Best AI Control Planes of 2026

BAND creates robust interaction frameworks designed for enterprise-level applications of distributed AI agents. The platform facilitates immediate, collaborative interactions among both agents and humans, incorporating a runtime control plane that upholds policies, defines authority limits, and ensures transparency across diverse systems. Additionally, BAND empowers developers, engineering teams, and leaders of enterprise platforms who are managing multi-agent ecosystems spanning internal infrastructures, SaaS solutions, and environments shared with partners. This support enhances operational efficiency and fosters innovation within complex organizational structures.

MuleSoft provides a unified platform for enterprises that need to connect, manage, govern, and orchestrate AI agents, APIs, models, applications, and data at scale. It serves as an agentic control plane that helps organizations bring structure and visibility to fast-growing AI environments. Through MuleSoft Agent Fabric, companies can govern and coordinate agents regardless of where they were built, helping improve performance, compliance, and return on investment. MuleSoft Omni Gateway extends control across APIs, agents, and models, allowing teams to manage development, deployment, security, and policy enforcement from a single place. The platform also includes tools such as Agent Registry and Agent Scanners to identify, catalog, and monitor agents across major AI platforms. With Agent Broker and A2A support, MuleSoft helps agents collaborate across systems while giving businesses more control over how tasks are routed and completed. Organizations can also use MuleSoft MCP Support and Anypoint Connectors to transform existing applications, APIs, and systems into resources that AI agents can use. For developers, MuleSoft offers options ranging from natural language building with MuleSoft Vibes to pro-code development with Anypoint Code Builder. MuleSoft is designed for enterprises that want to scale agentic AI securely while maintaining governance, integration, observability, and operational consistency.

Forest is an operational backend for regulated companies that need to run human teams, AI agents, BPOs, LLMs, workflows, and suppliers in one governed environment. The platform connects databases, compliance providers, internal tools, specialized agents, and external systems while keeping data inside the customer’s infrastructure. Forest provides the shared control plane where business logic, workflows, permissions, RBAC, smart actions, and audit trails are managed. Teams can use Forest to run regulated workflows on top of existing KYC and KYB providers such as Sumsub, Onfido, Veriff, Persona, and Trulioo. It supports onboarding workflows that combine identity verification, business registry checks, beneficial-owner discovery, document checks, screening, risk-based routing, agent triage, and human review. Forest’s MCP support lets AI agents call the same workflows used by human operators while attaching audit records to each action. The platform is designed for agentic operations in regulated environments where every action by humans, agents, BPOs, LLMs, and workflows must remain traceable. Forest also provides an implementation method that maps the company’s ecosystem, connects data and suppliers, designs operator journeys, and brings workflows into production. By combining governed workflows, live data access, MCP-based agent execution, auditability, permissions, and compliance controls, Forest helps regulated companies scale operations safely.

Maetra serves as an AI governance control plane tailored for teams managing tool-utilizing AI agents. It identifies agents and their associated repositories, assesses risks based on established frameworks, and reviews potential actions against versioned governance policies prior to execution. Additionally, it facilitates human approvals, monitors prompts and tool interactions for runtime vulnerabilities, ensures ongoing tasks remain aligned with authorized objectives, and maintains unalterable records of decisions for auditing purposes. The system features several modules, including Govern, Secure, Task Guard, Interaction Guard, Discover, Comply, Audit, and Decision Intelligence, which can function independently or as part of a cohesive control plane, enhancing overall operational efficiency and compliance. Ultimately, this integrated approach ensures robust management and oversight of AI agent activities within organizational frameworks.

