Arena (formerly Chatbot Arena) vs garak

Arena, formerly Chatbot Arena, is a free web platform for evaluating AI models by comparing responses and collecting votes for public leaderboards. In Battle mode, it presents two anonymous responses and reveals the model identities after a vote. Arena aggregates qualifying votes with the Bradley-Terry rating system. Side by Side and Direct modes are also available, but only anonymous Battle votes count toward official rankings. Leaderboards cover agent, text, web development, image, video, vision, document and search tasks; comparisons include image generation, image editing and video generation. Leaderboards can be viewed without signing in, while Direct, Side by Side, Image Arena and Video Arena require login. Accounts can use Google or email, and coding Agent Mode can connect to GitHub repositories. Arena applies a daily usage limit that resets 24 hours after it is reached. Video Arena requires login, permits two generations per 24 hours and offers Battle mode only. Arena also provides commercial evaluation services for enterprises, model labs and developers, with results supported by service-level agreements. Conversations may be used in research datasets and private provider evaluations; shared data is de-identified, and Arena advises against submitting sensitive information.

garak is a command-line scanner for probing language models and systems that use them for security weaknesses. Its checks cover issues such as hallucination, data leakage, prompt injection, misinformation, toxicity generation, and jailbreaks. Probes try to elicit failures, while detectors inspect responses for patterns such as unsafe content or a failure to refuse. A standard scan can run without supervision and produce a report, with scan settings available for customization. Integrations include OpenAI, Hugging Face, Cohere, Replicate, AWS Bedrock, LiteLLM, REST-accessible models, and custom Python integrations. Hugging Face models can run locally or be accessed through an inference API or private endpoint. Output includes screen results, a detailed report log, a hit log, and a debug log. garak assesses text output only. It is developed in Linux and OSX and can be installed with pip or from source; listed platforms include Linux, macOS, Windows, and self-hosted use. It is free, with a free plan and no free trial. Listed capabilities include custom metrics, LLM-as-a-judge, and safety evaluations.