gate-oc-audit vs RiskKernel

gate-oc-audit and RiskKernel are both guardrails & safety tracked by AIDiveForge. Below is a side-by-side comparison of pricing, capabilities, platforms, and ownership — sourced from each tool's live website and verified before publishing.

gate-oc-audit

Gate operates as a drop-in proxy: your agent points at one endpoint, Gate inspects every outbound prompt and every inbound response, then enforces the policy you write — blocking injections, redacting secrets and PII, flagging ambiguous cases, and writing every decision to a tamper-evident audit log anchored to a blockchain. The vendor reports 97.4% F1 across 16 public prompt-injection benchmarks and a head-to-head F1 of 96.6% versus Lakera Guard's 83.7% on four matched datasets; methodology and per-benchmark scores are published. Token compression and prefix caching run on every request, and the vendor states users see 20% or more token savings without changing model outputs. Gate is in private beta with no self-hosted deployment option, so teams with hard data-residency requirements hit a wall immediately.

RiskKernel

Deployed as a single Go binary, it sits in front of your existing OpenAI, Anthropic, or LangChain stack via a one-variable proxy — no rewrite required. Every call is metered and checkpointed, so a killed or crashed run resumes from the last saved state instead of re-spending from zero. The human-approval gate routes irreversible tool calls for sign-off over CLI, web, or webhook before they fire, and the LLM cannot bypass it because the gate lives in compiled code, not a prompt. The hosted dashboard is private beta only; teams that need a UI today are self-managing.

Attribute	gate-oc-audit	RiskKernel
Pricing	Paid	Free
Free trial	No	No
Open source	Yes	Yes
Has API	Yes	Yes
Self-hosted option	No	Yes
Platforms	Web proxy, desktop app	Linux, macOS, Windows (Go binary)
Pros	Proxy-based architecture means your agent changes one endpoint, not its entire codebase, so you get injection defense without a rewrite and without touching model provider credentials. Bidirectional inspection catches both inbound injections from tool responses and outbound PII or credential leaks in model replies, which means a single misconfigured response cannot silently send a customer's SSN or an AWS key to the wrong place. Vendor-published benchmark methodology with per-dataset scores lets you audit the 97.4% F1 claim yourself rather than taking marketing copy on faith — which matters when you are deciding whether to put this in front of production traffic. Inline token compression and cache-prefix marking run automatically, so teams switching from direct API calls to Gate can offset the added infrastructure cost against token savings the vendor states average 20% or more per request. Policy-driven rule enforcement writes every block, redact, and flag decision to a tamper-evident audit log, so compliance reviews have a verifiable record of what the agent was told and what it said — without manual logging code in your agent.	Hard per-run dollar and token ceilings enforced in compiled code, which means the kill switch fires before the overspend registers rather than after the invoice cycle closes. Crash-resumable checkpointing, so a process killed mid-run restarts from the last saved state instead of replaying every prior API call and paying for them again. Human-approval gate for side-effecting tool calls that the LLM cannot route around, so irreversible actions — deleting records, sending messages, writing to external systems — wait for a human decision before executing. One-variable proxy adoption with no code rewrite required, so existing agents running against OpenAI or Anthropic get metering and enforcement without refactoring the application. Self-hosted Apache 2.0 binary with BYO provider keys and no telemetry, so teams in regulated or air-gapped environments get full auditability without exporting run data to a third-party service.
Cons	No self-hosted deployment option exists on the current vendor page. Teams in healthcare, finance, or government with data-residency or network-isolation requirements cannot use Gate at all — they move to on-premise alternatives or build detection in-house. The 1% false-positive rate reported in the benchmark means Gate will block or flag legitimate requests. At low request volumes this is a minor inconvenience; in high-throughput pipelines where a blocked call means a failed agent task, teams need a human-review queue or a fallback path — neither of which is described in the current docs, adding implementation overhead. Private beta access is invite-only with no stated general availability timeline on the vendor page, so teams cannot schedule Gate into a production roadmap with confidence. Projects that need a committed SLA or guaranteed capacity move to established providers like Lakera Guard despite the lower reported benchmark scores.	The hosted dashboard is private beta only, so teams that need a web UI to monitor, review, or manage runs across agents have no production-ready option yet — they operate through CLI or build their own view against the OpenTelemetry export. SDK adapters are scoped to LangChain, the Claude Agent SDK, and the OpenAI Agents SDK; teams running CrewAI, AutoGen, or any other framework hit the proxy layer only and lose loop-count and tool-level controls until they write their own adapter. The project is maintained by a single developer with no enterprise support tier listed; teams whose compliance posture requires a support contract or SLA will find nothing on offer and will move to a vendor-backed observability or guardrails product instead.

Bottom line

Gate-oc-audit is paid while RiskKernel is free. Choose based on which difference matters most for your workflow.

Frequently asked questions

What is the difference between gate-oc-audit and RiskKernel?

gate-oc-audit is Paid and open source, while RiskKernel is Free and open source. Compare pricing, free trial, API, platforms, and pros/cons in the table above on AIDiveForge.

Is gate-oc-audit better than RiskKernel?

It depends on your workflow. Use the side-by-side attributes (pricing, open source, API, self-hosted, platforms) to decide. AIDiveForge does not rank a universal winner — we publish verified facts so you can choose.