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AI · alternatives · 2026

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24 alternatives to Latch – Open-source security middleware for AI agents

Latch is an open-source proxy that sits between AI agents and the tools they use. It intercepts all tool calls and applies security policies in real-time: Safe operations pass through instantly. Risky operations require human approval via dashboard or Telegram. Dangerous operations are blocked completely I built Latch to address the growing security risks of AI agents accessing critical systems. There have been 1,800+ exposed agent gateways discovered in the wild and recent security audits showing multiple vulnerabilities in agent frameworks, so this was motivated by the clear urgent need…

Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Prices are shown for the 2 we have checked on their own sites, 2 of them free or with a free tier.

  1. 1
    Latchkey▲122

    Hi HN, At Imbue, we’ve been following the rapid developments in the agent landscape and noticed that the way agents interact with third-party services on users’ behalf often leaves a lot to be desired. Integrations are ad hoc, complicated, context-heavy, and either unfriendly to non-technical users or tied to a lock-in of some sort. We‘re experimenting with a command-line tool, Latchkey, that could be used by local agents targeted at non-technical users while avoiding remote intermediaries. As far as we know, this is the only existing approach at the intersection of these two goals. Core…

    Mar 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  2. 2
    Proxy 1.0▲718

    Your AI Assistant that actually gets things done

    2025 · convergence.ai · its alternatives →

  3. 3

    Hey HN! Today we're launching Agent Vault - an open source HTTP credential proxy and vault for AI agents. Repo is at https://github.com/Infisical/agent-vault, and there's an in-depth description at https://infisical.com/blog/agent-vault-the-open-source-crede.... We built Agent Vault in response to a question that been plaguing the industry: How do we give agents secure access to services without them reading any secrets? Most teams building agents have run into this exact problem: They build an agent or agentic system and come to realize at some point…

    Apr 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  4. 4

    Run AI agents on your Mac with scoped access

    Aug 2026 · plow.co · its alternatives →

  5. 5
    Kastrafree tier, from $19.99/mo▲332

    Hi HN, Fernando and I built Kastra. Kastra intercepts AI agent tool calls and evaluates them against deterministic policies before they execute. We built this product to control pre- and post-inference workloads. This is aimed at developers using coding agents like Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, and OpenClaw. Kastra pushes an allow, hold, and deny decision before the action runs. You can build these policies in plain English from the web app. The interception engine evaluates the tools, targets, and parameters of every action at sub 1ms at a scale of billions of interceptions per day. We also…

    Jul 2026 · kastra.ai · its alternatives →

  6. 6
    CtrlAI▲104

    Transparent proxy that secures AI agents with guardrails

    Mar 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  7. 7

    We built an open-source proxy that sits between coding agents (Claude Code, OpenClaw, etc.) and the LLM, compressing tool outputs before they enter the context window. Demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vFZ6MPrwjw#t=9s. Motivation: Agents are terrible at managing context. A single file read or grep can dump thousands of tokens into the window, most of it noise. This isn't just expensive — it actively degrades quality. Long-context benchmarks consistently show steep accuracy drops as context grows (OpenAI's GPT-5.4 eval goes from 97.2% at 32k to 36.6% at 1M…

    Mar 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  8. 8
    Clawcard▲125

    While building Latch, our governance and observability platform for agents handling sensitive operations, I needed a way to test it end‑to‑end. That meant giving agents real, governed identities: email, phone, payments, and secrets - all tied to a single auditable entity. That testing surface turned into Clawcard. With a single API key, your agent gets: - A real email inbox (send + receive) - An SMS phone number - Virtual Mastercards with spend limits - An encrypted credential vault - A full audit trail for every action All of it is built for agent-native governance and wired to work out of…

    Mar 2026 · clawcard.sh · its alternatives →

  9. 9
    HOL Guard▲106

    The 1st Firewall for AI Agents

    Jul 2026 · hol.org · its alternatives →

  10. 10
    Foil▲83

    An AI agent that monitors your AI agents

    Mar 2026 · getfoil.ai · its alternatives →

  11. 11

    Your agent team, on your machine. Open-source harness for multi-user Claude agents. - yaodub/cast

    Jun 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  12. 12

    Unlock Smarter Pipelines

    Feb 2026 · latchkey.dev · its alternatives →

  13. 13

    gate.cat blocks destructive shell commands before AI coding agents execute them. Open source, local, and fail-closed.

    Jul 2026 · gate.cat · its alternatives →

  14. 14

    Runtime firewall for AI coding agents.

    Aug 2026 · contextfence.dev · its alternatives →

  15. 15

    Drop-in security for your AI stack.

    2025 · its alternatives →

  16. 16

    Open Source Reliability Harness: Make your agents follow rules. One line of code to‎ ‎enforce, trace, and improve. ‎ ‎ - GitHub - open-bias/open-bias: Open Source Reliability Harness: Make your agents follow rules. One line of code to‎ ‎enforce, trace, and improve. ‎ ‎

    Apr 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  17. 17

    We build runtime security for AI agents. The playground started as an internal tool that we used to test our own guardrails. But we kept finding the same types of vulnerabilities because we think about attacks a certain way. At some point you need people who don't think like you. So we open-sourced it. Each challenge is a live agent with real tools and a published system prompt. Whenever a challenge is over, the full winning conversation transcript and guardrail logs get documented publicly. Building the general-purpose agent itself was probably the most fun part. Getting it to reliably use…

    Mar 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  18. 18
    SecuriX▲17

    Trust Layer for Autonomous AI

    May 2026 · securix.app · its alternatives →

  19. 19

    Open-source malware scanner and runtime guard for AI agents

    Jul 2026 · panguard.ai · its alternatives →

  20. 20
    SafeClawfree tier, from $20/mo▲7

    Security-first hosting for AI agents

    Feb 2026 · safeclaw.tech · its alternatives →

  21. 21

    An information-flow policy engine for LLM agents.

    24d ago · openappa.com · its alternatives →

  22. 22

    Hi HN, Matvey, Ildar, Joey, and Dominik here. If you're building LLM agents that use tools, you're probably worried about prompt injection attacks that can hijack those tools. We were too, and found that solutions like prompt-based filtering or secondary "guard" LLMs can be unreliable. Our thesis is that agent security should be handled at the network level between the agent and the LLM, just like a traditional web application firewall. So we built Archestra Platform: an open-source gateway that acts as a secure proxy for your AI agents. It's designed to be a deterministic firewall against…

    2025 · archestra.ai · its alternatives →

  23. 23

    Your AI agent asks. You decide. From your phone.

    May 2026 · agentlock.net · its alternatives →

  24. 24

    Hey HN, We built FireClaw because we kept watching AI agents get owned by prompt injection through web content. The agent fetches a page, the page says "ignore previous instructions," and suddenly your agent is leaking data or running commands it shouldn't. The existing solutions detect injection after the fact. We wanted to prevent it. FireClaw is a security proxy that sits between your AI agent and the web. Every fetch passes through a 4-stage pipeline: 1. DNS blocklist check (URLhaus, PhishTank, community feed) 2. Structural sanitization (strip hidden CSS, zero-width Unicode, encoding…

    Mar 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

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Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →