Formal vs SASE and secure web gateways

Inspection of agent model calls, APIs, tools, and production data.

SASE and web gateway

Criteria	Formal	Zscaler	Cloudflare
Agent identity and human attribution	Documented: Agents linked to their operator	Documented: Enterprise identity and agent authorization	Documented: Access identities and MCP callers
Device and workload context	Documented: Identity, device and workload context	Documented: Identity, posture and application context	Documented: Identity, device and network context
HTTP and API policies	Documented: HTTP request policies and rewriting	Documented: Routed web and API inspection	Documented: Gateway and Access HTTP policies
LLM traffic inspection	Documented: Model request and response inspection	Documented: Supported AI prompt and response inspection	Documented: Routed model analytics and guardrails
Prompt and response masking	Documented: Mask or block sensitive content	Documented: DLP and AI content controls	Documented: DLP flagging and blocking by feature
MCP server governance	Documented: Remote HTTPS MCP governance	Documented: MCP and agent traffic brokering	Documented: Remote MCP portals and curated tools
SQL action authorization	Documented: Per-statement policies	Not documented: Native SQL authorization not documented	Not documented: Connectivity, not SQL authorization
Database masking and result filtering	Documented: Mask fields and filter results	Not documented: Web and AI DLP, not native SQL masking	Not documented: Native SQL transformations not documented
Full comparison		Read Formal vs Zscaler ›	Read Formal vs Cloudflare ›