Annotate vs Elva: Features, Pricing & Which Is Better (2026)

A side-by-side comparison of Annotate and Elva — features, pricing, and ideal use cases — to help you decide which AI tool fits your workflow.

Annotate

Free

Record your screen, point and speak — turn the session into a video prompt for Cursor, Claude Code, or Codex.

Point-and-Speak Recording: Capture your screen while drawing and narrating so the agent gets both visual and voice context.
Cursor / Claude Code / Codex Handoff: Drop the session directly into your existing agent — no prompt draft to write.
MCP-Based Delivery: Sends frames and speech through MCP so the agent reads structured context instead of a raw video blob.
Multi-Monitor Capture in One Take: Record app on one display and editor on another together in a single session.
UI Markup Tools: Pen, rectangle, and text annotations mark the exact button or region you mean.
Local-Only Processing: Runs entirely on-device on Apple Silicon — no upload, no login, no cloud.
Fewer Tokens per Change: Structured video prompts reduce token load compared to pasting long written briefs.
Free for Mac: No account, no paid tier — full functionality out of the box.

UI Bug Report to Agent: Record a broken flow, circle the problem, and hand it to Cursor to fix.
Design Review with Coding Agent: Show a Figma-to-code diff on-screen and dictate the required visual tweaks.
Cross-App Debugging: Capture logs in one window and the failing UI in another, then let the agent reason across both.
Refactor Requests: Highlight a specific component in the editor and describe the desired API change verbally.
Onboarding a Junior Agent: Walk through a repo layout on video so Codex has context before making changes.
Privacy-Sensitive Codebases: Prompt an on-device agent about sensitive UIs without any recording leaving the Mac.

Theneo

Freemium

Reads your repositories to discover every API, scores and governs them, then exposes them to developers and AI agents via hosted MCP servers.

Spec-Free API Discovery: Elva scans repository code directly to find endpoints and generates OpenAPI 3.1 as output, so no existing spec is needed to start.
Endpoint Scoring: Every collection is graded on design, developer experience, AI readiness, security and performance, with the weakest collection surfaced first.
AI Fix Pass: A one-click agent writes missing descriptions from code, types response schemas and documents auth, then rescores the collection.
API Contracts: Per-audience contracts pin the exact endpoints and fields a partner, internal team, public developer or MCP client receives, excluding PII and internal fields.
Breaking Change Enforcement: Each commit is diffed against published contracts, showing the schema diff, affected consumers and tools, and blocking publish by policy.
Hosted MCP Servers: Contracts generate MCP servers hosted behind Elva's gateway with OAuth2, scoped keys, per-tool authorization and exportable call logs.
MCP Playground and Agent Feedback: Test the server with a live model, then read the complaints agents file about confusing or failing tools, scored back into the catalog.
Multi-Target Publishing: One approved contract ships as OpenAPI spec, Theneo docs, MCP server, Postman collection and a typed TypeScript SDK in sync.

API Inventory Audit: Discover undocumented or forgotten endpoints across a large codebase and get a ranked list of what to fix first.
Agent Enablement: Expose an internal service to Claude, Cursor or ChatGPT as a governed MCP server instead of hand-writing tool wrappers.
Partner Integration Safety: Publish a restricted contract to an external partner and have Elva block commits that would break their integration.
PII Scoping: Keep customer emails and internal ops annotations out of a public or agent-facing surface while the same endpoints serve them internally.
Zombie Endpoint Retirement: Prove no active consumer references an endpoint before deleting it, using contract and call-log evidence.
Enterprise Security Review: Satisfy SOC 2, ISO 27001 and GDPR questions and wire agent access into an existing SSO and SCIM identity provider.
Documentation Drift Control: Keep docs, SDKs and Postman collections regenerated from code on every merge instead of maintained by hand.