# Llama Guard 4 vs LlamaFirewall

> LlamaFirewall scores 50.8 (D) on agent readiness against Llama Guard 4's 49.1 (D), and leads in 4 of 7 scored categories. Llama Guard 4 leads on agent ergonomics and maintenance & community. Both do guard policy. Category scores, facts, verdicts and agent notes side by side.

- Canonical: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/llama-guard-vs-llamafirewall
- Markdown: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/llama-guard-vs-llamafirewall.md (~2,700 tokens)
- Slim: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/llama-guard-vs-llamafirewall.min.md (~680 tokens, same facts, less prose, for token-sensitive contexts)
- JSON: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/llama-guard-vs-llamafirewall.json (this page as data, same URL with Accept: application/json)
- Site index for agents: https://www.anchorterminal.com/llms.txt (full text: https://www.anchorterminal.com/llms-full.txt)
- API: https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/index.json
- Updated: 2026-10-09

LlamaFirewall scores 50.8 (D) on agent readiness against Llama Guard 4's 49.1 (D), and leads in 4 of 7 scored categories. Llama Guard 4 leads on agent ergonomics and maintenance & community. Both do guard policy.

- Llama Guard 4: grade D, 49.1/100, rank #713 of 842. Markdown https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/llama-guard.md · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/tools/llama-guard.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

### Llama Guard 4 (D)

Good for: A team outside the EU with a GPU that wants content moderation of text and images on its own hardware, against a fixed 14-category policy it can edit in the prompt.

Ahead on:
- Agent ergonomics, 67 against 60
- Maintenance & community, 28 against 15

Watch for: Weights last changed on 29 April 2025, with no changelog, version tags or stated deprecation policy

### 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:
- Reliability, 53 against 38
- Payments & pricing, 50 against 45

Also in its favour:
- Open source

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 | Llama Guard 4 | LlamaFirewall | Edge |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Reliability | 16% (20 this run) | 38 | 53 | LlamaFirewall +15 |
| Performance | 10%, pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Schema & documentation | 13% (16.2 this run) | 52 | 49 | Llama Guard 4 +3 |
| Agent ergonomics | 13% (16.2 this run) | 67 | 60 | Llama Guard 4 +7 |
| Security & auth | 14% (17.5 this run) | 53 | 56 | LlamaFirewall +3 |
| Payments & pricing | 10% (12.5 this run) | 45 | 50 | LlamaFirewall +5 |
| Task success | 10%, pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Maintenance & community | 7% (8.8 this run) | 28 | 15 | Llama Guard 4 +13 |
| Transparency & trust | 7% (8.8 this run) | 55 | 58 | LlamaFirewall +3 |
| Negative events | ≤15 | 0 | 0 | |
| **Total** | | **49.1 · D** | **50.8 · D** | |

## Facts side by side

| Fact | Llama Guard 4 | LlamaFirewall |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Kind | Model API | Agent framework |
| Vendor | Meta | Meta |
| Hosted endpoint | no (local only) | no (local only) |
| Transports | HTTP |  |
| Auth | None | None |
| Pricing | Free | Free |
| x402 | no | no |
| Licence | Llama 4 Community Licence (source-available weights, not an OSI licence), with the Llama 4 acceptable use policy | 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 | 2025-04-29 | 2025-05-29 |
| Terms last updated | 2025-04-05 | no document linked |
| Privacy policy last updated | no document linked | 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 | not found in the text |  |
| Popularity | 4.4k stars | 4.4k stars, 1k PyPI/wk |

## Verdicts

**Llama Guard 4.** A single self-hosted model classifies text and multi-image prompts against 14 MLCommons-aligned hazard categories and answers in a few tokens. The weights have not changed since 29 April 2025, download access needs Meta's manual approval, and the licence withholds the grant from individuals and companies based in the European Union.

**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

### Llama Guard 4

1. Request access on the Hugging Face page before anything else. Approval is manual, and the form cannot be edited after submission
2. Send only the user turn to check an input, and the user turn plus the model's answer to check an output. The template picks the role from the message count
3. Parse the first line for `safe` or `unsafe` and the second for category codes. Set `max_new_tokens` to about 10 and turn sampling off
4. Do not send an image with no text. Meta says the model is not an image-only classifier, and S14 is skipped when an image is present
5. Pair it with a prompt-attack detector. The card says the model can itself be moved by adversarial or injected text

### 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, Llama Guard 4 or LlamaFirewall?

LlamaFirewall scores 50.8 (D) on agent readiness against Llama Guard 4's 49.1 (D), and leads in 4 of 7 scored categories. Llama Guard 4 leads on agent ergonomics and maintenance & community.

