head to head · open source
garak vs ship-safe
garak has 9,308 GitHub stars, 1,294 forks, 429 open issues and last shipped 4 days ago. ship-safe has 846 stars, 113 forks, 9 open issues and last shipped 5 days ago. garak leads on adoption by 1,000% (9,308 vs 846 stars). garak is written in Python under Apache-2.0; ship-safe is written in JavaScript under MIT. garak has attracted 14% as many forks as stars, ship-safe 13%. garak was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (llm-security), so they are genuine substitutes rather than adjacent tools.
Two open source projects, one decision. Both are free and self-hostable — the differences are community size, license terms, language stack and release pace.
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Side by side
| garak | ship-safe | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 9.3K | ★ 846 |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Python | JavaScript |
| Last push | 2026-09-16 | 2026-09-15 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.3K | ⑂ 113 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick garak if
- You weight community size — 9.3K stars and counting
- You want the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick ship-safe if
- You want the ship-safe feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches JavaScript
- You evaluated both and ship-safe fits your workflow better
About garak
garak is a free, Apache 2.0 command line vulnerability scanner for large language models that probes generative AI systems for hallucination, data leakage, prompt injection, misinformation, toxicity generation, and jailbreaks, and it is aimed at security engineers, red teamers, and AI developers who need to test the models they ship.
read the full garak overview →
About ship-safe
Ship Safe is a local first security agent for AI written software that finds issues across a repository, investigates whether each finding is real, and shows the evidence behind its conclusion — it is built for developers and security teams who ship code written by or with AI agents.
read the full ship-safe overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is garak or ship-safe more popular?
garak has 9,308 GitHub stars and ship-safe has 846. garak has the larger community by that measure.
Are garak and ship-safe free?
Both are open source. garak is licensed under Apache-2.0 and ship-safe under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between garak and ship-safe?
garak is written in Python and ship-safe in JavaScript. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, garak or ship-safe?
Choose garak if you want the larger community (9,308 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose ship-safe if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.