Top 10 Salt Security Alternatives
APIs are no longer just technical enablers, instead they’re revenue accelerators. Today, 35–62% of enterprises report direct income from APIs, and for nearly a quarter, APIs contribute over 75% of total revenue. This transformation is powered by DevOps, microservices, and cloud-native architectures that have turned software delivery into a business growth engine.
However, this growth brings a new class of risk. Unsecured, undocumented, or poorly monitored APIs can derail innovation, leading to breaches, compliance fines, and production downtime. As APIs increasingly handle sensitive data like personal identifiers, payment information, and healthcare records, regulators are demanding tighter data controls and continuous security assurance. Simply bolting API protection onto a WAF or relying on edge-based visibility is no longer enough.
API Security has become a board-level concern, it’s about protecting both revenue and customer trust. Enterprises must not only move faster but also build more responsibly, with deeper visibility across every environment from dev to production.
This is where Salt Security often falls short. Built around a production-only architecture, Salt focuses on traffic based monitoring and compliance visibility rather than true shift left API protection. With no native testing engine, limited discovery of internal or third party APIs, and heavy SaaS data ingestion, most vulnerabilities still slip into production. The result: delayed remediation, high privacy risks, and rising operational costs.
For organizations aiming to secure APIs as strategic business assets rather than just compliance checkboxes, a modern, automated, and privacy-preserving approach is essential.
This blog highlights the Top 10 Salt Security Alternatives, evaluated across coverage, scalability, deployment ease, cost efficiency, and alignment with API-first, DevSecOps-driven delivery models.
When evaluating Salt Security’s approach to API protection, several recurring challenges emerge that directly affect security depth, compliance readiness, operational cost, and developer productivity. These limitations underscore why many enterprises are actively seeking Salt Security alternatives.
The table below highlights the key triggers and explains why they matter, from blind spots in discovery and testing to excessive data ingestion and limited CI/CD alignment, helping teams pinpoint where Salt may fall short in real world deployments.
Salt Security offers API protection, yet for teams seeking stronger shift left coverage, reduced vendor risk, and lower total cost of ownership, several alternatives now deliver broader value across the API lifecycle.
Below are the Top 10 Salt Security Alternatives that combine deeper pre-production coverage, privacy-preserving architectures, and CI/CD alignment, enabling enterprises to scale securely without slowing down innovation.
Here’s a side-by-side comparison of Salt Security vs leading alternatives across core dimensions like business value, privacy, cost, visibility, and deployment agility, helping you quickly identify the best fit for your API security strategy.
Levo.ai is purpose-built for modern, API-first enterprises that need real, end-to-end API security, not just post-deployment monitoring. Unlike legacy, production-only tools like Salt Security, which rely on edge integrations and SaaS data ingestion, Levo delivers continuous protection across the entire software development lifecycle, from pre-production testing to live runtime environments, without sacrificing speed, privacy, or visibility.
Powered by an eBPF-based sensor, Levo provides deep, kernel-level visibility into every API: internal, external, third-party, and even low-traffic shadow APIs, ensuring complete discovery and precise, noise-free detection. This behavioral insight enables Levo to automatically generate rich API documentation, classify sensitive data flows, and detect runtime vulnerabilities in real time, capabilities Salt misses entirely due to its dependency on traffic mirroring and limited edge context.
Levo’s detection and protection modules are accurate, adaptive, and cost-efficient. Where Salt floods teams with false positives and reactive alerts, Levo validates every finding through exploit-aware testing, ensuring alerts are actionable and remediation cycles shrink from months to days. Built for precision, Levo’s inline protection blocks only verified threats, never legitimate traffic, giving enterprises confidence that security won’t disrupt performance or reliability.
Levo’s privacy-preserving architecture is designed to keep sensitive data within your environment, processing only lightweight metadata in its SaaS control plane. This eliminates the vendor-induced risk of full traffic ingestion that Salt introduces, while cutting egress and infrastructure costs by 10x, saving enterprises $100K–$500K annually.
Seamlessly integrated into CI/CD pipelines and developer workflows, Levo operationalizes shift-left security at scale. With YAML and Python-based customization, on-prem and hybrid deployment options, and full automation, Levo adapts to every enterprise environment effortlessly. In contrast, Salt’s complex deployments, lack of pre-production coverage, and rigid architecture make it slow, costly, and limited to production-only visibility.
Where Salt Security stops at runtime, Levo.ai secures the entire journey, enabling enterprises to build, test, and operate APIs confidently, securely, and at the speed of innovation.
Selecting the right API security platform depends on whether your priorities lean toward runtime threat detection, shift-left prevention, compliance readiness, or broad cloud visibility.
Each vendor brings distinct advantages, but also clear trade-offs depending on architecture, team maturity, and integration depth.
The table below helps teams evaluate where these tools fit best and where they fall short, making it easier to align vendor strengths with organizational API security goals.
Provides full API visibility and discovery: internal, external, shadow, zombie, and third-party APIs, enriched with auth, sensitivity, reachability, and runtime context.
