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

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

Paid

AI reviewer that checks every pull request against your ADRs, docs and past decisions to catch product drift before it ships.

Context-Aware Review: Reviews each PR against your ADRs, product docs and past decisions instead of only linting style or syntax.
Product Drift Detection: Flags conflicts, gaps and drift between the PR's intent and your product context inline in the diff.
Agent Self-Correction: The Prelint agent can self-correct against detected violations before a human reviewer opens the PR.
GitHub & GitLab Integration: Runs on both major hosted git platforms with native PR/MR integration.
Isolated Infrastructure: Every organization runs on isolated per-organization infrastructure and Prelint does not train on customer code.
Usage-Based Pricing: $1 per completed review with $10 in free credits, no seats or subscription.

AI-Written PR Triage: A team using coding agents like Copilot or Claude Code lets Prelint gate agent PRs against product intent before humans look.
Architecture Enforcement: A platform team encodes architecture decisions in ADRs and uses Prelint to catch PRs that violate them.
Onboarding Safety Net: A new engineer's early PRs get reviewed against product context they haven't fully internalized yet.
Open Source Maintenance: A maintainer of a public repo enables Prelint (free for OSS) to review incoming contributions for product fit.
Cost-Controlled Review: A startup wants automated review without paying per developer seat and pays $1 per PR instead.