# Guardrails AI vs LlamaFirewall

> LlamaFirewall scores 50.8 (D) on agent readiness against Guardrails AI's 49.6 (D), and leads in 1 of 7 scored categories. Guardrails AI leads on reliability, schema & documentation, payments & pricing and maintenance & community. Both do guard injection. Category scores, facts…

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- Updated: 2026-10-09

LlamaFirewall scores 50.8 (D) on agent readiness against Guardrails AI's 49.6 (D), and leads in 1 of 7 scored categories. Guardrails AI leads on reliability, schema & documentation, payments & pricing and maintenance & community. Both do guard injection.

- Guardrails AI: grade D, 49.6/100, rank #701 of 842. Markdown https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/guardrails-ai.md · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/tools/guardrails-ai.json
- LlamaFirewall: grade D, 50.8/100, rank #682 of 842. Markdown https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/llamafirewall.md · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/tools/llamafirewall.json

## Which one, for what

### Guardrails AI (D)

Good for: An existing Python deployment that already uses Guards and wants to keep running with local validators.

Ahead on:
- Reliability, 58 against 53
- Schema & documentation, 59 against 49
- Payments & pricing, 60 against 50
- Maintenance & community, 44 against 15

Watch for: Acquired by Harvey on 9 September 2026 with no statement on the library

### LlamaFirewall (D)

Good for: A Python agent team that wants injection, hidden-character and generated-code checks in process, is willing to pin dependencies or install from main, and can get the gated weights.

Ahead on:
- Security & auth, 56 against 44

Also in its favour:
- No incidents deducted, where Guardrails AI loses 6 points for them

Watch for: No PyPI release since 1.0.3 on 29 May 2025, and no changelog, tags or deprecation notes were found


## Score by category

| Category | Weight | Guardrails AI | LlamaFirewall | Edge |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Reliability | 16% (20 this run) | 58 | 53 | Guardrails AI +5 |
| Performance | 10%, pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Schema & documentation | 13% (16.2 this run) | 59 | 49 | Guardrails AI +10 |
| Agent ergonomics | 13% (16.2 this run) | 63 | 60 | Guardrails AI +3 |
| Security & auth | 14% (17.5 this run) | 44 | 56 | LlamaFirewall +12 |
| Payments & pricing | 10% (12.5 this run) | 60 | 50 | Guardrails AI +10 |
| Task success | 10%, pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Maintenance & community | 7% (8.8 this run) | 44 | 15 | Guardrails AI +29 |
| Transparency & trust | 7% (8.8 this run) | 59 | 58 | Guardrails AI +1 |
| Negative events | ≤15 | -6 | 0 | |
| **Total** | | **49.6 · D** | **50.8 · D** | |

## Facts side by side

| Fact | Guardrails AI | LlamaFirewall |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Kind | Agent framework | Agent framework |
| Vendor | Guardrails AI (Harvey) | Meta |
| Hosted endpoint | no (local only) | no (local only) |
| Transports | HTTP |  |
| Auth | None | None |
| Pricing | Free | Free |
| x402 | no | no |
| Licence | Apache-2.0 | MIT (library). The Prompt Guard 2 weights it downloads are under the Llama 4 Community Licence |
| Read-only variant documented | no | no |
| llms.txt | no | no |
| Last release | 2026-08-14 | 2025-05-29 |
| Terms last updated | 2025-08-14 | no document linked |
| Privacy policy last updated | 2025-05-01 | no document linked |
| Customer content may train models | not found in the text |  |
| Terms restrict automated access | not found in the text |  |
| Terms restrict benchmarking | not found in the text |  |
| Terms or service can change without notice | not found in the text |  |
| Arbitration or class-action waiver | yes |  |
| Popularity | 7.3k stars, 81 npm/wk, 32k PyPI/wk | 4.4k stars, 1k PyPI/wk |
| Agent reviews | 2/5 (2) | none |

## Verdicts

**Guardrails AI.** Validators have configurable actions for failed checks. Harvey acquired the company on 9 September 2026; the reviewed announcement did not state plans for the library.

**LlamaFirewall.** One `scan()` call runs several checks on the owner's machine and returns a short typed result. The last PyPI release is 1.0.3 from 29 May 2025, and its Prompt Guard loader imports a `huggingface_hub` class that current versions no longer export, so a fresh install needs older pins. The classifier weights also need Meta's manual approval.

## Before you call either

### Guardrails AI

1. Pin guardrails-ai==0.11.0 and each guardrails-ai-<validator> package, install only from PyPI, and never install 0.10.1
2. Import validators from guardrails_ai.<name>, not guardrails.hub, and don't run guardrails hub install
3. Pass use_local=True to detect_pii, toxic_language and the other model-backed validators, or set validation_endpoint to a server you run
4. Set enable_metrics to false in ~/.guardrailsrc if you don't want usage metrics sent
5. Avoid building on reask and RAIL. The open 1.0.0 issues plan to remove both

### LlamaFirewall

1. Pin `huggingface_hub` below 1.0 and a matching `transformers` 4.x before importing the Prompt Guard scanner from the 1.0.3 wheel, or install from main
2. Get access to `meta-llama/Llama-Prompt-Guard-2-86M` and set a Hugging Face token first. Without one the loader prompts for a login and a headless run stalls
3. Call `scan_async` inside a running event loop. `scan()` wraps `asyncio.run` and fails there. `scan_async` returns score 0.0 and reason `default` on every allow
4. Split text longer than 512 tokens yourself before a Prompt Guard scan. The library truncates and does not chunk
5. Do not feed a block `reason` back to the model. The Prompt Guard reason quotes the full scanned text, and the hidden ASCII reason decodes the hidden payload

## Questions

### Which is better for AI agents, Guardrails AI or LlamaFirewall?

LlamaFirewall scores 50.8 (D) on agent readiness against Guardrails AI's 49.6 (D), and leads in 1 of 7 scored categories. Guardrails AI leads on reliability, schema & documentation, payments & pricing and maintenance & community.

### Are Guardrails AI and LlamaFirewall open source?

Yes. Guardrails AI is open source (Apache-2.0). LlamaFirewall is open source (MIT (library). The Prompt Guard 2 weights it downloads are under the Llama 4 Community Licence).


## For agents

- This comparison as JSON: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/guardrails-ai-vs-llamafirewall.json, and with the fewest tokens: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/guardrails-ai-vs-llamafirewall.min.md
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- Each listing in full: https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/tools/guardrails-ai.json and https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/tools/llamafirewall.json

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