Salt Security pioneered API threat detection using full traffic ingestion and machine learning to surface runtime anomalies and attack patterns. Its data-intensive architecture supports rich forensics and SOC workflows but drives high compute and storage overhead, elevates vendor-induced privacy risks, and complicates deployment in regulated or large-scale environments. With limited pre-production visibility, Salt primarily delivers reactive defense, addressing threats only after they reach production.
Traceable.ai, now part of Harness (2025), builds on similar runtime detection principles, adding contextual correlation between API behavior, identity, and data sensitivity. It provides strong runtime protection and fraud analytics but remains traffic-dependent, resulting in high TCO and compliance complexity. Despite marketing shift-left capabilities, its testing is reactive and derived from observed runtime behavior. The Harness integration may streamline DevOps alignment but reduces flexibility for enterprises seeking standalone, proactive API security coverage.
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Salt Security and Akamai both deliver post-production API protection but lack true shift-left integration and proactive testing.
Salt Security relies on full traffic ingestion and ML-driven anomaly detection to identify runtime threats. While effective for attack analytics and SOC visibility, this architecture drives high compute and storage costs, introduces privacy exposure, and requires complex inline or mirroring deployments. Its lack of native pre-production coverage or automated remediation keeps security reactive and operationally heavy.
Akamai, extending its CDN and WAF heritage through Noname-powered modules, focuses on runtime protection via mirrored traffic within the cloud. This approach inflates egress costs, increases vendor-induced privacy risk, and limits visibility to edge APIs while missing internal, low-traffic, and shadow endpoints. Testing depth and coverage across the SDLC remain minimal, with most capabilities confined to production monitoring.
Both solutions strengthen perimeter defense but offer limited value for enterprises seeking full lifecycle API security, automation, and low-overhead deployment.
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Salt Security focuses on reactive runtime defense, capturing and analyzing full API traffic to detect anomalies and attacks post-deployment. Its ML-driven detection is effective for SOC visibility but heavily reliant on complete traffic ingestion, leading to massive compute and storage overhead, inflated costs, and elevated privacy exposure. Salt lacks true shift-left integration, no native pre-production testing or automated remediation, which keeps security operations manual, reactive, and high-latency.
Akto, while positioned as a developer-centric API security scanner, remains surface-level in depth. It automates endpoint discovery and runs standardized payload tests, but these scans lack business-logic awareness, authentication context, and runtime correlation. This yields high false negatives and false positives, slowing remediation cycles and eroding developer trust. With limited coverage across the SDLC and significant setup overhead, Akto’s approach often results in periodic compliance-style scans rather than continuous security posture assurance.
Both tools strengthen visibility and add value at different stages, but neither delivers the end-to-end, context-aware API protection modern, API-first enterprises require to secure APIs dynamically across build, test, and runtime.
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Salt Security focuses on runtime API threat detection via full traffic ingestion and ML-driven anomaly modeling. It offers strong production visibility and SOC analytics but comes with high compute/storage costs, vendor privacy risk, and heavy deployment overhead. Without pre-production testing or automated remediation, its approach remains largely reactive.
Orca Security delivers agentless cloud posture management, providing visibility into workloads and APIs via cloud metadata. It lacks behavioral API testing, runtime telemetry, and pre-production validation, leaving logic level vulnerabilities and business-critical API risks untested.
Both enhance production visibility, but neither provides full shift left, behavior aware API protection, Salt reacts to attacks, while Orca offers broad but shallow asset insights.
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Salt Security delivers runtime-first API protection, focusing on detecting attacks, access control misconfigurations, and sensitive data exposure in production. It offers full traffic ingestion and SOC analytics, providing visibility into active APIs, but its approach is reactive, lacking pre-production testing, automated remediation, or deep shift-left capabilities. Deployment is complex, and processing full traffic introduces high compute costs and vendor privacy risk.
Inviciti provides pre-production API scanning, generating security tests from OpenAPI imports and static policy engines. It enables compliance-oriented coverage and basic injection checks but misses business-logic flaws, shadow/internal APIs, and runtime anomalies. Testing is manual heavy, static, and single-request, leading to high false negatives. Deployment is on-prem capable but orchestration heavy, and remediation requires manual triage.
Both improve API security, but in complementary ways: Salt excels at reactive runtime protection, while Inviciti focuses on pre-production scans. Neither alone achieves end to end shift left, behavior aware API security, leaving gaps across runtime, internal, and business critical endpoints.
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Salt Security delivers runtime-first API protection, focusing on detecting attacks, access control misconfigurations, and sensitive data exposure in production. It provides traffic ingestion, SOC analytics, and limited visibility into external APIs, but its approach is reactive, lacking pre-production testing, automated remediation, or deep shift left capabilities. Deployment is complex, and processing full traffic introduces high compute costs and vendor privacy risk. Coverage is limited to production, leaving internal, partner, and low-traffic endpoints under-protected.
