F5 AI Guardrails vs Promptfoo
Side-by-side comparison of framework coverage, pricing, capabilities, and target customers. Last checked October 2026.
https://aicompliancevendors.com/compare/f5-ai-guardrails-vs-promptfooF5 AI Guardrails
F5's runtime guardrails and AI Red Team testing for AI models, apps and agents, built from CalypsoAI and deployable on premises or air-gapped
F5 AI Guardrails is F5's runtime security product for AI models, applications and agents. F5 sells it alongside F5 AI Red Team, its automated adversarial testing product, and presents the two as a pair: findings from Red Team can be turned into guardrail policies. Both come from CalypsoAI, the AI security company F5 announced it would acquire on September 11, 2025 for $180 million in purchase consideration, mostly cash. The deal closed on September 26, 2025. F5 introduced both products when it announced the deal had closed, and made them generally available in January 2026 as part of its Application Delivery and Security Platform. F5, Inc. was incorporated in 1996 and is based in Seattle; this profile lists the company's founding year and headquarters, as the directory does for other big-company products. F5 AI Guardrails blocks prompt injection and jailbreaks, detects and prevents leakage of personal data and custom data categories, filters toxic or harmful output, and audits or blocks unauthorized tool calls and actions by agents. Policies can be written in natural language. Every enforcement action is logged with attribution, and logs can be exported to third-party SIEMs. It works with any model and runs in AWS, Azure or Google Cloud, in private clouds, or on premises, including fully air-gapped environments. F5 AI Red Team sends a swarm of attacker agents to run static, prompt-based and multi-turn attacks, including indirect prompt injection and data-leakage tests on RAG applications. F5 says its attack library grows by more than 10,000 patterns a month. Red Team runs in the major public clouds or on premises as a certified Red Hat OpenShift operator. A feature called F5 AI Remediate drafts guardrails from Red Team findings, and a person approves each one before it goes live. **Gateway and platform** On June 22, 2026 F5 launched the F5 AI Security Platform, which groups AI governance, AI discovery, testing with AI Red Team and runtime protection with AI Guardrails, plus an audit trail across AI interactions. At the same time it announced the acquisition of SurePath AI, which adds network-based discovery of AI use, including shadow AI. F5's AI Gateway now combines a model gateway, an MCP gateway (with an MCP server registry and per-tool allow and deny controls) and AI Guardrails under one control plane. **Compliance coverage** F5 says Guardrails has automated auditing templates for GDPR, HIPAA and the EU AI Act, out-of-the-box policy controls aligned to PCI, PHI and the EU AI Act's prohibited-risk categories, and audit-ready logs. It also says Red Team findings can support compliance programs aligned with the NIST AI RMF and the EU AI Act, and it publishes an infographic aligning its products with the OWASP Top 10 for LLMs. We found no article-by-article mapping to the EU AI Act. **Who it's for** Large enterprises, including regulated financial services and healthcare organizations, that need AI guardrails they can host themselves or run air-gapped. F5 says both products are deployed at Fortune 500 companies. It also suits F5 customers who want AI controls on the same platform as their application delivery and API security.
Promptfoo
Build Secure AI Applications
Promptfoo is an open-source CLI and library for evaluating LLM prompts, models, RAGs, and agents through automated benchmarks and matrix comparisons, alongside red-teaming for security vulnerabilities like prompt injections, jailbreaks, PII leaks, and insecure tool use. It differentiates via developer-first local execution, CI/CD integration, and modular plugins covering 50+ attack types with community-driven threat intelligence. Targeted at developers and security teams in enterprises (127 Fortune 500 users), it supports self-hosting to avoid vendor lock-in. Enterprise adds collaboration, monitoring, SSO, and compliance dashboards. Acquired by OpenAI in March 2026 for integration into Frontier platform, remains open-source with SaaS/on-prem options.Promptfoo homepagePromptfoo docsPromptfoo pricing
What the data shows
We haven't published an editorial verdict on this pair yet. The comparison below is built from public vendor materials and our taxonomy — no editorialized ranking.
