Salt Security Alternatives

Why Look for Salt Security Alternatives?

Salt Security is one of the most recognized names in API security tools. Its Illuminate platform combines API discovery, behavioral threat detection, and posture governance in a single product, and the company was among the first to focus exclusively on the API security problem. But being a pioneer does not make it the right fit for every team.

The most common reason organizations explore alternatives is pricing. Salt Security is an enterprise-grade platform with pricing based on API traffic volume. For mid-market teams or organizations with smaller API estates, the cost can be difficult to justify when simpler or more targeted tools would cover their needs.

Other teams want a different approach to API security entirely. Salt focuses on runtime protection — analyzing live API traffic to detect threats after deployment. Teams that prioritize shift-left security want to catch API vulnerabilities during design and development, before code reaches production. Tools built around OpenAPI specification auditing and CI/CD testing serve that workflow better than traffic-based analysis.

Some organizations also need inline blocking. Salt deploys out-of-band through traffic mirroring, which means it detects threats but relies on integrations with gateways or WAFs to actually stop attacks. Teams that want a single product to both detect and block prefer platforms with native inline enforcement.

Finally, teams already running a WAF may want a combined WAF and API security solution rather than paying for two separate products. And those adopting open-source or freemium tools want to minimize vendor lock-in and licensing overhead.

Top Salt Security Alternatives

1. 42Crunch

42Crunch takes the opposite approach to Salt Security. Instead of analyzing production traffic, it treats the OpenAPI specification as the single source of truth. The platform audits your API definitions with 300+ security checks, tests running APIs for conformance against the documented contract, and deploys micro API firewalls that enforce those contracts at runtime.

The IDE extensions (VS Code, JetBrains, Eclipse) have surpassed 2 million downloads. A free tier covers security audits and conformance scans without needing an account. The full platform adds CI/CD gates, runtime protection, and team dashboards.

Best for: Teams that maintain OpenAPI specifications and want API security embedded in the development workflow from IDE to production. License: Commercial (with free tier) Key difference: Spec-driven security starting at design time. Salt discovers APIs from traffic; 42Crunch secures them from the spec.

42Crunch review

2. Wallarm

Wallarm combines a web application firewall with API-specific protection under one roof. It protects over 160,000 APIs and processes billions of requests daily. API discovery builds your inventory from live traffic automatically, and ML-based threat detection covers the full OWASP API Top 10.

The critical difference from Salt is inline blocking. Wallarm sits in the request path and stops attacks before they reach your backend. Salt operates out-of-band and relies on third-party enforcement. Wallarm also includes bot management, GraphQL security, and DDoS protection — capabilities that would require additional tools alongside Salt.

Security Edge deployment via DNS redirect gets you up and running in as little as 15 minutes without infrastructure changes.

Best for: Teams that need combined WAF and API protection with native inline blocking, especially those facing bot abuse and credential stuffing. License: Commercial (Security Edge has a free tier) Key difference: Inline blocking and WAF capabilities built in. Salt detects; Wallarm detects and blocks.

Wallarm review

3. Akamai API Security

Akamai API Security (built on Noname Security, acquired June 2024) is the closest direct competitor to Salt Security in the runtime API protection space. It discovers APIs enterprise-wide, runs 150+ dynamic tests in CI/CD pipelines, and detects runtime attacks using ML. Named a Leader across four categories in the 2025 KuppingerCole API Security Leadership Compass.

The platform is vendor-neutral — it works without any Akamai CDN products and deploys across SaaS, hybrid, and on-premises environments. It monitors both east-west (internal) and north-south (external) API traffic, which Salt also covers. Akamai adds CI/CD testing that Salt lacks, and its compliance dashboards cover PCI DSS v4.0, GDPR, ISO 27001, HIPAA, and FAPI.

Best for: Enterprises with complex multi-vendor infrastructure who need platform-agnostic API discovery, testing, and runtime protection. License: Commercial Key difference: Adds CI/CD security testing (150+ dynamic tests) on top of runtime protection. Platform-agnostic across any CDN, WAF, or gateway.

Akamai API Security review

4. Cequence Security

Cequence stands out from Salt Security in one fundamental way: it blocks attacks natively. Most API security tools, including Salt, detect threats and forward alerts to a separate WAF or gateway for enforcement. Cequence deploys inline as a reverse proxy and stops malicious requests in real time.

