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Lakera
Security layer for LLM applications, aimed at prompt injection, data loss, and related abuse on model inputs and outputs.
Teams shipping LLM features that accept user input and can place a check on the request path.
Buyers who want a one-time filter to replace app auth, data permissions, or a human review policy.
Verdict
Lakera is a good fit for teams shipping apps where users or documents can steer a model that has tools or private context. Pricing is mid-range for guardrail products and usually scales with traffic you put in front of the check. Security-minded buyers like a focused guardrail on the path before the model acts; it belongs alongside normal app security, not as a substitute for access control.
Score Breakdown
How Lakera scores in the categories that matter to its buyers.
Pricing
Lakera Guard publishes a free Community tier with a monthly request allowance, and Enterprise by quote. Prices below are USD from Lakera’s public rate card as of September 2026.
| Plan | Requests / month | Price | What stands out |
|---|---|---|---|
| Community | 10,000 | $0 / mo | 8k-token max prompt; SaaS; EU data residency |
| Enterprise | Flexible | Sales quote | SSO, RBAC, SIEM; SaaS or self-hosted; EU/US residency |
The Field at a Glance
How Lakera compares with other Security, safety & guardrails vendors we reviewed, by Overall Score and relative typical engagement cost.
Lakera scores 6.8 in Security, safety & guardrails, under HiddenLayer (8.1), Noma Security (8.0), Lasso Security (7.6), and Zenity (6.9). Relative cost lands upper-mid for this subcategory.
Use-case matrix
| Use case | Fit | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| User-facing LLM with tools | Strong | A guardrail fits best on this kind of app. |
| Basic content screening | Mixed | Results depend on the policy the team configures. |
| Replacing auth and data permissions | Poor | Access control and data permissions are separate controls. |
| No insertion point in the app | Poor | The check cannot run without a place in the request path. |
Review Excerpts
Excerpts from Hacker News discussions and from buyer sentiment drawn from public information. Paid reviews and pay-for-play sites were excluded.
“Most tools I've found (Lakera Guard, LLM Guard, Azure Prompt Shields) are still text-only in their public APIs. The research papers describe the attacks well but I haven't seen many production-grade defences for image/audio/document injection.”
“Most of the defenses discussed here (Lakera, LLM Guard, Prompt Shields) are detection layers — they try to classify whether an input is malicious before it reaches the model. The problem with semantic attacks is exactly what you identified: you can't reliably detect "act as a SQL expert" as benign vs. malicious without full context.”
“It gave us a dedicated check on the request path before the model acts, which our application security team could reason about.”
Representative buyer view
“We put it in front of an assistant that can call internal tools, and tuned the policy on traffic that looked like production.”
Representative buyer view
“Tuning took longer than we expected. Early settings flagged normal requests, and it took several rounds to bring the false positives down.”
Representative buyer view
Where customer reviews couldn't be found, our analysts attempted to give a voice to buyer sentiment, drawing on real information from review sites, forums, and product documentation.
Based on: Lakera's website, a Hacker News discussion of Lakera, and a second Hacker News discussion of Lakera
Company Facts
- Founded
- 2021 (CB Insights)
- Headquarters
- San Francisco, California, United States (CB Insights)
- Total funding raised
- $30M (CB Insights)
- Status
- Acquired by Check Point in September 2025 (CB Insights, Check Point)
- Key investors
- Check Point, Redalpine Venture Partners, Atomico, Citi Ventures (CB Insights)
- Website
- lakera.ai
Key Leadership
David Haber
Co-founder and CEO
Methodology
This page is an independent evaluation of Lakera for buyers comparing options in security, safety & guardrails. AI Industry Reviews accepts no sponsorships, advertising, or pay-for-placement fees. Lakera did not pay for this review.
What we scored
The headline number is an Overall Score on a 0-10 scale. Eight criteria fall under it in two groups.
- Buyer outcomes (for security, safety & guardrails)
- Injection and abuse checks
- Request-path fit
- Tuning on real traffic
- Limit of a filter
- Company & commercial
- Innovation & product leadership
- Project management & communication
- Pricing
- Contract fairness
Pricing measures whether the price looks fair for the value delivered, including packaging and renewal friction that show up in real buying cycles.
Score Composition
| Input | Weight | What it covers |
|---|---|---|
| Reviews | 40% | A proprietary read of what practitioners say about likes, complaints, and day-to-day use, including public review sites, forums, and private chat rooms. Paid reviews and pay-for-play sites are out of scope. |
| Product | 35% | Hands-on look at screens and workflows. |
| Pricing | 15% | Whether the price looks fair for what you get. |
| Docs & training | 10% | Docs, tutorials, and training material. |
How we balanced the evidence
The Overall Score is the simple average of the eight criteria. Recommendation language follows that score and the use-case matrix above.
Scope
Lakera is graded here as security, safety & guardrails. Criteria scores can move as more review volume and product checks are added.