Experiential Labs vs Supernova: Features, Pricing & Which Is Better (2026)
A side-by-side comparison of Experiential Labs and Supernova — 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.
Supernova
Supernova
An encrypted Iceberg data lake with a built-in engine and MCP endpoint, so Claude and Codex can query every tool your company uses.
Key features
- MCP Endpoint for Claude and Codex: Point any MCP-speaking assistant at mcp.supernova.ai/mcp and every synced table becomes queryable in natural language.
- Encrypted Iceberg Lake: Open Apache Iceberg tables in object storage with table-level encryption, so the data stays in a portable open format you control.
- Zero-Copy Connections: Any engine that speaks Iceberg can read the lake directly, avoiding a second copy of your warehouse.
- Time Travel: Every table retains version history, so you can query the state of your data as of any earlier point.
- Built-In Frontier Models: Ask a question or describe a dashboard in plain language and Supernova generates the models and visualisations without a data team.
- TypeSQL: Schema-aware SQL that autocompletes across joins and type-checks before execution, catching errors the way a typed language would.
- Single-Binary CLI: One command-line tool connects sources, runs queries, tails live table changes and registers the MCP endpoint with Claude Desktop, from a laptop or CI.
- Git-Backed Dashboards: Models and dashboards are readable and writable through Git, putting analytics artefacts under normal version control.
Best for
- Conversational Revenue Analysis: Ask Claude which customers churned last quarter and why, with the answer computed over live Stripe and HubSpot tables.
- Warehouse Cost Reduction: Replace a multi-vendor pipeline-plus-warehouse stack with one usage-billed platform, which the vendor illustrates as $5,640/mo dropping to $540/mo for a hardware company.
- Dashboards Without a Data Team: Describe the dashboard you want in a sentence and have the models and charts generated for you.
- AI-Native Data Access Layer: Give internal agents a governed, encrypted single endpoint for company data instead of per-tool API integrations.
- