Two of the most-watched enterprise AI agent control planes hit GA inside the same five-day window. Salesforce Agent Fabric moved its core governance components — AI Gateway, MCP Bridge, Trusted Agent Identity — to GA on April 29, 2026. Microsoft Agent 365 went GA May 1 at $15/user/mo standalone, or bundled into the new $99/user/mo E7 “Frontier Worker Suite.”
If you’re a mid-market CIO at a 500- to 2,000-person shop without a strong existing position in either, this is the head-to-head decision you’ll be making this quarter. Here’s the procurement-side read on six dimensions that actually matter.
The honest framing first: these aren’t two answers to the same question. Agent Fabric is a multi-vendor control plane that wants to govern agents wherever they live — Bedrock, Foundry, GoDaddy, MCP servers. Agent 365 is an Entra-anchored governance plane that pulls non-Microsoft agents into a Microsoft-tenant registry. Both call themselves “vendor-agnostic,” and neither one quite is. Pick the gravity, then read the dimensions.
Dimension 1 — Where each platform actually lives
Agent Fabric: MuleSoft-anchored multi-vendor control plane
From MuleSoft’s own architecture docs: “Agent Fabric is an agent control plane that provides a single pane of glass to register, manage, govern, and observe all of your agents and MCP endpoints.”
Futurum’s analyst breakdown frames it sharper: “Salesforce is explicitly positioning Agent Fabric as a multi-vendor agent control plane, not a Salesforce-centric workflow extension.”
Architecturally, Agent Fabric sits above Agentforce (Salesforce’s own agent runtime) and uses Agent Scanners to discover and register agents running on Amazon Bedrock, Microsoft Foundry, GoDaddy, and MCP servers. The control surface is in MuleSoft’s Anypoint Platform.
Agent 365: Entra-anchored Microsoft-tenant governance plane
From Microsoft Learn: Agent 365 is “the single control plane for agent visibility, governance, and security across your entire tenant” and replaces the old Entra Agent Registry blade.
Per Infinity Group’s partner explainer: “At the core of Agent 365 is a central registry that catalogues the AI agents operating across the organisation. This includes Microsoft-built agents, partner solutions and internally created agents, regardless of where or how they were built.”
The catch: Agent 365’s “any platform” claim assumes the agent already touches your Microsoft tenant — through Graph, Azure, or a partner integration. It’s not an arbitrary scanner crawling Bedrock or Foundry estates that have no Microsoft surface.
Net: Agent Fabric is the deliberate multi-vendor scanner. Agent 365 is the Microsoft-stack-native registry that extends to non-Microsoft agents touching your stack. Different shapes.
Dimension 2 — Pricing and GA status
Agent Fabric
| Component | Status | Pricing |
|---|---|---|
| Agent Fabric core | GA since September 2025 | Bundled with MuleSoft / Anypoint capabilities — no separate per-user SKU published |
| AI Gateway, MCP Bridge, Trusted Agent Identity | GA April 29, 2026 | Same — bundled |
| Agent Broker (deterministic orchestration) | Beta April 2026, GA June 2026 | Bundled |
| Agent Fabric in Canada + Japan regions | Available now | Same |
Per InfoWorld’s coverage, Salesforce hasn’t published a separate line-item price. The “free for Salesforce customers, paid for outside” claim circulating in the press is unverified — what’s documented is that Agent Fabric ships as part of MuleSoft / Anypoint capabilities. If you’re not already a MuleSoft customer, the procurement conversation lands as a MuleSoft-side commitment, not a Salesforce-side seat license.
Agent 365
Per Redress Compliance’s licensing guide and the E7 Frontier Worker Suite explainer, Agent 365 pricing is the cleanest of the two:
| SKU | Price | What’s in it |
|---|---|---|
| Agent 365 standalone | $15/user/month | Agent control plane only |
| E7 Frontier Worker Suite (bundle) | $99/user/month | Microsoft 365 E5 + Microsoft 365 Copilot + Entra Suite + Agent 365 |
GA May 1, 2026. Confirmed.
One footnote: autonomous agents with their own identities are still in the Frontier preview programme. Microsoft has confirmed those will need their own licenses at GA but hasn’t published the price or timeline.
Net: Agent 365 has clean per-seat pricing on day one. Agent Fabric ships inside MuleSoft and pricing depends on your existing MuleSoft footprint.
Dimension 3 — What “Guided Determinism” actually means
This term shows up in every Salesforce explainer and almost no one defines it cleanly. Here’s the actual definition from Salesforce’s own announcement:
“Agent Script for Agent Broker — Bring the same guided determinism that powers Agentforce to Agent Broker, letting you define fixed handoff rules while LLMs handle the reasoning in between. Goal-based, autonomous agents paired with trusted, codified workflows result in more consistent and reliable outcomes.”
