Data Protection and Cryptography vs DataStealth: Side-by-Side Comparison (2026)
Features, pricing, ratings, and pros & cons — compared head-to-head.
Data Protection and Cryptography is a free data masking tool. DataStealth is a commercial data masking tool by DataStealth. Compare features, ratings, integrations, and community reviews side by side to find the best data masking fit for your security stack.
CST VerdictBased on our analysis of NIST CSF 2.0 coverage, core features, company size fit, deployment model, here is our conclusion:
Data Protection and Cryptography
Developers and security teams building applications that need lightweight data masking without infrastructure overhead should reach for Data Protection and Cryptography. The free pricing and 630 GitHub stars signal active use in production environments where byte-level manipulation of sensitive data needs to happen inside application code rather than in a separate gateway. Skip this if your requirement is policy-driven data discovery across your entire data estate; this tool assumes you already know what to mask and where.
Mid-market and enterprise teams protecting sensitive data across fragmented infrastructure,on-prem databases, cloud APIs, legacy mainframes, and SaaS together,should evaluate DataStealth for its agentless inline masking that actually works across those disparate environments without forcing rip-and-replace. The platform covers all four NIST asset and data security functions (ID.AM, ID.RA, PR.DS, DE.CM) and deploys via gateway or proxy rather than requiring agents on every system, which matters when you're dealing with air-gapped or mainframe systems that block typical tooling. Skip this if your primary concern is detection and response; DataStealth prioritizes classification and protection over behavioral anomaly hunting.
