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

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

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.