Sardine vs Sift

Sardine and Sift both score risk in real time and both now sell AI for fraud teams, so they end up on the same shortlist. They come from different places. Sardine built a platform for financial crime in fintech and banking, covering fraud, onboarding, and AML. Sift built fraud decisioning for digital businesses at large scale, then extended into account abuse.

Sardine vs Sift at a glance

Sardine calls itself an agentic financial crime platform. It covers onboarding (KYC, KYB, document and bank verification), fraud (payments, card issuing, merchant monitoring, account takeover, bots), and AML (transaction monitoring, sanctions screening, customer risk rating, case management, sponsor bank monitoring). It sells ten AI agents and runs Sonar, a consortium that shares risk signals across members. Customers named on its site include FIS, Nubank, Gusto, and Deel.

Sift is a fraud decisioning platform. Its products are Payment Protection and Account Defense, plus the Sift Score API for teams that bring Sift's signals into their own models. It says it protects more than 700 brands and processes more than 1 trillion events a year. Named customers include Patreon, Yelp, and Kickstarter, and in fintech, Remitly and CoinJar.

Product scope

Sardine. Wider scope for regulated companies. One vendor can cover the identity checks at signup, fraud scoring on every payment, and the AML program behind it, with case management for alerts. That matters to a fintech or bank that answers to a sponsor bank or regulator and wants fewer vendors.

Sift. Narrower and deeper on fraud and abuse. Payment fraud, account takeover, and fake account creation are its core use cases, sold across e-commerce, SaaS, iGaming, food delivery, travel, and fintech. Sift does not list KYC or AML products, so a regulated fintech would pair it with separate vendors for those.

AI agents and analyst tools

Sardine. Ten agents: OSINT Search, Data Analyst, Rule Assistant, Transaction Monitoring, Business Due Diligence, Doc KYC, PEP Screening, Graph Analyst, Sanctions Screening, and SAR Generation. At its Series C, Sardine reported its KYC agent auto-resolving 88% of onboarding edge cases. The agents are designed to resolve alerts inside Sardine's own workflows.

Sift. A lighter, console-centered approach. ActivityIQ uses generative AI to summarize user activity for investigators. The Attack Detection Agent, the first part of Sift's Fraud Attack Defense Suite, tracks alerts from detection to resolution, visualizes attacks against baselines, and groups alerts into single investigations with audit logs. Sift also offers workflows and a decisioning engine to automate low-risk decisions.

Data and detection

Sardine. Device intelligence and behavioral biometrics are central to its fraud product, with Sonar adding signals shared across member companies such as FIS and Deel.

Sift. Its network is the headline: more than 1 trillion events a year across its customers, used to recognize linked accounts and coordinated abuse. Newer features include ThreatClusters, which combines customer and peer models, and RiskWatch, which adjusts block rates as attack patterns shift.

Pricing

Neither Sardine nor Sift publishes pricing. Both are sold through sales.

Where Runtime fits

Both tools are built for the risk team, and both stop at its edge. They score, decide, and help analysts resolve alerts using the data they hold. The cases that hurt most in payments are the ones that leave that edge. A blocked payout becomes a support ticket, a payment ops trace, and a recon break in finance, with each team investigating separately in different tools.

Runtime is the third option, and usually not a replacement for either. It is an AI agent harness for every team that touches a transaction. Agents run on isolated computers in your cloud, with your models, and investigate across the ledger, processor, bank files, help desk, and the case data in Sardine or Sift. They draft the decision with evidence, wait for a person before anything moves money, and record every step. A forward-deployed AI engineer builds the first agents with your team.

Which should you choose

• Choose Sardine if you are a regulated fintech or bank that wants fraud, KYC, and AML from one vendor, with ready-made agents for alerts, screening, and SAR drafting.
• Choose Sift if your main problem is payment fraud and account abuse at high volume, and you want decisions backed by a very large event network.
• Choose Runtime if your fraud cases keep spilling into support, payment ops, and finance, you need agents in your own cloud with approvals on money movement, and you want one record per case across teams. Runtime runs alongside whichever of the two you pick.

Frequently asked questions

What is the difference between Sardine and Sift?

Sardine covers fraud, onboarding (KYC and KYB), and AML compliance on one platform and sells ten AI agents for risk work. Sift focuses on payment fraud and account abuse, with real-time scoring backed by a network of more than 1 trillion events a year.

Is Sardine or Sift better for fintech?

For a regulated fintech that needs KYC, transaction monitoring, and sanctions screening alongside fraud, Sardine covers more of the list. For a fintech whose main problem is payment fraud and account takeover, Sift is a proven choice with fintech customers such as Remitly and CoinJar.

Do Sardine and Sift have AI agents?

Yes. Sardine lists ten agents, including Transaction Monitoring, Sanctions Screening, Graph Analyst, and SAR Generation. Sift offers ActivityIQ, which summarizes user activity for investigators, and the Attack Detection Agent, which groups fraud attacks into investigations.

How much do Sardine and Sift cost?

Neither publishes pricing. Both are sold through sales.

Where does Runtime fit next to Sardine or Sift?

Runtime is not a fraud scoring platform. It runs agents that investigate the cases either tool flags, across the ledger, processor, bank files, and support tickets, and that do the follow-up work in payment ops, finance, and support, with approvals and a full record of every run.