Sunglasses vs Lakera Guard (now Check Point AI Guardrails)
This comparison is architecture fit, not winner-take-all branding. Sunglasses is a fast, local pre-ingestion filter; you can place it in front of a guardrail product in the same pipeline.
Now Check Point AI Guardrails, per its docs, which describe it as available as a SaaS cloud-hosted solution or a self-hosted product.
Sunglasses is Layer 1 — local, free. It scans a typical attack string in ~3.8ms (median of our own 38-string set) and sends nothing anywhere unless you pass --report-to.
Side by side
The grey line under each Lakera Guard cell gives its own words and the page they come from, fetched 2026-10-29. Pick by where you need the scan to run and what you can send off your machine.
Better together
Sunglasses is a fast, local pre-ingestion filter — you can place it in front of a guardrail product in the same pipeline. We do the fast, local scan first; the guardrail product does its own analysis second. Two layers, one pipeline.
Sunglasses ships an adapter system and integrates with LangChain, CrewAI, and MCP workflows, so it slots in front of existing security stacks rather than replacing them.
When to pick which
you need local-only, offline, zero-cost scanning — compliance, privacy, air-gapped environments, budget, or principle. One pip install takes you from nothing to defended against known attacks.
you want the threat-database protection its docs describe and your policy allows the deployment you pick, SaaS or self-hosted.
you want defense in depth: the local filter runs first, and the guardrail product may catch things the local filter does not.
Sources and how to check
docs.lakera.ai/guard.md and docs.lakera.ai/docs/selfhosting, fetched 2026-10-29. Every quoted line in the table is from one of these two pages.
Its pricing and terms pages were not read, so this page states no price and no license for Lakera Guard.
Its docs call the product Check Point AI Guardrails (docs.lakera.ai/docs/selfhosting, fetched 2026-10-29). This page uses both names.
Tell us at [email protected] and we will correct this page.