- Shared framework coverage: None documented in common.
- Only F5 AI Guardrails covers: EU AI Act, HIPAA, NIST AI RMF
- Shared capabilities: 1 of 12 listed.
Want our editorial take? Email the editors or read our methodology.
At a glance
| Attribute | F5 AI Guardrails | Promptfoo |
|---|---|---|
| Founded | 1996 | 2024 |
| Headquarters | Seattle, United States | San Francisco, United States |
| Employees | Undisclosed | 11-50 |
| Funding | Product of F5, Inc. (Nasdaq: FFIV); no separate funding | $23.4M total (Series A, July 2025) |
| Pricing | F5 doesn't publish prices; its AI Guardrails page links to a free trial and a sales contact. AWS Marketplace lists F5 AI Guardrails (a container image for Amazon EKS) with a 12-month "F5 Guardrails AI" dimension at $100,000.00, but the listing says that price is a placeholder and that pricing is configured by F5 as a private offer. AWS Marketplace also lists F5 AI Red Team at $100,000.00 for a 12-month contract on its "Red Team Reports" dimension; the listing says cost scales with the number of report units bought and doesn't say how many reports that price covers. | Community (open-source): free with 10k red teaming probes/month; Enterprise/On-Prem: custom pricing via contact sales.Promptfoo pricing |
| Website | Visit site | Visit site |
Framework coverage
| Framework | F5 AI Guardrails | Promptfoo |
|---|---|---|
| EU AI Act | limited | — |
| HIPAA | Adjacent | — |
| NIST AI RMF | limited | — |
Capabilities
| Capability | F5 AI Guardrails | Promptfoo |
|---|---|---|
| AI Guardrails | ✓ | — |
| Agentic Red Teaming | ✓ | — |
| Audit Logging | ✓ | — |
| Data Leakage Prevention | ✓ | — |
| Human-in-the-Loop | ✓ | — |
| LLM Evaluation | — | ✓ |
| LLM Guardrails & Content Filtering | ✓ | — |
| LLM Red Teaming | ✓ | ✓ |
| Policy Enforcement | ✓ | — |
| Prompt Injection Defense | ✓ | — |
| Prompt Management | — | ✓ |
| Runtime Enforcement | ✓ | — |
Industries served
F5 AI Guardrails
- Financial Services
- Healthcare
Promptfoo
- Healthcare
- SaaS & Technology
Integrations
F5 AI Guardrails
- AWS Marketplace
- Kubernetes
- OpenAI API
- Anthropic API
Promptfoo
- OpenAI API
- Anthropic API
- GitHub
- GitLab
- Jenkins
Frequently asked
What is the difference between F5 AI Guardrails and Promptfoo?+
F5 AI Guardrails is F5's runtime guardrails and AI Red Team testing for AI models, apps and agents, built from CalypsoAI and deployable on premises or air-gapped; Promptfoo is Build Secure AI Applications. The full side-by-side covers framework coverage (0 shared, 3 unique to F5 AI Guardrails, 0 unique to Promptfoo), pricing model, and capability overlap.
How do F5 AI Guardrails and Promptfoo pricing compare?+
F5 AI Guardrails: F5 doesn't publish prices; its AI Guardrails page links to a free trial and a sales contact. AWS Marketplace lists F5 AI Guardrails (a container image for Amazon EKS) with a 12-month "F5 Guardrails AI" dimension at $100,000.00, but the listing says that price is a placeholder and that pricing is configured by F5 as a private offer. AWS Marketplace also lists F5 AI Red Team at $100,000.00 for a 12-month contract on its "Red Team Reports" dimension; the listing says cost scales with the number of report units bought and doesn't say how many reports that price covers. Promptfoo:
Which AI compliance frameworks do F5 AI Guardrails and Promptfoo both support?+
There is no published overlap in framework coverage between F5 AI Guardrails and Promptfoo based on each vendor's own materials.
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Editorial independence: This comparison is free and was not paid for by either vendor. See our methodology.