Why people look for a Lakera Guard alternative
Lakera Guard is one of the strongest AI security products on the market for prompt injection, jailbreak, and toxicity. Reasons teams still look for an alternative usually come down to focus:
- Their actual problem is PII, not injection. Lakera leads with "control what your AI does" — block jailbreaks, block toxic output, block multilingual/multimodal attacks. Important work. But if your customer is yelling "users keep pasting API keys into our chat," that's a different shape of problem.
- No public pricing. Lakera offers a free tier to start but full pricing is demo-gated. Engineering teams often want to know what something costs before booking a call.
- Threat detection vs. transformation. Lakera scores requests and blocks them. Grepture transforms requests — it redacts PII before forwarding and restores it in the response. Different mental model: scoring vs. tokenisation.
- AI gateway features. Grepture pairs redaction with traffic logs, prompt management, cost tracking, evals, and provider fallback in the same product. Lakera is a security layer, not a gateway.
Summary: Grepture as the Lakera alternative
Grepture is an open-source AI gateway focused on the request path. Point your model calls at it. PII and secrets are redacted before they reach OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, or whoever's downstream. Reversible tokens mean the response still references the user's own data. Same product gives you observability and prompt management.
At a glance
| Grepture | Lakera Guard | |
|---|---|---|
| Primary focus | PII / secret redaction + AI gateway | Prompt injection, jailbreak, toxicity, data leaks |
| Approach | Transformation (mask-and-restore tokens) | Scoring and blocking |
| Reversible redaction | Native | Not the primary feature |
| Secret scanning | Built-in (25+ credential families) | Data-leak detection (different framing) |
| Prompt injection | Available on Business plan | Core strength |
| Multimodal | Text-first | Multimodal supported |
| Beyond core feature | Traffic logs, prompt management, cost tracking, evals, fallback | Security Center dashboard, SIEM integrations |
| Pricing | Public (Free, Pro €49/mo, Business) | Free tier + demo-gated full pricing |
| Open source core | Yes (proxy) | No |
Where Grepture is the better fit
- The top problem is "PII and secrets in prompts," not "users trying to jailbreak our chatbot."
- You want reversible redaction so user data flows back to the user but never to the model.
- You also want observability, prompt management, and cost tracking — not just a security score per request.
- You serve a multi-model setup and want one redaction policy across providers.
- Public pricing and self-serve start matter.
Where Lakera is still the right call
- Your top threat is prompt injection or jailbreak attacks, especially at scale.
- You need multimodal protection (images alongside text).
- Multilingual injection coverage is a must.
- Your buyer is the security team rather than the platform / AI engineering team.
A practical pattern: use both
Lakera and Grepture can run together. Lakera scores requests for injection risk; Grepture redacts PII and credentials and forwards the cleaned request. Different parts of the AI security surface, same point in the request path. There's no architectural conflict — both can be wired in.
Migration path
If you've evaluated Lakera and decided PII redaction is the bigger job: sign up at app.grepture.com, point your model base URL at the proxy, choose the categories to redact, and review the Traffic Log before enforcing. If you still need injection coverage, keep Lakera in the path or upgrade to Grepture Business which includes prompt-injection detection.