Lightbeam Data Classification vs Tanium Reveal: Side-by-Side Comparison (2026)

Lightbeam Data Classification

Mid-market and enterprise teams drowning in unclassified data across clouds and databases should start with Lightbeam Data Classification because its identity-centric approach actually connects who accessed what to what the data contains, eliminating the guesswork that kills most classification projects. The Data Identity Graph automatically tags PCI/PII/PHI across structured and unstructured data while continuously scanning databases without manual effort, addressing the ID.AM and PR.DS gaps that leave most organizations unable to answer basic inventory questions. Skip this if your data lives almost exclusively on-premises in legacy systems; the cloud and SaaS integrations are where Lightbeam's strengths live.

Tanium Reveal

Mid-market and enterprise security teams with distributed endpoints and strict compliance obligations should start here; Tanium Reveal finds PII, PHI, and regulated data in place across Windows, Mac, and Linux without staging or copying files, which cuts both discovery time and data movement risk. Pre-built content for GDPR, HIPAA, PCI, and CCPA means you're not building detection rules from scratch, and the SQLite indexing model scales better than some competitors when datasets are large. Skip this if you need cloud-native data classification or heavy integration with your existing DLP stack; Tanium Reveal is endpoint-focused and on-premises only.