Experiential Labs vs Side Space 2.0: Features, Pricing & Which Is Better (2026)
A side-by-side comparison of Experiential Labs and Side Space 2.0 — features, pricing, and ideal use cases — to help you decide which AI tool fits your workflow.
Experiential Labs
Experiential Labs
Open-source AI gateway that routes every model through one endpoint at provider cost, then improves that traffic with caching, routing and fine-tuning.
Key features
- Unified Model Endpoint: One OpenAI-compatible POST endpoint fronts every hosted provider, your own bring-your-own keys and your own GPUs, so switching models is a parameter change rather than an integration.
- Zero-Markup Routed Tokens: Routed traffic bills at the provider's list price with 0% added on top, with the company earning on hosted inference and the Pro plan instead of on your tokens.
- Model Recommendation from Traffic: The intelligence layer watches real request patterns and tells you when switching models would win, including newly released models on the day they ship, with optional per-prompt optimization.
- Caching Opportunity Detection: Identifies where cache hit rate could improve and shows the projected savings, with repeated tokens returning at 90% off once enabled.
- Traffic-Trained Custom Models: Fine-tunes a model on your own traffic and proves it in closed-loop simulation before it ever serves, then exposes it through the same endpoint you already call.
- Spend Attribution Console: Breaks requests and dollars down by agent, person, model, provider and day across the whole organization, alongside catalog, usage and limits.
- Live Request Logs and Metrics: Streams per-request time-to-first-token, token counts, provider, status and cost, with dashboard rollups for requests, spend, p50 TTFT and cache hit rate.
- Governance Controls: Budgets, provider allowlists and attribution are available from the free tier upward for controlling who can spend what on which models.
Best for
- Consolidating Multi-Provider Access: Replace separate SDKs and keys for OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and others with a single endpoint and key across every application.
- Cutting Inference Spend: Use caching recommendations and model-switch suggestions to lower the cost of an existing production workload without changing application code.
- Replacing a Frontier Model with a Small One: Distill or fine-tune a small model on your own traffic for a narrow repetitive task and serve it at a fraction of frontier-model cost and latency.
- Chargeback and Budgeting: Attribute AI spend to individual agents, teams or people for internal cost allocation and to enforce per-key budget caps.
- Evaluating New Model Releases: Compare a newly shipped model against your current one on your own traffic before committing to a migration.
- Hybrid Local and Hosted Serving: Route some workloads to self-hosted GPUs at zero marginal cost while sending the rest to hosted providers through the same interface.
- Self-Hosting the Gateway: Run the open-source gateway inside your own infrastructure when hosted routing is not an option.
Side Space 2.0
Side Space
An AI-powered vertical tabs manager in the browser side panel that helps research, summarize, organize, and chat with your tabs.
Key features
- Vertical Tabs Side Panel: Provides a persistent vertical tab manager inside the browser side panel for quick access and streamlined navigation between open pages.
- Tab Summarization: Generates concise summaries of open webpages or groups of tabs to surface key points and save reading time during research.
- Chat-with-Tabs Interface: Lets users query and converse with their set of open tabs to extract information, compare content, and get synthesized answers from multiple sources.
- Organization & Grouping: Tools to organize, sort, and group tabs for projects or topics, reducing clutter and enabling focused workflows.
- Research Workspace: Facilitates multi-tab research by consolidating content, highlights, and summaries in one side-panel workspace for easier analysis.
- Session Management: Keeps browsing sessions organized so users can save, restore, and continue research across visits (inferred from organization and workspace claims).
- Vertical tabs manager integrated into a browser side panel
- AI-driven summarization of open pages/tabs
- Chat interface to interact with and query tabs
- Tools to organize and group tabs for research workflows
- Context-aware assistance to help browse smarter and faster
Best for
- Academic Research: Collecting multiple articles in the side panel, producing unified summaries, and extracting key findings across sources for literature reviews.
- Competitive/Product Research: Opening and comparing product pages across tabs, then using the chat interface to synthesize pros, cons, and price differences.
- Project Tab Organization: Grouping and organizing dozens of tabs by project or task to reduce clutter and quickly resume work without losing context.
- Pre-Meeting Preparation: Summarizing several open web pages into short briefs to prepare talking points or summaries ahead of meetings.
- Quick Fact-Finding: Asking the chat interface to pull and consolidate facts or quotes spread across multiple tabs for fast answers.
- Conducting web research across many open tabs and getting concise summaries
- Organizing and grouping tabs for focused workflows or projects
- Quickly extracting key points from articles without switching tabs
- Using a chat interface to ask questions about content present in open tabs
- Improving browsing productivity by reducing tab clutter and surface relevant information