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

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

Elva

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.

HOL

Freemium

HOL Guard sits between AI coding agents and their tools to intercept risky reads, installs, MCP registrations, and config changes before execution.

Pre-execution Interception: Wraps agent launch commands so risky reads, installs, MCP registrations, and config or hook changes are surfaced as a reviewable diff before they run.
Under 50 ms Local Scan: All scanning happens on-device with no outbound network call, keeping agent workflows fast and usable fully offline.
One-keystroke Approval Flow: Each block presents the diff on screen so the developer can allow or deny with a single key, and the decision is written to a local receipt.
Multi-Harness Support: Ships tailored integrations for Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, OpenCode, Gemini CLI, Hermes, and OpenClaw so the same policy engine covers every agent.
Guard Cloud Sync: Optional cloud tier syncs decision receipts, alerts, and audit history across machines while never uploading file contents, prompts, or environment variables.
Team Policy Packs: Team plan deploys shared policy packs, team alerts, and investigation routing so multiple developers operate under the same runtime rules.
Plugin Scanner for Maintainers: Companion CLI and GitHub Action verify plugin manifests, MCP transport posture, and skill-level prompt-injection markers before release.

Blocking secret exfiltration: Stop a coding agent from reading .npmrc, .env, or cloud credential files during an automated task.
Guarding MCP installs: Review new MCP server registrations for insecure HTTP endpoints or wildcard binds before they are added to the harness.
Enforcing config approvals: Require an explicit allow on config or hook edits proposed by an agent so surprise supply-chain changes are caught in place.
Team-wide policy control: Roll out a single Guard policy pack across a team so every developer's Cursor or Claude Code session enforces the same runtime rules.
Cross-device continuity: Sync approval history through Guard Cloud so switching laptops does not force a developer to re-approve safe actions from scratch.
Plugin release gating: Use the plugin-scanner action in CI to fail PRs that publish plugins below a minimum trust score or with high-severity issues.