Top 5 AI Agent Control Planes in 2026 Compared on What Actually Controls Agents

The only platform here that covers all five pillars in one layer and works the same way on every model, framework, and cloud.

Traccia is an OpenTelemetry-native AI agent control plane. It does not ask you to build or host agents on its platform. You add its open-source Python or TypeScript SDK, or route model calls through its Gateway, and every agent you already run gets identity, observability, evaluation, runtime governance, and audit evidence from the same trace.

• Identity: every span carries the agent's ID and environment; agents and AI systems are tracked in a registry with owners and risk tiers.
• Observe: one OpenTelemetry trace per run, with model calls, tool calls, tokens, and cost; integrations for the OpenAI Agents SDK, LangChain, CrewAI, Claude Code, and Cursor.
• Evaluate: versioned prompts, datasets, LLM-as-judge and code scorers, and experiments that compare a baseline with a candidate.
• Govern: real-time policies such as Spend Cap, Model Boundary, Loop Cap, Refund Guard, and High-Risk Tool stop a call before it runs, through the SDK or in the request path through the Gateway, and fail closed. Refunds and purchases above a threshold can wait for a person in the Approvals inbox.
• Audit: a Decision Log for every policy decision, plus a Compliance Hub with reviews, incidents, evidence packs, and EU AI Act and HIPAA modules.

Limitations: a younger vendor than the hyperscalers on this list. The Gateway covers the OpenAI, Anthropic, and Gemini APIs; tool-level policies need the SDK. The Compliance Hub is on the Enterprise plan, and SAML single sign-on is on the roadmap.

The other genuinely vendor-neutral control plane on this list, built around deploying and promoting agents, at an enterprise price.

Lyzr launched Opencontroller as "the control plane for AI agent sprawl," supporting "any cloud, any framework, any models, any runtime." It runs alongside your agents inside your own cloud, with "no traffic to the vendor," and "refuses the call in the request path" when policy says no. Lyzr frames it as find, ship, and run: discover agents, models, and tools across your estate; evaluate and validate agents before they reach production; and monitor them in production. You bring existing containerized agents and apply identity, permissions, spend limits, and observability without rebuilding them, and you can stop, restrict, or isolate an agent that misbehaves.

Limitations: the entry price is $250K a year, with coding-agent coverage another $250K a year, so there is no way to start small. Its model centers on deploying and promoting containerized agents. Approvals on its pages are deployment approvals rather than per-action human review, and OpenTelemetry support and compliance-framework mapping are not documented on its product page.

The product that literally calls itself the control plane for agents, and the natural choice if your agents and identities live in Microsoft.

Microsoft positions Agent 365 as "the control plane to observe, secure, and govern AI agents." It became generally available for commercial customers on May 1, 2026. Its strength is identity: each agent gets a Microsoft Entra Agent ID, Conditional Access extends to agents, and a central registry lists them. Observability is built on OpenTelemetry, and evaluation and cost-anomaly tracking come from the companion Microsoft Foundry Control Plane.

Limitations: licensed per user, and Microsoft says it works best with Microsoft 365 E5. Registry sync for AWS and Google agents was in public preview at GA. Runtime blocking relies on Defender, Entra, and Intune rather than a per-action policy engine.

The most thoroughly documented pre-execution policy engine on this list, if your agents run through AWS.

AgentCore is AWS's platform for production agents, "any framework, any model." It does not market itself as a control plane, but it ships control-plane parts. Policy in AgentCore "intercepts all agent traffic through Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Gateways and evaluates each request against defined policies in the policy engine before allowing tool access," using Cedar or natural language. Temporal policies can require an approval before a transfer or keep a running total under a budget. Observability is OpenTelemetry-compatible and stored in CloudWatch, Evaluations reached general availability in March 2026, and the AWS Agent Registry in August 2026.

Limitations: policy governs tool calls that pass through AgentCore Gateway, and the control surface is AWS. Audit evidence is CloudWatch logs; we found no compliance-framework mapping. The Agent Registry launched in five regions.

Broad discovery and a real kill switch, governed from the platform many enterprises already run IT and risk on.

ServiceNow describes AI Control Tower as "the ServiceNow control plane for discovering, governing, securing, observing, and measuring AI across the enterprise." The May 2026 expansion added 30 integrations to discover AI across AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, SAP, Oracle, and Workday, risk frameworks aligned with NIST and the EU AI Act, runtime observability from its Traceloop acquisition, and cost attribution. Its AI Gateway applies real-time controls to MCP traffic, and a kill switch contains agents by revoking their credentials through Okta.

Limitations: you govern from the ServiceNow platform, and many new features are only in its new interface. Whether actions of agents outside ServiceNow can be blocked inline, before they execute, is not documented.