zn vs the alternatives
No anonymous checkmarks. Named rivals, real trade-offs — including where they win.
How to choose
Latency budget
Anything synchronous on every request should stay in the classifier band. zn rules run sub-millisecond locally; the v30 neural path answers in ~200ms.
Data residency
If prompts cannot leave your VPC, hosted-only APIs are out. zn-gate runs 100% offline; the cloud is an upgrade, not a requirement.
Indirect injection
If agents retrieve untrusted content, you need tool-result screening — not just user-input classification. zn inspects tool calls and results.
Verifiability
Ask for frozen benchmarks and published gates, not adjectives. Ours: 23,699 public vectors, v29 gates, reproducible splits.
Head-to-head
vs Lakera (Check Point)
The enterprise managed API: claimed 98%+ detection, sub-50ms, 100+ languages — proprietary, quote-only pricing, Check Point procurement.
vs LLM Guard (Palo Alto)
The MIT open-source scanner suite: 2.5M+ downloads, input and output scanners, self-hosted — now inside Palo Alto Prisma AIRS.
vs StackOne Defender
The Apache-2.0 npm package for indirect injection: under 10ms, purpose-built for tool-call results, self-reported ~88.7% accuracy.