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

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

Elva logo

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.

Key features

  • 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.

Best for

  • 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.
View Elva details
Juggler logo

Juggler

Julian Storer

Free

A native desktop workbench for AI coding agents with branching conversation trees, inspectable tool calls and editable context.

Key features

  • Branching Conversation Trees: Fork the session at any point, recursively, so competing approaches and tangents run side by side without polluting the main context.
  • Miller Column Navigation: A Finder-style column layout lays out tool calls, item properties and nested sub-threads for long reading and editing sessions.
  • Transaction Inspector: Open any model transaction to see the assembled system prompt, messages, tool definitions, output, token use, timing and stop reason.
  • The Context Surgeon: Fold history into a new thread, move or copy items between branches, expand a branch back into its parent, and undo structural changes.
  • Local or Remote Sessions: Run the desktop app locally or the headless binary on the machine holding the code, then attach from the app, a browser or a phone.
  • Durable Sessions: Sessions are stored on disk as live-synced Yjs documents, so quits, relaunches and dropped connections do not lose the conversation.
  • Automatic Context Sizing: Juggler measures the full request before each call, reserves room for the answer and compacts older history before limits become an error.
  • Inspectable MCP Tools: Follow an MCP handoff end to end - schema offered, arguments generated, approval, result and errors - with server status, logs and per-tool filtering.
  • JavaScript Extension SDK: Context items, LLM loop strategies, slash commands, viewers and Pinboard tabs are extensions you can fork or replace, under a permissive Apache-2.0 SDK.

Best for

  • Exploring Competing Fixes: Branch a thread into two sub-threads to try different approaches to the same bug and compare results before committing.
  • Auditing Agent Behavior: Inspect exactly what the model received and returned when an agent makes a surprising edit to the codebase.
  • Remote Development: Run the server on a dev box or GPU machine where the repository lives and drive the same live session from a laptop or browser.
  • Long Refactors: Keep a multi-hour session alive across quits and reconnects, with the agent paused awaiting approval for its next step.
  • Provider Comparison: Drive Claude Code, Codex, Copilot, Gemini and local Ollama models through one interface to compare behavior on the same task.
  • Custom Tooling: Write JavaScript extensions that add slash commands, file viewers or new LLM loop strategies to the workbench.
View Juggler details