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

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

Screenpipe

Freemium

Local-first app that continuously records your screen and audio, then serves that computer history to AI agents via API and MCP.

Continuous Local Capture: Records screen and audio 24/7 into a local SQLite database, capturing the full accessibility tree with OCR fallback, transcripts, speakers, keystrokes and app switches.
Natural-Language AI Search: Ask what you saw, said or heard in plain language and jump back to the original on-screen evidence in seconds instead of retracing tabs.
Local REST API and MCP Server: Expose your history at localhost:3030 or add it to Claude, Cursor and other clients with one MCP command so any agent can query it.
Pipes and Automations: Build agents and scheduled tasks that react to what you actually do, such as updating Linear whenever you work on a given task or drafting a daily summary.
Automatic Meeting Notes: Transcribes calls with speaker attribution and produces notes and follow-ups without a separate meeting bot joining the call.
Privacy Filters and Encryption: Filter by window, app or Chrome extension, redact passwords and PII with a dedicated model, encrypt at rest, and run entirely offline.
50+ App Integrations: Push captured context into Notion, Gmail, Zoom, Slack and dozens of other tools already in your workflow.
Source-Available and Portable: Inspect, modify and audit the source, and keep your history in your own database rather than locked to one model vendor.

Recovering Lost Context: Find the document, message or screen you saw days ago by searching what was actually on your display rather than remembering where it lived.
Meeting Follow-Through: Automatically transcribe and summarize calls, then surface the commitments and follow-ups you would otherwise forget.
Grounding Coding Agents: Give Claude, Codex or a custom agent real evidence of your session so it works from what happened instead of guesswork.
Personal Daily Summaries: Generate an end-of-day recap and calendar blocks for critical tasks from your real activity, including into tools like Obsidian.
Project Audit Trails: Record the flow of information and instructions across multiple projects and file it per project for later review.
Discovering Automation Opportunities: Let the enterprise tier analyze repeated manual work to find savings and candidates for automation.