AEGIS vs Lakera Guard: Open-Source Self-Host vs Closed SaaS

**Short answer**: Lakera Guard is the strongest commercial agent firewall — a hosted SaaS with strong prompt-injection detection, sub-50ms latency, and a Check Point acquisition behind it. AEGIS is the open-source self-host alternative — MIT-licensed, data-stays-in-your-VPC, with parameter-level taint propagation and cryptographic audit that Lakera doesn't publish. Pick Lakera if you want a vendor to operate the runtime and you're OK piping prompts off-prem. Pick AEGIS if your data sovereignty story matters (fintech, healthcare, gov), if you want auditable open-source, or if you want to extend the policy DSL yourself.

This is a written comparison, not a "we're better" pitch — both products solve real problems, and the right choice depends on what *you* need.

## What problem does each product solve?

Both products sit between an AI agent and its tools (or the model API the agent calls) and decide whether to allow, block, or escalate each call. Both run policy checks. Both log decisions. The mechanisms diverge after that.

| Concern | Lakera Guard | AEGIS |
|---|---|---|
| **Form factor** | Hosted SaaS API | Self-hosted gateway (Docker / binary) |
| **License** | Commercial | MIT |
| **Latency** | <50 ms (advertised) | <50 ms (measured) |
| **Where the data goes** | Through Lakera's infra | Stays in your network |
| **Acquisition status** | Bought by Check Point Sept 2025 (~$300M) | Independent OSS project |
| **Pricing** | Contact sales | $0 (Community) / $19-99/mo (Pro) / Custom (Enterprise) |

## How does Lakera Guard work?

Lakera's product page documents the scope: prompt injection (direct and indirect), jailbreaks, PII exfiltration, "unsafe tool use." The detector stack is proprietary; the public marketing materials emphasise:

1. **Inline interception** — agent calls Lakera's API before each tool call; Lakera responds with allow/block/redact within 50 ms.
2. **Multi-modal** — handles text, image inputs, and structured tool arguments.
3. **Continuous detector updates** — Lakera's team ships new injection patterns weekly. Customers benefit without redeploying.
4. **Dashboard** — Lakera Console shows blocked attempts, lets ops triage policy gaps.

Their marketing scope is broadly correct based on third-party reviews. The detector accuracy on AgentDojo and similar benchmarks is competitive (their own published numbers; no independent replication that we've seen).

## How does AEGIS work?

AEGIS ships as a gateway daemon (Docker or single binary) that sits in the customer's VPC. The agent points its tool-call traffic at the gateway; the gateway evaluates a three-layer detection chain and returns allow/block/escalate.

Three architectural choices that diverge from Lakera:

1. **Layer 1 — static rules + grammar-constrained DSL.** Most policies are deterministic — `amount > $10k → escalate`, `command matches "curl … | sh" → block`. These don't need ML; they need a clean DSL the customer can audit. AEGIS compiles natural language to a JSON-schema-validated DSL; the runtime evaluator is a few hundred lines.
2. **Layer 2 — sequence-aware anomaly.** Per-agent behavioural baselines using classical methods (Mahalanobis distance, Isolation Forest) plus a sequence model. We're upgrading to a SRAE (Siamese Recurrent Autoencoder) per the Trajectory Guard paper (AAAI 2026). Output is a continuous score, not a class.
3. **Layer 3 — LLM-as-judge with published calibration.** The judge layer is closest to what Lakera does. The key differentiator: we publish ECE numbers (see our [calibration report](/blog/llm-judge-calibration)) so customers know how trustworthy the confidence scores are. Lakera doesn't.

Plus: parameter-level taint propagation, cryptographic Merkle audit log with witness co-signature, AST-based pre-deploy scanner across LangGraph / CrewAI / AutoGen / Mastra.

## Where does Lakera Guard win?

**1. Operational maturity.** Lakera has been shipping detector updates for 3+ years. Their detection corpus has seen attacks AEGIS hasn't seen yet. If your only metric is "catches more attacks today," Lakera probably edges out.

**2. Zero infra burden.** API call in, decision out. No Docker, no Kubernetes, no version upgrades. For a 5-person AI startup that hates devops, this is meaningful.

**3. Detector R&D budget.** Lakera (now Check Point) has more researchers paid full-time than AEGIS. Their roadmap will move faster on commodity detection improvements.

**4. Enterprise sales muscle.** Check Point sells into Fortune 500 security teams. Procurement at large banks already has Lakera approved. AEGIS doesn't.

If those four matter most: Lakera Guard.

## Where does AEGIS win?

**1. Data sovereignty.** Lakera's product sends your prompts (and often tool arguments — which include PII, SSNs, financial data) through their cloud. For HIPAA, PCI-DSS, FedRAMP, FATF Travel Rule — that's at minimum a 6-month BAA / DPA / SOC 2 review. AEGIS runs on your hardware; the data never leaves your network. For regulated verticals this is the difference between "deployable" and "deal-killer."

