Comparison

Caver vs Lakera

caver-aisec compared to Lakera Guard. Why these two are complementary, not competitive, for most AI-security buyers.

caver-aisec and Lakera live in adjacent halves of the AI-security problem. Lakera is the inline guard at the prompt boundary. caver-aisec is the runtime detection + SOC correlation layer. For most teams the right answer is to use both, not pick one.

At a glance

	Lakera	caver-aisec
Posture	Inline guard. Intercepts prompts, scores, blocks or allows before the LLM call.	Runtime detection. Sees prompts after the LLM call, alerts, correlates with the rest of your security telemetry.
Latency profile	Sub-100ms; sits in the request path.	Asynchronous; doesn’t add latency to the LLM call itself.
Deployment	SaaS-first.	Self-hosted. On-prem, air-gapped, or cloud.
PII detection	Built-in PII detector with configurable redaction.	Planned via Presidio integration (caver-aisec#25).
Hallucination scoring	Faithfulness / groundedness scoring on RAG outputs.	Planned via Ragas / TruLens integration (caver-aisec#26).
Red-team testing	Lakera Red for adversarial probing.	Planned via Garak / PyRIT integration (caver-aisec#27).
Inline blocking	Lakera Guard, primary product.	Planned via NeMo Guardrails / Rebuff integration (caver-aisec#24).
SOC integration	Limited. AI-side product, not SOC-side.	First-class. AI events flow into Caver alongside identity, endpoint, network telemetry.
Cross-source correlation	None native.	Native. Prompt-injection attempt correlates with the IP, identity, endpoint, and tool-call activity around it.
AI Observatory / spend tracking	Limited.	First-class per-tenant LLM spend tracking with budget alerts.
Alert channels	Webhook + integrations.	PagerDuty, Discord, Teams, Slack, Telegram, SMTP, webhook.
Threat feeds	Lakera-curated.	NIST AI 100-2, OWASP Agentic AI Top 10, OWASP ML Top 10, HuggingFace Security, vendor advisories.
MCP tool-call audit	Not a focus.	First-class: LLM-to-MCP bridge instrumentation with CAVERN detection content.
Pricing	SaaS subscription.	Per-deployment commercial license-key.
Open source posture	Closed-source commercial.	Closed-source commercial. Built on open-source components (planned: NeMo Guardrails, Presidio, Ragas, Garak).

Where Lakera wins

Inline blocking is shipping today. Lakera Guard intercepts and blocks at the prompt boundary in production now. caver-aisec’s inline-block ticket is open but unshipped.
PII detection is shipping today. Same.
Lakera Red is shipping today. Pre-deploy adversarial test framework.
SaaS-first delivery. Fast pilots, zero infrastructure.
Established AI-security brand. Lakera holds mindshare in the inline-guard category.
Browser-side Chrome extension for shadow-AI catch is real and useful.

Where caver-aisec wins

SOC correlation. A prompt-injection attempt that touches identity, network, endpoint, and tool-call activity should show up in one queryable timeline. caver-aisec puts AI traffic next to the rest of your security telemetry; Lakera doesn’t.
AI Observatory. Per-tenant LLM spend tracking with budget alerts. Lakera doesn’t track spend.
Self-host / air-gap. Lakera is SaaS-first. For regulated industries, government, OT-adjacent, or air-gapped environments, Lakera can’t deploy. caver-aisec can.
Alert channel breadth. 7 named channels (PagerDuty, Discord, Teams, Slack, Telegram, SMTP, webhook) vs Lakera’s webhook + integrations.
Threat feed breadth. Multiple public AI-security feeds ingested as detection content, not just curated by the vendor.
MCP tool-call audit. Caver instruments the LLM-to-tool boundary specifically; useful for agentic AI deployments.

How to decide

Most teams: use both.

Lakera + caver-aisec is a deliberate combo. Lakera blocks at the prompt boundary. caver-aisec gives you SOC-side visibility into what was blocked, why, and what other telemetry correlates with the attempt. Same posture as a WAF + SIEM combo on the traditional web stack: the WAF blocks, the SIEM investigates.

Lakera-only is reasonable when: - You’re SaaS-only, no SOC, no regulated workloads. - AI security is your only security tool (small shop, AI-first product). - You need inline blocking today and can’t wait for caver-aisec parity (#24).

caver-aisec-only is reasonable when: - You need air-gap, on-prem, or data-residency reasons SaaS won’t satisfy. - You’re already running Caver as your SIEM and want AI security on the same operator surface. - You need OT-adjacent or industrial AI deployments where SaaS can’t deploy. - You want a single per-tenant spend + visibility surface, not just guarding.

Both is best when: - You want inline prevention + runtime detection + SOC correlation. - You’re at the scale where a missed prompt-injection costs more than two vendor relationships.

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