Arcade.dev is a platform designed for AI tool calling that empowers AI agents to safely carry out real-world tasks such as sending emails, messaging, updating systems, or activating workflows through integrations authorized by users. Serving as a secure authenticated proxy in line with the OpenAI API specification, Arcade.dev allows models to access various external services, including Gmail, Slack, GitHub, Salesforce, and Notion, through both pre-built connectors and custom tool SDKs while efficiently handling authentication, token management, and security. Developers can utilize a streamlined client interface—arcadepy for Python or arcadejs for JavaScript—that simplifies tool execution and authorization processes without complicating application logic with the need for credentials or API details. The platform is versatile, supporting secure deployments in the cloud, private VPCs, or local environments and features a control plane designed for managing tools, users, permissions, and observability. This comprehensive management system ensures that developers can maintain oversight and control while leveraging the power of AI to automate various tasks effectively.

WrangleAI is a robust platform designed for enterprises, providing essential oversight, control, and governance regarding their AI deployments and expenditures. Serving as a "control plane" for generative AI tools such as GPT-4, Claude, and Gemini, it allows organizations to track usage in real-time, gain insights into costs, monitor infrastructure, and implement spending limits to prevent excessive budgets. Additionally, WrangleAI enhances AI observability by enabling teams to discern which models are utilized, by whom, and for which objectives, while also offering intelligent workload routing to more economical models without compromising quality. The platform further incorporates governance mechanisms, including role-based access control and compliance assistance with standards like SOC 2 and ISO 27001, facilitating collaboration among finance, engineering, and leadership teams to enforce policies and receive actionable insights for optimizing AI investments. This comprehensive approach not only streamlines AI management but also empowers organizations to make informed decisions about their AI strategies.

Obot functions as an open-source AI infrastructure platform and Model Context Protocol (MCP) gateway, providing organizations with a centralized control system to discover, onboard, manage, secure, and scale MCP servers, which facilitate the connection of large language models and AI agents to various enterprise systems, tools, and data sources. It incorporates an MCP gateway, a catalog, an administrative console, and an optional integrated chat interface, all within a modern design that works seamlessly with identity providers like Okta, Google, and GitHub to implement access control, authentication, and governance policies across MCP endpoints, thus ensuring that AI interactions remain secure and compliant. Moreover, Obot empowers IT teams to host both local and remote MCP servers, manage access through a secure gateway, establish detailed user permissions, log and audit usage effectively, and create connection URLs for LLM clients, including tools like Claude Desktop, Cursor, VS Code, or custom agents, enhancing operational flexibility and security. Additionally, this platform streamlines the integration of AI services, making it easier for organizations to leverage advanced technologies while maintaining robust governance and compliance standards.

Lunar.dev serves as a comprehensive AI gateway and API consumption management platform designed to empower engineering teams with a singular, integrated control interface for overseeing, regulating, safeguarding, and enhancing all outbound API and AI agent interactions. This includes tracking communications with large language models, utilizing Model Context Protocol tools, and interfacing with external services across various distributed applications and workflows. It offers instantaneous insights into usage patterns, latency issues, errors, and associated costs, enabling teams to monitor every interaction involving models, APIs, and agents in real time. Furthermore, it allows for the enforcement of policies such as role-based access control, rate limiting, quotas, and cost management measures to ensure security and compliance while avoiding excessive usage or surprise expenses. By centralizing the management of outbound API traffic through features like identity-aware routing, traffic inspection, data redaction, and governance, Lunar.dev enhances operational efficiency. Its MCPX gateway further streamlines the management of multiple Model Context Protocol servers by integrating them into a single secure endpoint, providing robust observability and permission oversight for AI tools. Thus, the platform not only simplifies the complexity of API management but also significantly boosts the ability of teams to harness AI technologies effectively.

