Agents Shipgate vs Braintrust
Braintrust is a hosted platform for scoring model outputs and monitoring runtime behavior. Agents Shipgate is a local CLI and GitHub Action that scans the declared tool surface before release. Different layers, often shipped together.
Use Braintrust for eval and observability infrastructure
Braintrust ships a hosted SaaS for organizing test sets, scoring model outputs (custom and built-in scorers), comparing experiments, and recording runtime traces. It fits when you want managed eval infrastructure, dashboards, and team collaboration around model quality.
Use Agents Shipgate for static release-readiness review
Agents Shipgate reads a checked-in shipgate.yaml
manifest plus local tool sources (MCP exports, OpenAPI specs,
SDK/framework metadata) and produces a deterministic Tool-Use
Readiness Report. It runs locally, never invokes the model,
and emits no scanner telemetry by default. Output formats are
Markdown, JSON, and SARIF.
| Dimension | Braintrust | Agents Shipgate |
|---|---|---|
| Deployment | Hosted SaaS | Local CLI + GitHub Action |
| Primary input | Test sets, runtime traces | Manifest plus tool sources |
| Runs the model? | Yes | No |
| Sends data off-machine? | Yes (hosted) | No by default |
| License | Commercial | Apache-2.0 |
| Catches: failing test scorer | Yes | No |
| Catches: missing approval policy on a write tool | No | Yes |
| Catches: wildcard tool source in a PR | No | Yes |
The pattern teams converge on
If you already use Braintrust for model evals, Agents Shipgate slots in as the release gate Braintrust does not cover: static review of the tool surface itself, run locally in CI before any model invocation. If you do not yet have a hosted eval platform, Agents Shipgate is a no-account, no-telemetry starting point for the release-readiness layer; you can add Braintrust later for the behavior layer.