Compare · Lakera Guard
Lakera alternative for multimodal prompt injection
Lakera Guard is the most recognised prompt-injection defender on the market, and an excellent product. It is also text-first, moving upmarket post-acquisition, and starts at roughly $99/mo before enterprise gating. If your attack surface is image and audio uploads on a self-serve budget, you need different tooling.
TL;DR
Use Lakera Guard when you need an end-to-end text PI defender inside an enterprise-sized contract. Use Glyphward when your exposure is images (FigStep, AgentTypo, typographic PI) and audio (WhisperInject-class) and you want a self-serve API at $29/mo. The two are additive — many teams run both.
Where Lakera sits in 2026
Per public reporting, Check Point announced its acquisition of Lakera in the Sept–Nov 2025 window. Post-acquisition, Lakera’s self-serve tier and enterprise positioning have been re-weighted toward larger deals, consistent with a security-platform consolidation. That is a sensible commercial move — and it widens the gap at the self-serve SMB tier, where teams want a drop-in scanner for multimodal uploads without a procurement cycle.
Lakera’s text PI coverage remains excellent. Their public materials describe a multimodal roadmap, with text-in-image detection already available in their product. What they do not sell at $29/mo, and what no enterprise-grade vendor generally does, is a self-serve scanner that treats image and audio as first-class modalities with a free tier.
Architectural difference
| Lakera Guard | Glyphward | |
|---|---|---|
| Primary modality | Text-first with multimodal on roadmap | Multimodal-first (image + audio) |
| Image PI coverage | Text-in-image with emphasis on text extraction | OCR + CLIP visual embedding + text-in-image head against a curated FigStep/AgentTypo corpus |
| Audio PI coverage | Limited | Waveform anomaly classifier + Whisper-small transcript filter |
| Pricing floor | ~$99+/mo self-serve, enterprise gated beyond | Free 10/day · $29/mo Pro · $99/mo Team |
| Buyer shape | Enterprise, procurement-led | Indie AI startup, credit-card self-serve |
| Deployment | API, SDKs | API, SDKs, drop-in REST |
The architectural story is shorter than the table: Lakera’s roots are text PI and their strength is there; Glyphward’s roots are pixels and waveforms. Neither will eat the other’s lunch. Most engineers I speak to end up running both, at different layers of the stack.
When to pick which
- Pick Lakera if your dominant surface is raw LLM text I/O (RAG, chat, code-assistant), you have enterprise procurement in place, and you need a single platform with text guardrails + reporting + SSO.
- Pick Glyphward if your dominant surface is image or audio uploads from end users (avatar SaaS, voice agents, screenshot-reading agents, chatbots that accept image attachments) and you want self-serve pricing and a free tier for the benchmark.
- Run both if you have a mixed surface and a budget. They compose cleanly — Lakera on the text path, Glyphward on the upload path. No negotiation needed: we do not try to replace them.
What it costs to switch or complement
Adding Glyphward to an existing Lakera deployment is a one-endpoint addition: route uploads to Glyphward before they reach your vision/audio model, and keep Lakera on the text path. No migration, no data export, no lock-in to unwind. For a net new deployment, the Glyphward free tier (10 scans/day) covers a benchmark run against your own samples before you commit a card. Full rate card here.
Related questions
Is Glyphward affiliated with Lakera or Check Point?
No. Glyphward is an independent project, and this page does not represent Lakera’s current position — it reflects public marketing and reporting as of April 2026. For Lakera’s own statement of their product, see lakera.ai.
Does Lakera have an image-PI product right now?
Their marketing and product pages describe multimodal coverage including text-in-image detection. Treat "multimodal coverage" the same way you would any vendor claim: run your own samples through both scanners and look at the confusion matrix, not the datasheet. Glyphward’s free tier exists precisely so you can run that test against us without a contract.
What changed after the Check Point acquisition?
Security-platform acquisitions typically shift the acquired product upmarket, and publicly reported behaviour is consistent with that. We explicitly do not make any claims about Lakera’s forward roadmap — that is their announcement to make.
Is there a free tier on Lakera to compare?
Lakera has historically offered Community and free-trial access; specific limits change. Our Free plan (10 scans/day, no card) is designed to be painless for a like-for-like benchmark on your own samples.
Further reading
- Multimodal prompt-injection scanner pricing comparison (2026) — full market table across all five credible options.
- Glyphward pricing — what the Pro and Team tiers actually include.
- FigStep detection and WhisperInject detection — the concrete attack classes this page is about.