**2. Parameter-level taint propagation.** Lakera Guard treats every prompt as a single string and asks "is this an injection?" AEGIS labels every tool argument with provenance — `user` / `retrieval` / `web` / `file` / `memory` — and gates dangerous sinks on the label. The IPIGuard paper (EMNLP 2025) shows this drops attack success rate from 4.43% → 0.69% vs classifier-only defences. Until Lakera ships taint propagation, AEGIS has the structural edge on indirect prompt injection.

**3. Cryptographic audit.** Lakera Guard logs decisions to their infrastructure; you query their dashboard. AEGIS logs to a Merkle tree with witness co-signature, RFC 6962 style. An auditor (or a court) can verify decisions weren't edited post-hoc. We have not seen Lakera publish anything equivalent.

**4. Open-source extensibility.** You can read every line of AEGIS. You can fork it. You can add your own detector. You can audit the policy DSL compiler. You can host your own witness service. With Lakera, you trust their black box.

**5. Cost.** Community is free. Pro is $19-99/mo. Lakera Guard's pricing is contact-sales — based on public references from customers, mid-market deals start at ~$2k/mo and scale into six figures for enterprise.

If those matter most: AEGIS.

## What about combining them?

It's not crazy. We've seen design partners use AEGIS as the in-VPC enforcement layer for data-sovereign decisions and Lakera as a secondary text-classifier layer for prompt content. The architecture:

```
user prompt
│
▼
(1) Lakera Guard API ─── checks prompt for injection
│
▼
(2) Your agent runs, calls a tool
│
▼
(3) AEGIS gateway (in your VPC) ─── policy + taint + audit
│
▼
actual tool (Stripe / DB / file)
```

The split is honest about each product's strength: Lakera handles "is this prompt suspicious in language terms" (their strongest detector), AEGIS handles "is the resulting tool call safe given the policy + taint state + audit requirements" (its strongest layer). Each does what it does best.

We're not threatened by this architecture — it's a reasonable trade-off when you don't want to choose.

## What are the honest gaps in AEGIS today?

To be square about where AEGIS isn't there yet:

- **Detector library size**: Lakera has more patterns shipped today. Our adaptive-thresholds + n-gram + IsolationForest baseline catches the canonical attacks but lags Lakera's curated corpus.
- **Image / multi-modal**: AEGIS is text-and-tool-call focused. Lakera handles image inputs too. We don't yet.
- **Live customer count**: Lakera has hundreds of paying customers. AEGIS has design partners, no commercial customers yet (by design — we're in OSS-first growth mode).
- **24×7 support**: Lakera ships an SLA. AEGIS Community is community-supported; Pro is email + 1-business-day; Enterprise gets a named SE.

We're transparent about these because the buyer should know, and because closing them is just engineering time, not architecture.

## Which product should I actually pick?

If you're a B2C startup building a chatbot, no regulated data, want to pay-as-you-go: **Lakera Guard**.

If you're a fintech, healthcare AI, gov-contract, on-prem, or compliance-heavy team that needs data sovereignty, cryptographic audit, and the ability to fork the firewall: **AEGIS**.

If you're a security team that wants both belt and suspenders: **run both** — Lakera at the prompt boundary, AEGIS at the tool-call boundary.

The point of this article isn't "we're better." It's that both products solve real, different problems, and the choice should be a fit-check, not a vendor war.

## FAQ

**Is AEGIS trying to compete with Lakera?**
Not directly. Lakera bet on managed SaaS; AEGIS bet on open-source + self-host. There's overlap in the middle but the GTM motions are different.

**What does Lakera think about open-source alternatives?**
Their public stance (from blog posts and Check Point's M&A rationale) is that enterprise customers value managed services — that's the wedge they bet on. We respect that bet. The OSS+self-host market is real but separate.

**If Lakera's detection is better today, why use AEGIS at all?**
Three reasons: data sovereignty (Lakera can't legally ship to your VPC easily), price (Lakera enterprise is six figures), and extensibility (Lakera's detectors are closed; AEGIS's are forkable).

**What's AEGIS's roadmap for catching up on detection?**
Q3-Q4 2026 we're adding SRAE for sequence anomaly (Trajectory Guard, AAAI 2026), parameter-level taint upgrade (FIDES + NeuroTaint patterns), and judge-calibration distillation (Patronus GLIDER). See [docs/RESEARCH-ROADMAP.md](https://github.com/Justin0504/Aegis/blob/main/docs/RESEARCH-ROADMAP.md).

**Is the comparison fair given AEGIS is younger?**
That's the right pushback. The honest answer: on the dimensions where we've shipped (sovereignty, taint, audit), we're ahead. On dimensions where Lakera has 3 years' head start (detector corpus, multi-modal, enterprise sales), they're ahead. Both true.

---

**Try AEGIS** → `curl -fsSL aegistraces.com/install | sh`

**Read the source** → [github.com/Justin0504/Aegis](https://github.com/Justin0504/Aegis)

**Compare on AgentDojo yourself** → benchmarks in `apps/red-team-corpus/`