What Is Promptfoo and What Does It Do?

Promptfoo is an AI security testing platform that catches vulnerabilities in AI applications and agents during development rather than after deployment. It connects to your AI apps and CI/CD pipelines, generates context-aware attacks to red-team them, and surfaces remediation guidance directly in pull requests. It's aimed at teams building AI features — developers, security directors, and CISOs — and is used by 156 of the Fortune 500 and more than 300,000 developers, according to the company.

The core workflow: Connect, Attack, Fix

Promptfoo organizes its approach around three stages that map to how software teams already work.

1. Connect — integrate where you build

You wire Promptfoo into the systems you already use:

• CI/CD pipelines — GitHub, GitLab, Jenkins, and others
• MCP and agent frameworks
• On-premise or cloud deployments

The point is that testing runs inside your existing development workflow instead of as a separate, manual step.

2. Attack — test everything

Promptfoo generates thousands of context-aware attacks tailored to your specific application. Three things distinguish this from static, hand-written test suites:

• Real-time threat intel drawn from a 300k+ user community
• Deep automation that scales beyond human-curated tests
• Customizable attack flows matched to your business logic

3. Fix — close the loop

Findings don't stop at a report. Promptfoo delivers:

• Security findings surfaced in pull requests
• Actionable remediation steps
• Fix tracking across teams
• Continuous monitoring

This is the part that separates it from a one-off audit: remediation lands in the developer workflow, where the fix actually gets made.

What it's built on

Promptfoo leans on its open-source community for threat intelligence. Contributors come from companies including OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon, and the platform reports 300,000+ open-source users and contributors from major foundation labs and tech companies. Weekly download figures are cited on the site as active deployments in production workflows worldwide.

Who it's for

The platform is positioned for different roles with different needs:

Security directors, in particular, are described as needing a solution that works at enterprise scale, integrates with existing tools, and gets adopted by their team — the emphasis being on depth without complexity.

When Promptfoo is a fit — and when it isn't

Consider it if you're shipping AI applications or agents and want security testing embedded in CI/CD rather than bolted on later, or if you need red-teaming that adapts to your specific application instead of generic model benchmarks.

Look elsewhere if you only need one-time model evaluation with no application context, or if you have no CI/CD or agent framework to integrate with — the value here comes from continuous, in-workflow testing.

Getting started

The natural entry point is the integration path: connect Promptfoo to your AI app and pipeline first, then run an initial red-team pass to see what it surfaces for your application, and finally wire remediation into your PR flow. The site's integrations and red-teaming sections cover the specifics for each supported pipeline and framework.