Savate vs kickboxing
Savate fights in shoes and only the shoe may strike. That one condition removes the shin kick entirely and rewrites the whole kicking vocabulary.
Savate is not a variant of kickboxing. It is an older, separately codified French striking sport with its own federation, weight classes and competitive history, and it was doing all of that before the Japanese and American experiments of the 1960s and 1970s.
The defining rule is footwear. Savate is contested in purpose-made boots, and only the shoe is a legal striking surface. No shin contact is permitted. Everything technical follows: there is no Thai-style shin round kick because the shin cannot legally strike, so the kicking arsenal is built from precise foot strikes — fouetté with the instep or toe, chassé thrusting from the side or front, revers with the sole, and coup de pied bas low to the shin.
Those kicks are thrown with the leg extended, at range, more like fencing than like a rotational round kick. Savate fighters consequently carry unusual footwork, unusual angles, and a straight-line kicking game most kickboxers have never trained against.
Savate also formalised a distinction kickboxing does not have: assaut, where power is deliberately restrained and precision is scored, versus combat, which is full contact. That split gives it a competitive pathway for athletes who never want to take full-power head kicks, which is more than most striking codes offer.
When savateurs cross into kickboxing they must add shin kicking and learn to defend a low kick to the thigh, which savate's shin-targeted coup de pied bas does not prepare them for. What they bring is range, precision and an arsenal opponents cannot predict.