The Microsoft MCP Gateway serves as an open-source reverse proxy and management interface for Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers, facilitating scalable and session-aware routing along with lifecycle management and centralized oversight of MCP services, particularly within Kubernetes setups. Acting as a control plane, it adeptly directs requests from AI agents (MCP clients) to the corresponding backend MCP servers while maintaining session affinity, effectively managing multiple tools and endpoints through a singular gateway that prioritizes authorization and observability. Additionally, it empowers teams to deploy, update, and remove MCP servers and tools through RESTful APIs, enabling the registration of tool definitions and the management of these resources with security measures such as bearer tokens and role-based access control (RBAC). The architecture distinctly separates the management of the control plane, which includes CRUD operations on adapters, tools, and metadata, from the data plane's routing capabilities, which support streamable HTTP connections and dynamic tool routing, thus providing advanced features like session-aware stateful routing. This design not only enhances operational efficiency but also fosters a more secure environment for managing AI services.

Peta serves as an advanced control plane for the Model Context Protocol (MCP), streamlining, securing, governing, and overseeing how AI clients and agents interact with external tools, data, and APIs. This platform integrates a zero-trust MCP gateway, a secure vault, a managed runtime environment, a policy engine, human-in-the-loop approvals, and comprehensive audit logging into a cohesive solution, enabling organizations to implement nuanced access controls, safeguard raw credentials, and monitor all tool interactions conducted by AI systems. At the heart of Peta is Peta Core, which functions as both a secure vault and gateway, encrypting credentials, generating short-lived service tokens, verifying identity and compliance with policies for each request, managing the MCP server lifecycle through lazy loading and auto-recovery, and injecting credentials during runtime without revealing them to agents. Additionally, the Peta Console empowers teams to specify which users or agents can access particular MCP tools within designated environments, establish approval protocols, manage tokens, and review usage statistics and associated costs. This multifaceted approach not only enhances security but also fosters efficient resource management and accountability within AI operations.

Oz serves as a cloud-centered orchestration platform tailored for AI coding agents, empowering developers and teams to effortlessly execute, oversee, automate, and expand an unlimited number of parallel cloud coding agents without the need for custom infrastructure. This platform offers programmable, auditable workflows that streamline repetitive development tasks and intricate code modifications, ensuring full control over the process. Users can initiate agents through various interfaces including the CLI, web application, APIs, SDKs, Warp Terminal, or mobile devices. Additionally, Oz allows for the orchestration of numerous agents simultaneously, complete with integrated audit trails, session tracking, and comprehensive visibility, and provides the capability to monitor or engage with active agents within a shared control environment. The platform also accommodates flexible hosting options, whether on your own infrastructure or Warp's, while ensuring that each agent operates within secure, isolated environments. Oz produces tangible artifacts such as plans and pull requests, and is adept at managing multi-repo alterations, allowing agents to effectively synchronize extensive updates across vast codebases. With its robust features, Oz significantly enhances the efficiency of software development processes, making it an indispensable tool for modern development teams.

Barndoor serves as a robust management layer for data and access, ensuring that artificial intelligence systems interact securely with enterprise data and infrastructure. Acting as a unified control center, it oversees AI agents and applications, empowering organizations to set policies, automatically enforce access rules, and retain comprehensive oversight of AI tool operations within business frameworks. Moving beyond traditional identity-based permissions, Barndoor employs context-aware governance, which allows administrators to dictate the allowed actions of an AI agent by considering variables such as the user in charge of the agent, the system being accessed, the nature of the data, and the task at hand. This system assesses each AI request in real time to apply policies before actions are undertaken, thereby thwarting unsafe or unauthorized operations from affecting internal systems or altering sensitive data. Furthermore, by integrating such a nuanced approach to governance, organizations can enhance both security and compliance, ultimately fostering a more trustworthy AI ecosystem.

Agent Control represents a groundbreaking open-source framework designed to manage the behavior of AI agents on a large scale, setting a new benchmark for governance in this domain. It addresses the issue of disjointed and hardcoded checks by providing teams with a unified governance layer that enforces regulations at each step, all managed from a single control interface that can be updated dynamically without altering the agent's underlying code. Developers can easily designate any function as governable by applying the control() decorator, thereby transforming key decision points within an agent into independently regulated control points, each equipped with its own governance policies. When a decorated function runs, Agent Control assesses the input or output against the prevailing policy and generates a response that could be to deny, steer, warn, log, or allow the action. If a denial occurs, the SDK triggers a ControlViolationError, preventing any unsafe actions from being executed. This separation of policies from the actual code empowers developers to strategically position control hooks, while policy teams determine the enforcement specifics of those hooks, ensuring a collaborative approach to governance. The flexibility and robustness of Agent Control make it an invaluable tool for organizations looking to standardize AI agent governance effectively.

