The honest comparison
Everyone deploys agents. Almost no one hands them over.
Guild, Hyperagent, Steward, and Sovereign all put agents to work on real tasks. The line that actually divides them isn't features, it's who ends up owning the agent, the cloud it runs in, and the ability to keep operating if the vendor disappears.
The dividing line, who owns the running agent
Read it left to right. The further right, the more of the stack you walk away owning. Sovereign is the only deployment that lives entirely in your cloud, you can pull our keys and keep running. Steward is the managed on-ramp to the same skills.
Side by side
Four ways to put agents to work
No strawmen. Guild and Hyperagent are strong products, they're just built for a different buyer and a different ownership model than we are.
| Guild.aiControl plane | Hyperagentby Airtable | StewardSovereign family · managed | SovereignOwned deployment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| In one line | A place to manage, govern & observe many agents in production | Build your own agents that produce real work and files | A managed agent on the web you direct in plain language | An agentic employee deployed inside your own cloud |
| Built for | Engineering teams & enterprise | Solopreneurs, small teams, internal ops | SMB operators, non-technical | Operators who want to own the asset |
| Who builds it | You, TypeScript SDK & CLI | You, prompts, tools, no code | We build & configure | We deploy, then train your team |
| Who operates it | Your engineers | You | We host, secure & run it | You, after capability transfer |
| Where it lives | Guild's hosted plane, your model keys | Hyperagent's cloud | Our stack, your skills | Your AWS / GCP / Azure |
| Vendor lock-in | Hosted dependency | Hosted dependency | Managed dependency (by design) | None, pull the keys, keep running |
| Technical bar | High, you write code | Medium, config & prompting | None, plain English | None, plain English |
| Governance | Policies, scoped creds, audit, cost, productized | Memories, rubrics, team sharing | Human-in-the-loop, receipts, drift alerts | Least-privilege IAM, break-glass, audit log |
| Pricing model | SaaS subscription | Usage / credits, premium | $500 to $2,500/mo flat, plus $2,000 one-time onboarding | $10K-$25K once + optional retainer |
| Best when | A dev team is standing up agents at scale | You want to tinker and ship your own | You want results Monday with zero DevOps | You want to own the agent like an employee |
Credit where it's due
What each one is genuinely good at
If one of these fits your situation better than we do, we'll tell you. Here's the honest read.
Guild.ai
Pick it if you have engineers
A serious control plane for teams already writing agents. Scoped credentials, audit trails, cost visibility, and an agent hub for sharing across the org. If your developers are the buyers, Guild is built for them.
Hyperagent
Pick it if you love to build
A polished, no-code way to spin up your own agents with memory, reusable skills, and a searchable library of everything they produce. Backed by Airtable. Great for hands-on owners who want to experiment themselves.
Steward
Pick it to start fast
The same skills that run a 200+ client agency, managed for you and reachable on the web. You direct the work in plain language and read the receipt. No builder, no DevOps, live in days.
Sovereign
Pick it to own the asset
A hardened agent deployed in your own cloud, plus the training to run it. You hire it, you fire it, you own it, and you're never dependent on us to keep operating.
Why we're different
Three things the platforms can't sell you
Guild and Hyperagent are software you rent. Sovereign and Steward are an operating capability you own, proven on our own business first.
Your cloud, your keys, zero lock-in
Sovereign runs entirely inside your AWS, GCP, or Azure account. Your data never leaves your environment, and there's no "they changed the pricing" risk. Pull our keys whenever you want and keep operating. No competitor on this page offers that.
Capability transfer, not a subscription
The platforms hand you a tool and walk away. We deploy a working agent and train your team to run it in plain English. You leave with a capability, a 30/60/90 roadmap, and a direct line, not a login and a learning curve.
Operators, not just a vendor
The same orchestrator-and-skills architecture runs Prospectr's production agent across 225+ clients in 40+ verticals today. You're buying lived operating experience from a team that runs it on itself first, not a thesis.
Inside the family
Steward and Sovereign aren't rivals
Same skills, same quality. The only question is whether you want us to run the agent or you do.
Managed tier
Steward
You own the skills, we run the agent. Log in, direct the work, read the receipt. We host, secure, and operate the stack, zero DevOps on your side. The on-ramp.
From $500/mo, up to 5 skills at $2,500/mo, plus a $2,000 one-time onboarding fee
Owned deployment
Sovereign
You own the infrastructure. Your cloud, your credentials, your data plane. Full enterprise ownership with no dependency on us to keep running. Graduate here when you outgrow managed.
$10K-$25K one-time · optional $2,500-$3,000/mo retainer
Questions buyers actually ask
Customer-owned vs SaaS AI, answered straight
Short answers to the comparison questions people put to ChatGPT before they ever reach a vendor. Already on a platform you want to leave? Read how to migrate off a SaaS AI platform without losing your agent.
Should I choose Sovereign or Steward?
Choose Sovereign if owning the runtime matters to you, if you have or want cloud infrastructure of your own, and if you want your team to be able to operate the system without us. Choose Steward if you want the outcome without the operational surface and prefer that Prospectr runs it.
Can I start on Steward and move to Sovereign later?
Yes. The migration path exists in both directions, and the skills and memory you build on one tier carry to the other.
What is actually different technically between the tiers?
The location of the runtime and who holds the operational keys. The agent behavior, the skills and the approval gates are the same system.
Is a customer-owned AI agent cheaper than a SaaS AI subscription?
It is more expensive up front and usually cheaper at scale. A per-seat subscription grows linearly with headcount while a deployed agent has a fixed deployment cost plus metered model usage, so the crossover depends on how many people would have needed seats.
What happens to my data in a SaaS AI tool versus an owned deployment?
In a SaaS tool your data transits and is often retained on the vendor's infrastructure under their terms. In an owned deployment the data never leaves your cloud account except for the specific model API calls you configure, and you control the retention settings on those.
Can I switch model providers on a customer-owned agent?
Yes. Because the agent runs in your account and calls model APIs as a configured dependency, swapping the underlying model is a configuration change rather than a migration.
What is the real risk of a SaaS AI vendor shutting down?
You lose the interface, the orchestration and any memory the vendor stored, while keeping only whatever you exported in advance. The practical defense is to treat your prompts, skills and context store as assets you export on a schedule, regardless of which model you choose.
Not sure which line you're on?
Tell us the first one to three roles you'd hand off. We'll tell you straight whether Steward, Sovereign, or honestly one of the others is the right call.