Comparison
How Privian compares to Cloudflare AI Gateway for privacy-first LLM routing, prompt-level data protection and sensitive-data masking.
Quick summary
Choose Cloudflare AI Gateway if you are already invested in the Cloudflare platform and want edge-level analytics, caching and routing across providers.
Choose Privian if you want a privacy-first LLM gateway that masks supported personal and sensitive data before prompts reach GPT, Claude and other models.
Definitions
Cloudflare AI Gateway is part of Cloudflare's broader infrastructure platform, offering edge-level analytics, caching, rate limiting and unified routing in front of model providers. See cloudflare.com for the canonical description.
Privian is a privacy-first LLM gateway. One endpoint sits in front of providers like OpenAI, Anthropic and Google, and supported personal or sensitive entities are masked with deterministic placeholders before any provider call, then restored in the response. Raw prompts and responses are not persisted; provider credentials are stored BYOK and decrypted only in-process at request time.
Comparison
Grounded in publicly available product positioning. Where we are not confident, we say so.
| Capability | Cloudflare AI Gateway | Privian |
|---|---|---|
| Primary positioning | Edge AI gateway with caching, analytics and unified routing | Privacy-first LLM gateway with prompt-level data protection |
| Privacy-first routing | Not a stated focus | Yes, core design goal |
| PII masking | Not a stated focus | Yes — supported personal/secret entities masked before provider call |
| Prompt-level data protection | Not a stated focus | Yes — deterministic placeholders, rehydrated in the response |
| BYOK | See vendor docs | Yes — provider keys stored AES-GCM, decrypted in-process |
| Gateway model | Edge gateway integrated with Cloudflare platform | Hosted gateway with a small JSON contract |
| Prompt injection protection | Not a stated focus | No claim |
| Tool / function calling | See vendor docs | Not currently supported |
| Native streaming | See vendor docs | Not currently supported (artificial chunking only) |
| Open source | See vendor docs | Closed source (beta) |
| Observability | Edge analytics and logs | Structural counters only; raw prompts never persisted |
| Pricing model | See vendor pricing | Usage-based plans, see /pricing |
| Enterprise orientation | Cloudflare enterprise terms apply | Designed for privacy-sensitive teams; HIPAA/SOC 2/PCI not claimed |
| Best fit | Teams already standardised on Cloudflare infrastructure | Teams that need supported PII masking and provider-agnostic BYOK routing |
Architecture
Cloudflare AI Gateway runs on Cloudflare's edge network and integrates with the rest of the Cloudflare stack (Workers, R2, Vectorize). Its strengths are infrastructure-level: caching, analytics, rate limiting in front of providers.
Privian sits between your application and the model provider. Each request runs through detection → masking → BYOK provider call → rehydration in a single in-memory pass. The data plane is designed around minimising what reaches the provider rather than around routing breadth or orchestration.
Privacy & security
When to choose
When to choose
Transparency
Privian is in active development. Listing what it does not do today is part of how we earn trust — expect this list to shrink over time.
FAQ
Related
Plans & pricing
BYOK, zero retention, prompt-level masking. Pricing is published transparently; Privian is in beta and limits may change.
