NeuralTrust alternatives: the 2026 comparison

Honest answer first: NeuralTrust is a strong, legitimate choice, and for some profiles the obvious one. If you want your gateway layer to be open source — auditable, forkable, deployable as a Docker image, Kubernetes manifests or a single Go binary — TrustGate is the most actively developed option of that kind in Europe. The commercial platform adds runtime protection, posture management and a real red-teaming product (TrustTest), and the June 2026 seed round means the company is resourced to execute. If your evaluation is "European, independent, open-source gateway, with red teaming attached", NeuralTrust fits that brief better than anyone else on this page. The counterpoints to weigh: platform pricing is on request rather than public, and community adoption of the open-source gateway is still young — expect to lean on the vendor rather than a large ecosystem.

Disclosure: Senthex is us — judge this section accordingly, and check the claims against the linked pages.

Senthex is the other independent European vendor here, and the honest way to frame the choice is that we solve a different primary problem. NeuralTrust's anchor is the gateway; Senthex's anchor is proof. The firewall is a runtime proxy — swap a base URL, one line of code, works with OpenAI, Anthropic, Mistral or Gemini — but the distinctive part is the audit trail: in the v1.1.7 pilot, each record is chained with SHA-256 and anchored to an RFC 3161 timestamp, so an auditor can verify it offline — tamper-evident, not tamper-proof — aligned with EU AI Act record-keeping (Articles 12 & 19). You can verify a real bundle yourself. We also publish original research on multi-agent attacks — ATLAS and RELAY — with frozen datasets, so the detection behaviour is inspectable before you buy. Hosting is EU (Hetzner Falkenstein, Germany) or self-host including Azure; raw request and response bodies are excluded from storage by default (data minimisation); pricing is public with a free tier.

When Senthex is not the right choice: if an open-source gateway is a hard requirement (TrustGate); if you need red-teaming tooling as a product (NeuralTrust's TrustTest, or Lakera's enterprise program); if your risk is model supply chain (HiddenLayer); or if you only need gateway operations (Cloudflare). See also what we do and do not claim on EU AI Act compliance.

If you want the category leader with the most adversarial data behind it, Lakera remains hard to argue with: the Gandalf game gave it prompt-attack data at a scale nobody else has published — Check Point's announcement cites over 80 million adversarial patterns — plus the PINT benchmark and a documented self-host path down to air-gapped deployments. Since September 2025 it is part of Check Point, which cuts both ways: enterprise support and longevity on one side; sales-gated pricing and a roadmap serving the acquirer's platform on the other. If that trade-off is the crux of your decision, we wrote a dedicated page: Lakera alternatives, compared honestly.

Until mid-2026, "NeuralTrust or LLM Guard" was a reasonable open-source question. It no longer is: the LLM Guard repository was archived on July 9, 2026, a year after Palo Alto Networks completed its acquisition of Protect AI, and its README states the project and its models are no longer maintained. The MIT code still runs and can be forked, but choosing it today means maintaining a frozen detection stack yourself. If open source is the requirement, TrustGate is the actively developed option; if you are migrating off LLM Guard specifically, we compared the migration paths on a dedicated page: LLM Guard alternatives.

If what you actually need is gateway operations — usage analytics, caching, rate limiting, retries, model fallback — and your stack already runs on Cloudflare, AI Gateway's core features are free and excellent. It is not a security firewall, though: its Guardrails feature is content moderation, and prompt-injection detection lives in a separate WAF add-on (AI Security for Apps, formerly Firewall for AI) gated to Enterprise plans. There is no self-hosting and no regional processing control for AI Gateway. We unpacked all of this on a dedicated page: Cloudflare AI Gateway alternatives.

HiddenLayer plays a different game: it is an MLSecOps platform centred on the model supply chain — scanning model files for backdoors and serialization exploits, AI asset discovery, attack simulation — with a runtime detection module (AIDR) attached. If your risk register is dominated by third-party model files and fine-tunes rather than prompts hitting an API, HiddenLayer addresses problems neither NeuralTrust nor Senthex is built for. Pricing is sales-led with no public numbers, and the deployment model is not publicly documented, so plan a real procurement cycle.