- •Teams or individuals who need graded score per analysis, usable as a workflow gate
- •Teams or individuals who need five analyses with no signup; browser-only linter and trust-policy explainer
- •Anyone focused on aws workflows
- •Anyone focused on iam workflows
🛡️ Other AI Security & Testing Tools to Consider
DepScope and Shieldly aren't the only options. Here are other popular tools in the same space:
Lineation
Security control plane for AI agents — zero-trust agent identity, LLM and MCP gateways, policy-as-code, and prompt-injection defense
Axtary
Payload-bound authorization for AI agents — human approval is cryptographically tied to the exact action, so a changed payload is denied
Tracecat
Open-source SOAR for AI-native security teams — agents, cases, and workflows with human approval gates
Trestle
Local secret scanner with an MCP server so coding agents check their own output
Agentmetry
Local, open-source flight recorder that tags AI agent activity with MITRE ATT&CK
ZeroLeaks
Continuous AI red teaming for agents, endpoints and MCP tools, with unlimited scans on every plan
Is one of these your tool?
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Frequently Asked Questions
Is DepScope better than Shieldly?
It depends on your needs. DepScope offers 8 key features including Hallucination guard verifies packages against live registries in 19 ecosystems and Typosquat detection by Levenshtein distance to popular package names, while Shieldly provides 6 features including Detects wildcards, risky PassRole, NotAction traps and public principals and Privilege escalation path detection across chained policies. DepScope uses a free model with a free tier, while Shieldly is freemium with free access available. Choose based on which features and pricing model align with your requirements.
Is DepScope cheaper than Shieldly?
DepScope doesn't have standard paid plans, while Shieldly starts at $19/month. Both tools offer free tiers, so you can try each before committing. Always check the official websites for the most current pricing.
Can I use DepScope and Shieldly together?
Yes, many users combine DepScope and Shieldly in their workflow. DepScope excels at hallucination guard verifies packages against live registries in 19 ecosystems, while Shieldly shines with detects wildcards, risky passrole, notaction traps and public principals. Using both allows you to leverage the strengths of each tool, though this means managing two subscriptions — though free tiers can help manage costs.
What's the main difference between DepScope and Shieldly?
While both are ai security & testing tools, DepScope emphasizes hallucination guard verifies packages against live registries in 19 ecosystems, whereas Shieldly is known for detects wildcards, risky passrole, notaction traps and public principals. The best choice depends on your specific workflow and feature priorities.
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