### Can an agent call Llama Guard 4 and LlamaFirewall without installing anything?

No hosted endpoint is listed for Llama Guard 4. No hosted endpoint is listed for LlamaFirewall.

### Are Llama Guard 4 and LlamaFirewall open source?

No open-source release is listed for Llama Guard 4. 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/llama-guard-vs-llamafirewall.json, and with the fewest tokens: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/llama-guard-vs-llamafirewall.min.md
- Over MCP at https://www.anchorterminal.com/mcp (no key): `compare_tools {"a": "llama-guard", "b": "llamafirewall"}`. From a terminal: `anchor compare llama-guard llamafirewall`
- Each listing in full: https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/tools/llama-guard.json and https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/tools/llamafirewall.json

## Other comparisons with Llama Guard 4 or LlamaFirewall

- [Amazon Bedrock Guardrails vs LlamaFirewall](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/amazon-bedrock-guardrails-vs-llamafirewall.md)
- [Azure AI Content Safety (Prompt Shields) vs LlamaFirewall](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/azure-ai-content-safety-vs-llamafirewall.md)
- [Cisco AI Defense Inspection API vs LlamaFirewall](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/cisco-ai-defense-inspection-vs-llamafirewall.md)
- [Google Cloud Model Armor vs LlamaFirewall](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/google-model-armor-vs-llamafirewall.md)
- [Granite Guardian vs LlamaFirewall](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/granite-guardian-vs-llamafirewall.md)
- [Guardrails AI vs LlamaFirewall](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/guardrails-ai-vs-llamafirewall.md)
- [Lakera Guard (Check Point AI Guardrails) vs LlamaFirewall](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/lakera-guard-vs-llamafirewall.md)
- [LlamaFirewall vs NVIDIA NeMo Guardrails](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/llamafirewall-vs-nemo-guardrails.md)
- [LlamaFirewall vs OpenAI Guardrails](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/llamafirewall-vs-openai-guardrails.md)
- [LlamaFirewall vs Prisma AIRS AI Runtime Security API](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/llamafirewall-vs-prisma-airs.md)
- [Amazon Bedrock Guardrails vs Llama Guard 4](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/amazon-bedrock-guardrails-vs-llama-guard.md)
- [Azure AI Content Safety (Prompt Shields) vs Llama Guard 4](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/azure-ai-content-safety-vs-llama-guard.md)
- [Cisco AI Defense Inspection API vs Llama Guard 4](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/cisco-ai-defense-inspection-vs-llama-guard.md)
- [Google Cloud Model Armor vs Llama Guard 4](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/google-model-armor-vs-llama-guard.md)
- [Granite Guardian vs Llama Guard 4](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/granite-guardian-vs-llama-guard.md)
- [Guardrails AI vs Llama Guard 4](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/guardrails-ai-vs-llama-guard.md)
- [Lakera Guard (Check Point AI Guardrails) vs Llama Guard 4](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/lakera-guard-vs-llama-guard.md)
- [Llama Guard 4 vs Mistral Moderation API](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/llama-guard-vs-mistral-moderation.md)
- [Llama Guard 4 vs NVIDIA NeMo Guardrails](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/llama-guard-vs-nemo-guardrails.md)
- [Llama Guard 4 vs OpenAI Guardrails](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/llama-guard-vs-openai-guardrails.md)
- [Llama Guard 4 vs OpenAI Moderation API](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/llama-guard-vs-openai-moderation.md)
- [Llama Guard 4 vs Prisma AIRS AI Runtime Security API](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/llama-guard-vs-prisma-airs.md)
- [LlamaFirewall vs Presidio](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/llamafirewall-vs-microsoft-presidio.md)
- [LlamaFirewall vs Mistral Moderation API](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/llamafirewall-vs-mistral-moderation.md)
- [Llama Guard 4 vs Presidio](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/llama-guard-vs-microsoft-presidio.md)