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Comparison

Privian vs Skyflow

Skyflow and Privian solve different but adjacent privacy problems. This page is written to help security, architecture and procurement teams decide when they need a privacy vault, a privacy-first LLM gateway, or both.

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Quick summary

At a glance

Choose Privian if your primary requirement is prompt privacy — masking supported personal and sensitive entities before prompts reach an LLM, with rehydration in the response.

Skyflow

Choose Skyflow if your primary requirement is a data privacy vault — tokenising and storing structured sensitive data with residency controls and persistent vault storage.

Privian

Choose Privian if your primary requirement is prompt privacy — masking supported personal and sensitive entities before prompts reach an LLM, with rehydration in the response.

Definitions

What each product is

Comparison

Side-by-side comparison

Grounded in publicly available product positioning. Where we are not confident, we say so.

CapabilitySkyflowPrivian
Primary positioningData privacy vault for structured sensitive data with tokenisation and residency controlsPrivacy-first LLM gateway with prompt-level data protection
Privacy-first routingNot a stated focusYes, core design goal
PII maskingTokenisation of structured fields at storage timeYes — supported personal/secret entities masked before provider call
Prompt-level data protectionNot a stated focus; vault sits behind the application, not on the prompt pathYes — deterministic placeholders, rehydrated in the response
BYOKSee vendor docsYes — provider keys stored AES-GCM, decrypted in-process
Gateway modelNot an LLM gateway; vault API consumed by applicationsHosted gateway with a small JSON contract
Prompt injection protectionNot applicableNo claim
Tool / function callingNot applicableNot currently supported
Native streamingNot applicableNot currently supported (artificial chunking only)
Open sourceSee vendor docsClosed source (beta)
ObservabilityVault access logs and policy audit trailsStructural counters only; raw prompts never persisted
Pricing modelSee vendor pricingUsage-based plans, see /pricing
Enterprise orientationEnterprise-first; residency and compliance posture documented by vendorDesigned for privacy-sensitive teams; HIPAA/SOC 2/PCI not claimed
Best fitTeams that need a persistent privacy vault for structured sensitive dataTeams that need supported PII masking and provider-agnostic BYOK routing

Architecture

Architecture differences

The application sends a raw prompt to the gateway. The gateway replaces sensitive values with placeholders and forwards the masked prompt to the LLM provider. The provider returns a response with placeholders. The gateway rehydrates placeholders to the original values before returning the response to the application. The provider never sees original values.ApplicationRaw promptPrivian gatewayMask · Route · RehydrateLLM providerSees masked prompt onlypromptmasked promptresponse w/ placeholdersrehydratedBYOK trust boundary
Prompt path through a privacy-first gateway— Original values never cross the BYOK boundary.

Skyflow

Skyflow's architecture centres on a persistent vault. Applications send sensitive fields to the vault, receive opaque tokens, and store only tokens in their own databases. Detokenisation, residency and access policies are enforced by the vault. The model is storage-centric and structured-data-centric.

Privian

Privian's architecture is request-centric and stateless on the prompt path. Each request runs through detection → masking → BYOK provider call → rehydration in a single in-memory pass. Raw prompts and responses are not persisted; the goal is to minimise what reaches the LLM provider rather than to store sensitive data.

Privacy & security

Privacy and security positioning

What Privian optimises for

  • Prompt-level data protection
  • Supported PII and sensitive-value masking
  • Privacy-first routing with BYOK
  • No raw-prompt persistence; structural observability only

What Privian does NOT claim

  • Prompt injection or jailbreak defence
  • HIPAA / SOC 2 / PCI certification
  • Tool / function calling security guarantees
  • Downstream model behaviour guarantees

When to choose

When to choose Skyflow

  • You need a vault-first architecture for structured sensitive data (PII, PHI, PCI)
  • Tokenisation and persistent vault storage are core requirements
  • Data residency controls over stored records are a procurement requirement
  • Your privacy boundary is your own databases and downstream analytics, not LLM traffic specifically

When to choose

When to choose Privian

  • Your privacy boundary is the prompt — what reaches OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and other LLM providers
  • You need supported PII / sensitive-entity masking applied before the provider call
  • You want BYOK routing with no raw-prompt retention and deterministic rehydration
  • You are building privacy-sensitive AI features (support copilots, internal assistants, SaaS AI) over existing data stores

Framework

Evaluation decision

  1. 01

    Assess Skyflow

    Choose Skyflow if your primary requirement is a data privacy vault — tokenising and storing structured sensitive data with residency controls and persistent vault storage.

  2. 02

    Assess Privian

    Choose Privian if your primary requirement is prompt privacy — masking supported personal and sensitive entities before prompts reach an LLM, with rehydration in the response.

  3. 03

    Validate scope

    Confirm required capabilities and current limitations against the evaluation criteria.

Transparency

Honest limitations

Privian is in active development. Listing what it does not do today is part of how we earn trust — expect this list to shrink over time.

  • No tool / function calling in the current beta
  • No native provider token streaming yet (stream: true is artificially chunked)
  • No OpenAI SDK drop-in compatibility
  • No claim to detect or block prompt injection or jailbreaks
  • No Norwegian fødselsnummer masking yet
  • No custom user-defined entity types yet
  • No HIPAA / SOC 2 / PCI certifications at this time

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Is Skyflow an LLM gateway?
No. Skyflow is a data privacy vault. It stores structured sensitive data and returns tokens to applications. It is not positioned as a gateway that sits in front of LLM providers on the prompt path.
Does Skyflow mask prompts before model calls?
Not as a primary capability. Skyflow's model is to tokenise data at storage time so applications hold tokens instead of raw values. Whether a prompt sent to an LLM contains sensitive content depends on what the application assembles before the call.
Can Skyflow and Privian be used together?
Yes. A common shape is application → Skyflow (vault for structured sensitive data) → Privian (privacy-first LLM gateway on the prompt path) → LLM provider. The vault protects persistent storage; the gateway protects what reaches the model.
When do I need a privacy vault?
When your primary risk is structured sensitive data living in your own systems — customer records, payment data, health information — and you want to centralise tokenisation, access policy and residency controls for that storage.
When do I need a privacy-first LLM gateway?
When your primary risk is what reaches an LLM provider in prompts — support tickets, internal documents, user messages — and you want supported entities masked before the provider call and rehydrated in the response.
What is the difference between tokenisation and prompt masking?
Tokenisation replaces a sensitive value with an opaque token at storage time; the mapping lives in the vault and the application stores the token. Prompt masking replaces supported entities with deterministic placeholders at request time, calls the model with the masked prompt, and rehydrates the response in-process — nothing about the prompt is persisted.
Does Privian block prompt injection?
No. Privian focuses on prompt-level data protection — masking supported personal and sensitive values before they reach the model. It does not claim to detect or block prompt injection or jailbreaks. If injection defence is your primary requirement, a dedicated LLM firewall is a better fit.
Does Privian support native streaming?
Not in the current beta. The gateway accepts stream: true and returns artificially chunked text, but it does not pass through native provider token streams yet.

Related

Related resources

Other comparisons

Plans & pricing

See pricing for Privian — a privacy-first alternative to Skyflow

BYOK, zero retention, prompt-level masking. Pricing is published transparently; Privian is in beta and limits may change.

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