garak vs HELM

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.

HELM is an open-source Python framework for evaluating foundation models, including large language and multimodal systems. It supplies standardized datasets and benchmarks such as MMLU-Pro, GPQA, IFEval, and WildBench, with a unified interface for models from providers including OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. Evaluations can examine accuracy, efficiency, bias, and toxicity, and can include custom metrics, LLM-as-a-judge checks, safety evaluations, and human review workflows. Users can configure private checkpoints or model servers, run inference locally, or send requests to an API. A web interface displays individual prompts and responses, while leaderboards compare models and benchmarks across areas such as medicine, finance, multilinguality, and world knowledge. HELM can reproduce published evaluation results and documents commands for running benchmarks, summarizing results, and starting a local server. It is free, Apache-2.0 licensed, and entered maintenance mode on June 1, 2026.