Qualys provides pre-production API scanning, integrating APIs into its broader web-app and vulnerability management modules. It supports OWASP Top 10 and compliance-oriented testing, but testing is static, single request, and retrofitted, missing business-logic flaws, runtime anomalies, and multistep attack flows. Deployment requires orchestrating multiple modules, connectors, and dashboards, and remediation relies on manual triage. Runtime monitoring and shift-left enforcement are minimal, leaving APIs exposed between scans.
Both enhance API security in complementary ways: Salt Security excels at reactive runtime protection, while Qualys focuses on pre-production scans and compliance reporting. Neither alone delivers end to end, behavior aware API security, leaving gaps across runtime, internal, and business-critical endpoints.
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Rapid7 offers point-in-time DAST scans for APIs, primarily geared toward compliance reporting. Its tests are stateless, single request, and retrofit into web app scanning frameworks, leaving multistep attacks, role-based logic flaws, and business-critical endpoints untested. Coverage is limited to discovered endpoints during the scan, missing shadow, internal, and low traffic APIs. Deployment requires on-prem scan engines and complex orchestration, generating high manual overhead for test configuration, remediation, and repeat scans. Full SDLC coverage is absent, leaving APIs unprotected between builds.
Salt Security delivers runtime first API protection, focusing on detecting attacks, access control misconfigurations, and sensitive data exposure in production. It offers behavior-aware API visibility, sensitive data mapping, and SOC analytics, providing context rich insights into live APIs. Deployment is complex, with inline instrumentation and production dependencies, and processing full traffic introduces high compute costs and vendor privacy risks. Pre-production testing, automated remediation, and shift left capabilities are minimal, leaving gaps in early stage security coverage.
Both improve API security, but in complementary ways: Salt excels at runtime detection and behavior aware monitoring, while Rapid7 focuses on preproduction, compliance-oriented scans. Neither alone delivers end to end API security with full shift left integration, automated remediation, and runtime context awareness, leaving blind spots across business-critical, internal, and ephemeral APIs.
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Salt Security delivers runtime-first API protection, focusing on detecting attacks, access control misconfigurations, and sensitive data exposure in production. It provides full traffic ingestion and SOC analytics for visibility into active APIs, but the approach is reactive, lacks pre-production testing, automated remediation, and shift left capabilities. Deployment is complex, and ingesting full traffic increases compute costs and introduces vendor privacy risk.
Escape Security, in contrast, focuses on pre-production API security by generating schema-based tests from code repositories and AST analysis. It offers CI/CD integration and automated scanning of staging environments but misses runtime anomalies, internal APIs, and multistep business logic exploits. Testing requires manual setup and iterative tuning, leading to high false negatives. Deployment is SaaS-dependent, making on-prem or air-gapped use challenging, and remediation guidance is limited to generic recommendations.
Both improve API security, but in complementary ways: Salt excels at reactive runtime defense, while Escape focuses on pre-production scanning. Neither alone achieves end to end shift left, behavior-aware API security, leaving blind spots across runtime, internal, and business-critical endpoints.
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Salt Security delivers runtime-first API protection, emphasizing detection of attacks, access control misconfigurations, and sensitive data exposure in production. It ingests full API traffic, enabling SOC-ready analytics and live API visibility, but its approach is reactive, lacking native pre-production testing, automated shift left security, or tailored attack simulations. Deployment is complex, and full traffic ingestion introduces high compute costs and vendor privacy risk.
StackHawk provides preproduction API scanning, generating security tests from code and CI/CD integrations. It enables early vulnerability detection, OWASP Top 10 coverage, and integration into developer pipelines, but misses runtime anomalies, internal or low-traffic APIs, and advanced business logic flaws. Testing is primarily static and single request, requiring manual configuration and triage, which can result in high false negatives. Deployment is lightweight, but runtime coverage and automated remediation are limited.
Both improve API security, but in complementary ways: Salt excels at reactive runtime defense, while StackHawk focuses on preproduction vulnerability testing. Neither alone provides end to end, behavior-aware API security, leaving gaps across runtime, internal, and business-critical endpoints.
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APIs are the lifeblood of modern applications, yet they remain a prime target for attackers. While platforms like Salt Security, Traceable.ai, and Escape Security tackle pieces of the API security puzzle, be it runtime detection, shift-left testing, or automated compliance, none fully address end-to-end coverage with cost-efficiency and privacy in mind.
This is where purpose-built solutions like Levo.ai differentiate themselves. By combining pre-production testing, runtime threat detection, sensitive data protection, and automated remediation in a single platform, Levo minimizes operational overhead, accelerates developer workflows, and ensures robust privacy and compliance, something edge-first or partial solutions struggle to deliver.
Ultimately, the right API security choice depends on your organization’s priorities: speed of development, runtime visibility, or privacy-first compliance. What’s clear is that solutions focused solely on runtime monitoring or edge-based protection leave gaps that modern API-first enterprises cannot afford.
Adopting a unified, purpose-built API security platform like Levo enables teams to close those gaps, reduce complexity, and protect APIs throughout the software lifecycle, turning security from a bottleneck into an enabler of innovation.
Achieve complete API security with Levo and future-proof your APIs.
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