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

A side-by-side comparison of Caveman and mpai — 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.

mpai (open source)

Free

Terminal-native, open-source tool that lets a teammate join your live Claude Code or Codex session over a private tailnet.

Live Session Join: A teammate opens your in-flight Codex or Claude Code conversation from their own terminal without losing context.
Named Identity Prompting: Every prompt is attributed to the person who typed it, so audit trails show who steered the agent.
Private Tailnet Transport: Sessions travel over a Tailscale-style overlay network — no public relay, no third-party server.
Terminal-Native, No New IDE: Works with the CLI agents you already run; nothing changes about your editor or model.
Ephemeral Rooms: Start a short-lived room (e.g. 5-minute) for a quick pair session and it closes on its own.
Access Controls and Audit: Presence, transcript, list, and prompt routes all share the same access check with an audit log.
Open Source: Full source is on GitHub; self-host end to end.

Pair Debugging: Hand a stuck agent session to a teammate so they can prompt from their own terminal without cloning context.
Code Review of Agent Work: Reviewer joins live to steer or challenge the agent instead of reading the diff cold.
Onboarding: Senior engineer takes a junior through a real agent session in real time.
Long-Running Task Hand-off: Pass a multi-hour Codex refactor to the next shift without losing the running conversation.
Security-Conscious Teams: Collaborate on agent work without routing traffic through a hosted SaaS relay.