Preloop serves as an open-source control plane designed for AI agents that perform tangible actions. It integrates a multi-layered security approach featuring an MCP firewall for managing tool access, an AI model gateway that ensures cost-effectiveness, safety, and accountability, along with policy-as-code that incorporates human oversight, all while providing runtime session visibility and audit trails—all within a self-hosted environment. Given the rapid capabilities of AI agents to deploy code, modify infrastructure, manage financial transactions, access production data, and incur model costs almost instantaneously, Preloop empowers teams to regulate agent activities, monitor expenditures, and determine which actions necessitate human consent. It is compatible with a variety of tools such as OpenClaw, Hermes, Claude Code, Codex CLI, Cursor, Gemini CLI, Windsurf, Cline, OpenCode, and any agents that adhere to MCP standards. Additionally, access rules can evaluate not only the tool names but also arguments and context, utilizing CEL expressions to establish detailed conditions. Furthermore, teams have the flexibility to initiate with observability features and progressively introduce approval and denial protocols without the need for SDKs or extensive modifications to existing applications, thus streamlining the implementation process. This comprehensive approach ensures that organizations remain in control of their AI agents' functionalities and impacts.

Cloudflare AI Gateway serves as an advanced control plane for AI applications, designed to seamlessly connect to various models while dynamically managing request routing, usage tracking, billing, and logging through a single, cohesive interface. This platform empowers teams by providing enhanced visibility and oversight of their AI applications, enabling them to analyze user interactions through detailed analytics and logs, as well as efficiently manage application scalability through features like caching, rate limiting, request retries, and model fallback. By utilizing response caching and minimizing redundant API calls, AI Gateway effectively lowers costs and reduces latency, allowing frequent requests to be fulfilled directly from Cloudflare’s cache rather than relying on the original model provider. Additionally, it boosts reliability with adaptable controls that determine the timing and conditions under which model provider APIs are accessed, guided by various factors such as attributes, fallbacks, latency, cost, and availability. Importantly, routing rules can be modified directly from the dashboard or via API calls without necessitating redeployments or causing any service interruptions, ensuring a smooth operational experience. In this way, organizations can optimize their AI app performance while maintaining flexibility and control.

Data Flow Manager is an Agentic AI Control Plane for Apache NiFi Operations, built for enterprises running NiFi at real scale. Run, manage, and fix NiFi challenges across all clusters, environments, and flows using simple natural-language prompts. One platform. One control plane. Zero firefighting. DFM replaces fragmented UIs, brittle scripts, and reactive operations with centralized, AI-driven control, enabling NiFi teams to transition from manual operations to governed, autonomous execution.

Paperclip.inc is an AI company orchestration platform that helps businesses manage AI agents like a structured team. Instead of running many separate AI tools manually, users can manage every agent, task, approval, and routine from one organized workspace. The platform supports popular AI models and agents, including Claude, Codex, Gemini, Cursor, DeepSeek, Qwen, Kimi, GLM, MiniMax, OpenCode, Hermes, and more. Paperclip.inc gives each task business context by connecting goals from the company level down to teams, agents, and individual work items. Built-in budget controls prevent overspending by pausing agent work when a spending cap is reached. Permission settings allow users to decide which agent actions are automatic, approval-required, or blocked. The system also includes immutable audit logs and one-click rollback so teams can review decisions and recover from unwanted changes. Recurring routines can run on schedule in the cloud, allowing work such as reporting, monitoring, and operational digests to continue around the clock. With pre-built AI companies, EU hosting, managed updates, and open-source control plane technology, Paperclip.inc helps organizations scale agentic work without losing visibility or governance.

