head to head · open source
garak vs ship-safe
garak has 9,850 GitHub stars, 1,439 forks, 429 open issues and last shipped 3 days ago. ship-safe has 870 stars, 115 forks, 9 open issues and last shipped 19 days ago. garak leads on adoption by 1,032% (9,850 vs 870 stars). garak is written in Python under Apache-2.0; ship-safe is written in JavaScript under MIT. garak has attracted 15% 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 | ★ 9.8K | ★ 870 |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Python | JavaScript |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-10-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.4K | ⑂ 115 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick garak if
- You weight community size — 9.8K 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, LLM vulnerability scanner Generative AI Red teaming & Assessment Kit garak checks if an LLM can be made to fail in a way we don't want. garak probes for hallucination, data leakage, prompt injection, misinformation, toxicity generation, jailbreaks, and many other weaknesses. If you know nmap or msf / Metasploit Framework, garak does somewhat similar things to them, but for LLMs. garak focuses on ways of making an LLM or dialog system fail. It combines static, dynamic, and adaptive probes to explore this. garak 's a free tool. We love developing it and are always interested in adding functionality to…
read the full garak overview →
About ship-safe
The independent security agent for AI written software. It finds issues, investigates whether they are real, and shows you the evidence. Website · Docs · Security & Data Flow · Benchmark · Pricing · Blog · Contribute Ship Safe CLI Ship Safe runs locally in your repo and works in two layers. A deterministic engine finds issues across application code, AI agents, MCP configs, prompts, dependencies, CI/CD, secrets, and cloud adjacent configuration. Fast, repeatable, and benchmarked — this is the sensor layer. An investigation layer then decides what the findings are worth. It traces the value that reaches a sink…
read the full ship-safe overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is garak or ship-safe more popular?
garak has 9,850 GitHub stars and ship-safe has 870. 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 (9,850 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.