Both evaluate agents offline and in production, and both can block content during a run. Galileo, now Splunk Agent Observability, puts its guardrails in an open-source policy layer and sells through Splunk with annual billing; Maxim AI is self-serve, with voice simulation and prompt versioning, and blocks through its Bifrost gateway. How you buy and whether you run Splunk often decide it.[3][4]
Galileo is now sold as Splunk Agent Observability after Cisco completed its acquisition in May 2026; Maxim AI is an independent, hosted platform for simulating, evaluating and tracing agents. Both can block content during a run: Galileo through Agent Control, which is open source, and Maxim AI through guardrails in its Bifrost Enterprise gateway. Galileo lists no free tier and bills annually; Maxim AI has a free tier and per-seat monthly plans.
| Decision factor | Galileo | Maxim AI |
|---|---|---|
| Ownership | Acquired by Cisco (completed May 2026); sold as Splunk Agent Observability since 7 August 2026 | Independent; $3M seed led by Elevation Capital in 2024 |
| Run-time blocking | Agent Control: model and tool inputs and outputs, no agent code changes; Apache-2.0 | Bifrost Enterprise guardrails: inputs, outputs and MCP tool-call arguments and results |
| Prompt tooling | Prompts and playground; version control not documented | Versions, deployment rules, playground and prompt optimisation |
| Simulation | Experiments, including multi-turn experiments since June 2026 | Multi-turn text and voice simulation |
| Self-hosting | On-premises, including air-gapped (commercial) | Enterprise in-VPC, fully isolated or data plane only |
| Free tier | None listed for Agent Observability | Up to 3 seats, 10k logs a month, 3-day retention |
| Paid pricing | From $100 a month per 1.2 million spans a year, billed annually | Professional: $29 per seat a month, 100k logs |
| Capability | Galileo | Maxim AI | Prefactor |
|---|---|---|---|
| Observe | |||
| LLM call tracing | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Multi-step agent tracing (tool calls, nested spans) | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Cost tracking | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| OpenTelemetry support | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Evaluate | |||
| Offline evals (datasets, experiments) | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Online evals on production traffic | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| LLM-as-a-judge scoring | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Code-based evaluators | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Human review and annotation | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Prompt versioning and playground | Partial | ✓ | — |
| Act on findings | |||
| Runtime controls on live agent actions | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Gateway or proxy in the request path | — | ✓ | — |
| Licence and deployment | |||
| Open source | Partial | Partial | Partial |
| Self-hosting | ✓ | ✓ | Partial |
Cisco completed its acquisition of Galileo in May 2026, and since 7 August 2026 the product is sold as Splunk Agent Observability inside Splunk Observability Cloud. Customers onboarded before that date use Galileo's documentation and app; later customers use Splunk's. The old pricing page redirects to Splunk. For teams already sending telemetry to Splunk, agent evaluation in the same place is a strong reason to choose it; for others, expect a sales-led, annual purchase.
Maxim AI is independent and sells self-serve monthly plans. Its homepage changed in October 2026 to lead with Bifrost, its open-source gateway, and the evaluation platform moved under getmaxim.ai/evals. Its public changelog shows no dated 2026 entries and the newest monthly update post covers December 2025, so check recent changes directly with the vendor.
Deployment options differ as well. Splunk Agent Observability runs as SaaS in Splunk Observability Cloud or on-premises, including air-gapped, as a commercial deployment. Maxim AI's evaluation platform deploys in your VPC on AWS, GCP or Azure on Enterprise, fully isolated or as a data plane only, while Bifrost Enterprise can run in a VPC, on-premises, air-gapped or hybrid. If air-gapped evaluation is a requirement, Galileo documents it for the whole platform; Maxim AI documents it for the gateway.
This pair is unusual in that both vendors document blocking during a run. Galileo's Agent Control evaluates model and tool inputs and outputs while the agent runs and can block prompt injection, personal data leaks and harmful content using rules set in one place, without changes to agent code. It replaced the older Protect product in June 2026, and its core has been open source under Apache-2.0 since March 2026, so you can self-host it from the repository. The hosted version is documented as an enterprise feature.
Maxim AI's blocking sits in its Bifrost gateway. Guardrails check inputs, outputs and MCP tool-call arguments and results, and can block, redact or transform content. They are listed as a Bifrost Enterprise feature; the free Bifrost release does not include them. Bifrost also adds budgets and rate limits per virtual key, team and customer.
Neither documents approval workflows for agent actions. The architectural choice is whether you want checks in a policy layer around the agent (Galileo) or in the gateway that model and MCP traffic passes through (Maxim AI).
Galileo offers preset and custom LLM judges, Luna-2 small models as lower-cost evaluators, Autotune to adjust judges from feedback, Python code metrics and annotation queues, generally available since August 2026. One limit: the Splunk-hosted SaaS edition supports five preset Luna evaluators and no custom code evaluators, which are available on-premises only. Its prompts page does not document version control.
Maxim AI runs pre-built, custom LLM, JavaScript or Python code, and API-based evaluators, plus human raters with guidelines. Its prompt tooling includes versions, deployment rules that release changes without code changes, and optimisation. Its multi-turn simulation covers text and voice agents, with integrations for LiveKit and ElevenLabs. It also lists simulation for AWS Bedrock Agents and Glean agents, built on platforms rather than in your own code.
As of 20 October 2026, Splunk lists Agent Observability from $100 a month per 1.2 million spans a year, billed annually, including 500 million Luna tokens and 5 Luna fine-tuning runs a year. No free tier is listed for this product. Maxim AI's Developer tier is free for up to 3 seats and 10k logs a month with 3-day retention; Professional is $29 per seat a month with 100k logs and Business $49 per seat a month with 500k logs, with overage at $1 per 10k logs. Galileo's price grows with traffic; Maxim AI's grows with seats. See Splunk's pricing and Maxim AI's pricing.
We sell the layer this section describes. Read it with that in mind.
Stated plainly, since Prefactor publishes this page: Prefactor is an agent evaluation platform that scores each step of a run and acts on what it finds through runtime policies on tool calls and data access, approval holds for risky actions and a kill switch scoped to a run, an agent or a team. Galileo's Agent Control and Maxim AI's Bifrost guardrails both block content during a run; neither documents approval holds. Prefactor has no prompt playground or prompt registry and its platform is hosted, so for on-premises or air-gapped deployment Galileo is the better pick, and for prompt iteration Maxim AI is. See the full comparison of 15 platforms.
Reviewed against public product and documentation pages on October 20, 2026. If a vendor has changed a feature, product name, or positioning since then, send a correction and we will update it. Numbered source links in the page body point to the ordered sources below.
Prefactor scores each step of every agent run and can hold or stop an action when a score says it should not happen. Start on the free tier: 5,000 spans a month, no credit card required.
Prefactor helps teams observe, evaluate, and improve their AI agents in production, across every framework and provider.