Futurum’s translation: “Salesforce’s model of fixed handoff rules with bounded LLM reasoning, signals its architectural answer to the autonomy-versus-governance tension.”
So Guided Determinism isn’t just “guardrails.” It’s a hybrid pattern:
- Deterministic component: fixed, codified handoff rules and workflow steps (the “Agent Script” language)
- Probabilistic component: LLM reasoning between those fixed steps, bounded by the script
- Runtime: Agent Broker (beta April, GA June 2026)
Microsoft has a similar pattern but no name for it — Agent 365 enforces deterministic constraints through Entra identity, agent registry policies, and Purview integration, with the LLM reasoning happening in Copilot Studio or partner runtimes upstream.
The honest read: both platforms are doing the same architectural thing — deterministic rules around probabilistic reasoning. Salesforce just productized the term first.
Dimension 4 — Multi-vendor span (the dimension where the marketing diverges from reality)
This is where the head-to-head gets interesting.
Agent Fabric’s multi-vendor claim
UC Today summarizes the Agent Scanners surface: “Its Agent Scanners can automatically discover and register agents running on Amazon Bedrock, Microsoft Foundry, GoDaddy, and MCP servers.”
CRN’s TDX coverage confirms MCP support: “Agent Scanners now has additional support for Amazon Bedrock, Microsoft Foundry and GoDaddy, with MCP support slated for May…”
So far, so vendor-neutral.
But here’s Futurum’s caveat — buried at the bottom of the analyst piece, easy to miss, and the most important sentence in the whole launch cycle:
“Today, only Agentforce agents are fully governed with deterministic orchestration and rollback. For third-party agents, Salesforce can scan and inventory them, but enforcement of guided determinism, Agent Script, and Trusted Agent Identity remains unproven.”
In plain English: Agent Fabric can see your Bedrock and Foundry agents and register them. Whether it can govern them with the same controls it applies to Agentforce-native agents is not yet demonstrated.
Agent 365’s multi-vendor claim
Agent 365 catalogs Microsoft, partner, and in-house agents — but only those that touch your Microsoft tenant. Per the Entra control-plane explainer, Agent 365 “becomes the single control plane for agent visibility, governance, and security across your entire tenant.” Tenant-scoped, not internet-scoped.
If you have a Bedrock-native agent that never authenticates against Entra and never reads Microsoft Graph data, Agent 365 has no visibility into it. Agent Fabric does.
Net: Agent Fabric wins on discovery breadth. Agent 365 wins on governance depth within its scope. For vendor-agnostic mid-market shops, the discovery-vs-enforcement gap on the Agent Fabric side is the real Q3 procurement question.
Dimension 5 — Identity and access architecture
Agent Fabric: Trusted Agent Identity + AI Gateway + MCP Bridge
Per the TDX 2026 expansion, Agent Fabric ships with three identity-and-access primitives now GA:
- Trusted Agent Identity — agent-level identity with mobile authorization for high-risk actions (the “bank-grade-2FA-for-agents” pattern)
- AI Gateway — model-routing layer with tenant-level quotas, request inspection, and audit logging
- MCP Bridge — exposes existing APIs as MCP-compatible tools without modifying the underlying code
Agent 365: Entra Agent ID + Admin Center + Purview
Per the Microsoft Learn overview, Agent 365’s architecture is built on:
- Entra Agent ID — agent identity within the existing Entra identity stack
- Admin Center visibility — surfaces agent activity in the Microsoft 365 admin pane
- Purview integration — DLP, audit, and compliance patterns extend to agents
Net: Agent Fabric’s identity layer is brand-new and explicit. Agent 365 reuses the Entra surface your IT team already runs. If your shop is heavy on Microsoft 365 + Entra, Agent 365 is incremental skill-set; Agent Fabric is a new layer.
Dimension 6 — The Royal Cyber comparison and what it doesn’t cover
You may have seen Royal Cyber’s “Salesforce Agentforce vs Microsoft Copilot Studio” comparison. It’s well-written and useful, but it’s one layer down from the Agent Fabric vs Agent 365 question.
The cleaner stack picture:
| Layer | Salesforce | Microsoft |
|---|---|---|
| Agent runtime / build | Agentforce | Copilot Studio |
| Agent control plane | Agent Fabric | Agent 365 |
Royal Cyber compared the runtimes (Agentforce vs Copilot Studio). That’s the right comparison if your question is “which agent builder do my devs use.” It’s the wrong comparison if your question is “which control plane do my IT-admin and security teams adopt.” Don’t conflate the two layers when you brief your CIO.
