What Anthropic Managed Agents Is
Anthropic’s Managed Agents is an official hosted execution service for Claude agents. At $0.08 per session hour, it handles the infrastructure complexity of running autonomous agents: sandboxed code execution, session state management, credential handling, tool definition, checkpointing, and end-to-end tracing. The pitch is speed: go from idea to production agent in days instead of months.
It’s the official Anthropic answer to “I just want to run Claude agents without building infrastructure.”
What Sentrely Is
Sentrely is an independent control plane for Claude Code agents. It provides the governance layer: per-agent RBAC policies that restrict what agents can access, human-in-the-loop approval workflows via Slack and Telegram, immutable audit trails designed for compliance auditors, and cost controls that prevent runaway agent spend.
Sentrely isn’t competing with Anthropic’s execution layer — it’s the governance layer that sits on top of it.
The Gap in the Official Service
Anthropic Managed Agents excels at execution infrastructure. What it doesn’t provide:
Per-agent access control. The managed service runs your agents with the permissions you configure at setup. There’s no policy engine that says “agent A can read S3 bucket X but not Y” or “agent B can push to feature branches but requires approval for main.” All agents run under the same credential scope.
Human approval gates. If your agent wants to delete a production database table, the managed service will execute that operation if the agent has the permission. There’s no mechanism to pause and route that specific decision to a human in Slack before it runs.
Compliance audit trail. Anthropic’s tracing gives you end-to-end session visibility for debugging. That’s different from the structured, immutable, field-level audit logs that SOC 2 and HIPAA auditors require. A compliance-grade audit log isn’t an afterthought — it’s a specific artifact with specific fields and retention requirements.
Multi-agent isolation. When you’re running 10 agents on the same project, the managed service doesn’t enforce that agent A can’t access agent B’s resources. Sentrely enforces per-agent, per-resource isolation by policy.
The Comparison
| Dimension | Anthropic Managed Agents | Sentrely |
|---|---|---|
| Session infrastructure | Yes — handled entirely | You run your own agents |
| Sandboxed code execution | Yes | No |
| Session state / checkpointing | Yes | No |
| Credential management | Yes — built-in | Via Gateway credential vending |
| Per-agent RBAC | No | Yes — per-resource policies |
| Human approval gates | No | Yes — Slack + Telegram |
| Immutable audit trail | Debugging traces | Compliance-grade logs |
| SOC 2 / HIPAA evidence | No | Yes |
| Multi-agent isolation | No | Yes |
| Token budgets (per session) | Session pricing | Hard per-session budget caps |
| Kill switch | Session termination | Yes + fleet management |
| Vendor lock-in | Anthropic only | Claude-focused, portable design |
| Pricing | $0.08/session hour + API costs | Starter $49/mo flat |
| Self-hosted / VPC option | No | Enterprise tier |
When to Use Anthropic Managed Agents
The official service is the right choice when:
- You want the absolute fastest path to a running Claude agent
- Session infrastructure (sandboxing, state, checkpointing) is your main concern
- Governance requirements are light — no compliance audits, no human approval workflows
- You want first-party support from Anthropic on execution issues
When to Use Sentrely
Sentrely is the right choice when:
- Individual agents need different permission scopes
- Operations like production deploys require human sign-off
- You need SOC 2 or HIPAA audit evidence for AI agent operations
- Per-agent cost attribution and hard caps matter
- You don’t want a single vendor (Anthropic) controlling both your model and your governance infrastructure
Can You Use Both?
Yes, and this is actually a natural architecture. Anthropic Managed Agents handles the execution layer (sandboxing, session state, credential vending for Anthropic services). Sentrely sits above it handling governance (what agents can access, what requires approval, what gets logged for compliance).
If Anthropic’s execution service meets your infrastructure needs and Sentrely meets your governance needs, using both is a reasonable production architecture. The risk to monitor: as Anthropic adds governance features to their managed service, the overlap will grow.
The Vendor Independence Question
One consideration that doesn’t appear in feature tables: when your model provider and your governance layer are the same company, policy changes in that relationship affect both. Sentrely is an independent control plane — changes to Anthropic’s pricing, terms, or product direction don’t simultaneously affect your governance infrastructure. For organizations where auditability and independence matter, keeping execution and governance in separate vendor relationships is a meaningful architectural choice.