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Granite Guardian

#14 of 27 in AI Content Moderation Software

Granite Guardian: A focused open-source toolkit for screening LLM risks and evaluating AI outputs. Ranked #14 of 27 in AI Content Moderation Software by our editors (7.8/10); pricing: Open source; best for LLM risk screening and evaluation.

7.8/10Editor score
Visit IBM
Granite Guardian7.8 Visit IBM

At a glance

  • Editor score
    7.8 / 10
  • Pricing
    Open source
  • Best for
    LLM risk screening and evaluation
  • Paid from
    $0.21/unit usage-based
  • Text moderation
    Yes
  • Founded
    1911 · Armonk, New York, United States
  • Facts checked
    21 Sep 2026
Granite Guardian screenshot

  • Where it wins

    • Screens prompts and responses for harmful content, bias, jailbreaks, and hallucinations
    • Evaluates RAG relevance, groundedness, answers, and agentic function calls
    • Supports custom criteria, local deployment, and IBM watsonx.ai integration

  • Where it doesn't

    • Focused on text and LLM evaluation rather than general multimodal moderation
    • Granite Guardian 3.8B inference is billed per 1M tokens through watsonx.ai
    • Requires teams to choose and operate an API or self-hosted deployment path

Our verdict on Granite Guardian

Granite Guardian is IBM’s family of open-source risk-detection models and LoRA adapters for teams evaluating AI prompts, responses, conversations, retrieval-augmented generation, and agentic function calls. It is designed for LLM teams that need screening for harmful content, bias, profanity, violence, sexual-content risks, jailbreak attempts, hallucinations, and groundedness issues. The models are released under the Apache 2.0 license and support API and self-hosted deployment options.

According to IBM’s published pricing page, the Granite Guardian 3.8B plan costs $0.212 per 1M tokens for pay-as-you-go model inference through IBM watsonx.ai. The ecosystem also includes Ollama, vLLM, and Hugging Face, giving teams several runtime options alongside watsonx.ai. Its Bring Your Own Criteria capability lets teams define custom evaluation rules, while Think and no-think modes and LoRA adapters support different evaluation and downstream-task requirements.

Granite Guardian’s main strength is depth within LLM risk evaluation rather than breadth across every moderation format. It covers prompt and response screening, jailbreak detection, RAG context relevance, groundedness, answer relevance, and agentic function-call hallucination detection in one focused model family. That makes it a strong fit for teams building or assessing text-based AI systems, especially where custom policies and local execution matter. Teams seeking broad multimodal moderation should consider a product with a wider media scope instead.

Your product? Our editors can test Granite Guardian in depth and publish a review, labelled as paid · from $149/mo →

Granite Guardian pricing

Plans Open source No free plan — trial or paid only. Prices checked 21 Sep 2026.
See plans on ibm.com

All 1 Granite Guardian plans and prices →

Granite Guardian fact sheet

Free planNot verified
Paid from$0.21/unit usage-based
Text moderationYes
Image moderationNot verified
Audio moderationNot verified
Video moderationNot verified
Custom policiesYes
Human review workflowNot verified
Deployment optionsHybrid
DeploymentCloud, Self-hosted
SupportDocs
Built forMid-market, Enterprise (editorial estimate)
Integrations4 integrations: IBM watsonx.ai, Ollama, vLLM, Hugging Face
PricingOpen source (source)
Websiteibm.com
Facts checked21 Sep 2026

Granite Guardian integrations

Granite Guardian lists 4 integrations on its own site.

  • IBM watsonx.ai
  • Ollama
  • vLLM
  • Hugging Face

Alternatives to Granite Guardian

See all Granite Guardian alternatives →

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Featured on iTechGuides

Featured on iTechGuides — Granite Guardian 7.8/10

Granite Guardian is listed in our AI Content Moderation Software directory. Add the badge to your site — it links back to this page.

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Reviewed by iTechGuides Editors · Editorial team · Updated Oct 2026

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