What this means for you, by deployment scenario
Salesforce-anchored shop with Bedrock workloads: Agent Fabric is the right starting point. The scanners cover Bedrock natively, the governance gravity is in MuleSoft / Anypoint, and Trusted Agent Identity matches your existing Salesforce identity model. Watch for the third-party enforcement parity Futurum flagged.
Microsoft 365-anchored shop with mixed-vendor agents: Agent 365 is the right starting point. The Entra integration and Admin Center visibility match your existing IT-admin workflow, the $15/user/mo pricing is clean, and the E7 bundle is worth modeling if you’re already on E5 + Copilot.
Vendor-agnostic mid-market shop with no strong tilt: Run both, light-touch. Use Agent 365 for any agent that reads Microsoft 365 data (most internal agents fall here). Use Agent Fabric for anything cross-vendor that needs Bedrock + Foundry visibility. Budget Agent 365’s $15/seat as the predictable line; treat Agent Fabric’s MuleSoft footprint as the variable.
Regulated-industry shop where audit completeness is a procurement gate: Agent 365’s Purview integration is the more mature audit story today. Agent Fabric’s audit story is real but newer. If your CISO has to defend the architecture in a regulator review, Agent 365 is the lower-risk pick at this maturity stage.
Engineering-heavy mid-market shop with custom agent builds: Agent Fabric’s MCP Bridge is genuinely useful — exposing your existing internal APIs as MCP-compatible tools without rewriting them. If your team is already shipping MCP servers, Agent Fabric is the easier integration.
Shop running zero agents today: Don’t buy a control plane before you have agents to control. Pilot one runtime (Copilot Studio or Agentforce) on a single workflow first. Buy the control plane in Q3 when you have something to govern.
What both platforms can’t do
A few honest limits before you commit:
- Neither replaces your runtime. Agent Fabric is the control plane over Agentforce + third-party runtimes. Agent 365 is the registry over Copilot Studio + partner agents. You still need a runtime budget on top.
- Neither is truly vendor-neutral. The “agnostic” framing is marketing. The real choice is where your identity, audit, and data gravity live — Salesforce/MuleSoft vs Microsoft/Entra — not whether you’ve found a magical neutral arbitrator.
- Agent Fabric’s third-party enforcement is unproven. Discovery exists. Visibility exists. Whether the same Trusted Agent Identity controls flow through to a Bedrock agent the way they do to an Agentforce agent is not yet documented in customer case studies.
- Agent 365’s autonomous-agent licensing is incomplete. The Frontier preview programme has the autonomous-agent variants, and pricing isn’t published yet. If your roadmap depends on autonomous agents at GA pricing, you’re guessing.
- Royal Cyber’s Agentforce vs Copilot Studio comparison is one layer down. Don’t use it for the control-plane decision.
- Practitioner reviews are thin. No CIO or sysadmin reviews from late April through May 3 have surfaced. The early adopter cohort is real but not yet writing publicly. The first practitioner reviews will land in mid-May to early June.
The bottom line
Two control planes, same week, different shapes. Agent Fabric is the multi-vendor scanner; Agent 365 is the Microsoft-tenant registry. Both call themselves vendor-agnostic; neither one quite is. The procurement question for a mid-market CIO is which gravity well your existing stack already sits in — Salesforce / MuleSoft or Microsoft / Entra — and the answer to that question almost always picks the control plane for you.
If you genuinely have no tilt, run both light-touch and let the next 90 days of practitioner reviews drive the consolidation.
If you want the longer-form playbook on rolling out enterprise AI agents — control-plane patterns, audit design, the procurement decision tree for shops that don’t yet have a runtime — our Enterprise AI Rollout Playbook course walks through it. Free to start, Pro for the full path.
Sources
- Salesforce Advances Agent Fabric: Guided Determinism — Salesforce News
- Salesforce Agent Fabric: The Real Test — Sirocco Group
- Salesforce Stakes Out Multi-Vendor Agent Control Plane — Futurum
- Microsoft Agent 365 overview — Microsoft Learn
- Microsoft Agent 365: Capabilities, Benefits, Competitive Analysis — AlphaBOLD
- MuleSoft Agent Fabric Architecture Documentation — Salesforce Architects
- MuleSoft Agent Fabric adds new ways to keep AI agents in line — InfoWorld
- Microsoft Agent 365 Licensing Guide — Redress Compliance
- Salesforce Agentforce vs Microsoft Copilot Studio — Royal Cyber
