They check what an agent says. Reynforce checks what it commits your company to, and keeps the record. Most teams who arrive here already run one of them and have just found the gap — so this is a boundary rather than a bake-off.
| the question it answers | what it reads | |
| wording guardrails | is this output acceptable? | the text of the output |
| tracing and observability | what did the system do, and how much did it cost? | spans, prompts, latencies, token counts |
| evaluation | is the model good enough at this task? | a fixed set of cases, scored |
| Reynforce | is this true, who says so, and may this agent say it? | a register of claims with owners and dates, and a mandate |
The first three are about the agent. Reynforce is about the company — what it stands behind, and what has been promised in its name. That is why they stack rather than compete: a trace tells you the agent said something, and a register tells you whether it was the company's to say.
A wording guardrail sees we can have that live by the end of the month as a polite, on-brand, perfectly acceptable sentence. It is. It is also a deadline with nothing behind it, made in your name, and the guardrail has no source of truth to check it against — not because it is badly built, but because that is a different kind of input.
Tracing has the opposite shape: it would have the sentence, verbatim, in a span. What it does not have is the claim the sentence relied on, the state that claim was in at the time, and the authority the agent was acting under — so you can find the promise if you know to look, and you cannot answer was it ours to make.
The record is append-only and we cannot edit it either. That is the point of it. A log a vendor could tidy is not evidence in a disagreement with your customer.
An unusable claim cannot be cited whatever else is relaxed. Usability is a fact about the claim — nobody stands behind it — rather than a confidence threshold. Turning a dial up buys latitude with current sources, never permission to repeat a stale one.
It has no opinion about your stack. Reynforce never runs your agent, which rules out competing with the orchestration frameworks and makes this a decision function rather than an execution engine.
We have not characterised any named product on this page, and we are not going to from memory. Every vendor's documentation host is unreachable from where this page was written — measured, not assumed — and a comparison table built from recollection of somebody else's product is the exact thing this company exists to argue against.
[unread] The named rows. competitor docs is the reader pointed at each tool's own published pages. When a run returns passages, the rows go here with the page each one came from and the date it was read, in that vendor's own words — and if their own page contradicts something on this one, that is a finding and the page changes.
Until then: the categories above are a fair description of what the three kinds of tool are for, which is a claim about shape rather than about any company's features.
Keep it. The honest version of this page is: wording guardrails and tracing are doing a job this does not do, and if you have them you are further along than most. What you are missing is the source of truth, and /agent-promise-register.md describes it.