Humatron serves as a comprehensive AI workforce platform, transforming AI agents into secure and trusted digital workers that seamlessly integrate with various teams, tools, and business processes. Organizations have the ability to construct, recruit, tailor, train, oversee, and regulate these AI workers from a unified control dashboard, treating them more like digital personnel rather than mere assistants. Each AI worker can leverage advanced core agents, such as Claude, OpenAI, Manus, OpenClaw, Hermes, Cursor, or bespoke agent systems, which grants businesses the flexibility to interchange or update underlying models without altering the workforce layer. These AI workers are capable of operating independently, initiating and completing tasks, collaborating with team members, acquiring new skills, and communicating through established platforms like email, Slack, Teams, Zoom, and phone. The platform allows for the creation of builds that define reusable tools, rules, behaviors, and agent integrations, while each individual worker operates as a distinct instance tailored to meet the specific needs of a company, team, and role. This level of customization ensures that businesses can optimize their AI workforce to align perfectly with their operational goals.

SEAOTTER serves as a managed control plane specifically designed for the Hermes Agent on Google Cloud, providing isolated and consistently active agents without the need for VPS or SSH access. Users can easily create an agent via the dashboard, and within minutes, SEAOTTER sets up a dedicated namespace for each agent using a gVisor sandbox. The system allows for actions such as pausing, restarting, restoring, and reprovisioning through both API and user interface, all while offering integrated logs and metrics without the necessity of SSH access. Sensitive information is securely managed in a write-only section and stored within Google Secret Manager, with Hermes loading the secrets at startup, ensuring that users should refrain from sharing keys in chat. Upon signing up, users can connect using an organization-scoped so_ MCP key from Cursor, Claude, or Codex, while Hermes acts as the operational hub featuring various tools, memory management, and cron capabilities, all hosted in the us-central1 region. A trial period of seven days is available without requiring a credit card, allowing users to utilize one agent with limited resources (1 CPU / 4Gi / 8Gi). Following the trial, the cost for each always-on agent is $99 per month, with additional agents available for an extra $99 each, and custom solutions can be arranged through a consultation. This streamlined approach makes SEAOTTER an efficient choice for deploying agents in a managed cloud environment.

dstack simplifies GPU infrastructure management for machine learning teams by offering a single orchestration layer across multiple environments. Its declarative, container-native interface allows teams to manage clusters, development environments, and distributed tasks without deep DevOps expertise. The platform integrates natively with leading GPU cloud providers to provision and manage VM clusters while also supporting on-prem clusters through Kubernetes or SSH fleets. Developers can connect their desktop IDEs to powerful GPUs, enabling faster experimentation, debugging, and iteration. dstack ensures that scaling from single-instance workloads to multi-node distributed training is seamless, with efficient scheduling to maximize GPU utilization. For deployment, it supports secure, auto-scaling endpoints using custom code and Docker images, making model serving simple and flexible. Customers like Electronic Arts, Mobius Labs, and Argilla praise dstack for accelerating research while lowering costs and reducing infrastructure overhead. Whether for rapid prototyping or production workloads, dstack provides a unified, cost-efficient solution for AI development and deployment.

Ensure that AI implementation complies with corporate policies through our user-friendly AI governance control plane. By simplifying the process, you can enhance visibility and securely foster AI adoption with SurePath AI. The platform seamlessly integrates with your existing security infrastructure, private models, and enterprise data sources. It supports SSO, SCIM, and SIEM as core features. Monitor AI utilization at the network level while managing access and scrutinizing requests to prevent sensitive data leaks. Additionally, it allows for the redaction of sensitive information within requests directed at public models. The ability to modify requests in real-time promotes efficiency while minimizing risks. You can also redirect traffic to your private AI models, utilizing SurePath AI's access controls to create a custom-branded enterprise AI portal. With policy-driven controls, user requests are enriched with only the data they are authorized to access, resulting in responses that are contextually relevant to your business needs. Furthermore, user prompts are automatically optimized to ensure outputs align with your organization's strategic objectives while maintaining compliance.

