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

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

Caveman

Julius Brussee

Freemium

Efficiency stack that caches, compresses, and routes AI traffic to cut LLM output tokens by up to 65% with verified savings.

Caveman Skill: MIT-licensed Claude Code skill that teaches 30+ agents (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, and more) to answer in a compressed dialect, cutting output tokens ~65% while keeping code and errors byte-exact.
Local Proxy Wrap: One command (`caveman claude`) launches your agent with recoverable local context compression — no account required, BYOK, engine stores original bytes before lossy replacement.
Recoverable Context Compression: Engine recognizes logs, JSON, code, diffs, and tables, then sends smaller eligible context to the model and can restore the originals on demand.
Agent SDK: `@caveman-ai/agent` TypeScript SDK adds catalog-price guards, per-request token bills, and eval-gated context plans to production agents.
Cave Score & Ledger: Inferred local savings score and a verified 'causal-cache' ledger on paid tiers so you can prove cut tokens and cut dollars.
Managed Cloud Gateway: Point traffic at one URL and caching / compression / routing run eval-gated on autopilot, with a synced savings dashboard.
Browser Extension: Ships for ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini so end-user chats benefit from the same output compression without any code changes.
Enterprise & OEM: Same stack self-hosted in your cloud or datacenter with signed savings receipts, zero data retention, and OEM embed options.

LLM Bill Reduction: Cap OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google spend without changing model choice by cutting output tokens per response across your agent fleet.
Coding Agent Efficiency: Install the skill to make Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, and other CLI agents produce terse, byte-exact answers so long tasks fit in context.
Provider Wrap for Production Agents: Use the SDK to add per-call token bills, catalog-price guards, and eval-gated context plans to LangChain / custom agents.
Central Cost Gateway: Point every agent in the org at Caveman Cloud so caching and routing are enforced from one URL with a shared dashboard.
On-Prem or OEM Embed: Ship the Enterprise stack inside a regulated network or embed it in your own AI product with signed savings receipts and zero data retention.
Chat-App Compression: Install the browser extension for ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini to keep casual chats short, cheaper, and inside the context window.

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.