The platform processes over 10 billion API interactions daily for Fortune 500 customers. Behavioral fingerprinting tracks how clients interact with APIs over time, catching attackers who rotate IPs and mimic legitimate traffic. Bot management covers credential stuffing, account takeover, inventory hoarding, and content scraping without requiring client-side JavaScript.

Cequence was named a Leader in the 2025 KuppingerCole API Security Leadership Compass and ranked #128 on the Deloitte Technology Fast 500.

Best for: Enterprise teams that need native inline blocking plus bot defense in one platform, particularly in retail, financial services, and telecom. License: Commercial Key difference: Native blocking without depending on a separate WAF. Behavioral fingerprinting catches sophisticated attackers that IP-based detection misses.

Cequence review

5. APIsec

APIsec fills a gap that Salt Security does not cover at all: pre-production API penetration testing. While Salt focuses on runtime traffic analysis, APIsec generates AI-driven attack scenarios from your API specifications and executes them against live endpoints to find vulnerabilities before attackers do.

The platform supports REST, GraphQL, SOAP, and RAML APIs with over 1,200 security playbooks. It tests for business logic flaws like BOLA, broken access controls, and workflow bypass — the same attack types Salt detects at runtime, but caught earlier in the development cycle. Pricing starts at $650/month with a free tier for public API testing.

APIsec is trusted by 5,000+ organizations and integrates with 10 CI/CD platforms and major issue trackers.

Best for: Teams that want continuous automated API penetration testing integrated into CI/CD, without runtime infrastructure changes. License: Freemium (free tier for public APIs) Key difference: Testing-focused rather than runtime-focused. Finds API vulnerabilities before deployment instead of detecting attacks after.

APIsec review

6. DAST Tools with API Scanning: Escape and StackHawk

Teams that primarily need API vulnerability scanning rather than full runtime protection should consider API-native DAST tools. Two stand out:

Escape is an API-native DAST platform with 330+ security tests and a focus on business logic flaws like BOLA and IDOR. It runs against REST and GraphQL APIs using AI-powered payload generation. No traffic mirroring or proxy setup required — point it at your API and it scans. Y Combinator backed and SOC 2 Type II compliant.

StackHawk wraps the proven OWASP ZAP engine in a developer-friendly package built for CI/CD pipelines. Configuration lives in a YAML file in your repository. It tests REST, GraphQL, SOAP, and gRPC APIs, and a free tier covers a single application with no feature restrictions on the scanning engine.

Neither tool provides runtime protection or API discovery from production traffic. They complement Salt Security rather than replace it, covering the shift-left testing gap that Salt does not address.

Escape review | StackHawk review

Feature Comparison

When to Stay with Salt Security

Salt Security remains the right choice in several scenarios:

• API discovery is your primary concern. Salt combines three discovery methods — cloud connectors, external surface scanning, and live traffic analysis — in one platform. Its own research found that 30.7% of APIs go undiscovered by CDN-based tools alone. If finding shadow and zombie APIs is the top priority, Salt’s multi-source approach is hard to beat.
• You need deep compliance posture governance. Salt ships nearly 100 pre-loaded posture rules covering PCI DSS, HIPAA, GDPR, SOC 2, NIST, CMMC, and FedRAMP. Custom rules can be created without coding. Few competitors match this breadth of compliance coverage for API-specific governance.
• Agentic AI and MCP security matter to your organization. Salt was early to address MCP server security with dedicated features for discovering, monitoring, and governing AI agent interactions. If your organization is deploying agentic AI workloads, Salt’s MCP Protect and Agentic AI Governance features are more mature than most competitors.
• You prefer agentless, out-of-band deployment. Salt deploys without inline components, adding zero latency to API requests. For teams that cannot tolerate any additional request-path latency, this architecture is a requirement, not a preference.
• Behavioral threat detection for logic-based attacks is critical. Salt’s ML-based behavioral analysis catches BOLA, credential stuffing, and data exfiltration by baselining normal API behavior over weeks. This approach finds attacks that signature-based and spec-based tools miss entirely.

Frequently Asked Questions

Written by

Suphi Cankurt

Suphi Cankurt is an application security enthusiast based in Helsinki, Finland. He reviews and compares 129 AppSec tools across 10 categories on AppSec Santa. Learn more.