Agent 365 is Microsoft’s new enterprise framework for managing AI agents with the same rigor and structure used for human users. It centralizes oversight by providing a registry that surfaces every agent operating within your organization, including identity-secured agents, internally registered agents, and automatically detected shadow agents. The platform enhances security by extending Microsoft Defender protections, Entra identity access controls, and Purview governance policies to all agents. Agent 365 integrates with Microsoft 365, Power Apps, Power Automate, and Power BI, enabling agents to participate in workflows, analytics, and productivity tasks just like any other digital worker. Using Work IQ, organizations can equip agents with deep contextual understanding sourced from company data, relationships, and internal systems. This unified approach simplifies deployment, strengthens compliance, and improves operational insight for IT teams. Through Microsoft’s Frontier early access program, IT admins can explore and activate Agent 365 directly in the Admin Center. Microsoft built Agent 365 to support the rapidly growing role of AI agents across enterprise environments, ensuring they remain secure, governed, and aligned with organizational standards.

PaletteAI is a comprehensive platform for managing enterprise AI infrastructure that aims to enhance the speed of deploying, scaling, governing, and operationalizing AI workloads across various environments, including data centers, cloud, and edge computing. It offers a flexible, turnkey solution that empowers platform, DevOps, and AI/data science teams to create repeatable AI stacks that comply with governance requirements, integrating all necessary elements from storage to machine learning frameworks, thus eliminating the need for tedious manual configurations and enabling teams to swiftly establish new AI environments with just one click. Acting as a centralized control plane, it simplifies the entire lifecycle of AI infrastructure by allowing users to build, deploy, and oversee AI environments while maximizing hardware efficiency, maintaining security and policy protocols, and facilitating ongoing operations such as resource management and monitoring. By using PaletteAI, organizations can significantly reduce the time and effort needed to manage their AI infrastructure, allowing teams to focus more on innovation rather than maintenance.

JetStream Security serves as a governance platform focused on security, enabling enterprises to gain comprehensive visibility, control, and responsibility over their AI systems by transforming them from unclear, disjointed applications into managed and traceable infrastructures. Functioning as a unified control center, it integrates identity management, operational governance, monitoring, and financial management into one cohesive system, empowering organizations to “monitor every AI action, associate actions with accountable individuals, and ensure workflows stay within authorized limits” while applying policies during runtime. Furthermore, it incorporates agentic identity, linking human, agentic, and non-human identities to specific actions and access rights, thereby ensuring that each invocation, tool usage, or workflow can be tracked and governed according to least-privilege access standards. By maintaining ongoing runtime governance, JetStream continuously evaluates actual AI behavior against pre-approved frameworks, utilizing immutable logging and real-time monitoring to identify deviations, thereby reinforcing security and compliance. This robust approach not only enhances accountability but also supports organizations in navigating the complexities of AI governance effectively.

The Aditya Protocol serves as a control plane for operations that have been reviewed, specifically designed for teams engaging with AI agents, scripts, CI/CD processes, internal tools, and automation that are close to production environments. This innovative solution enables technical teams to request, review, approve, execute, and document crucial operational activities under human supervision, incorporating features such as reviewed command flows, rationale prompts, approval statuses, run histories, artifacts, access-token guidance, node-token guidance, settings controls, and workflows focused on providing evidence. Currently, the Aditya Protocol is available for a limited supervised pilot program involving select trusted technical reviewers and service-provider partners, and it is explicitly not intended as a wide-scale public release, certification tool, legal advisory resource, or a substitute for human operational judgment. As such, the protocol emphasizes the importance of human oversight in all operational processes it facilitates.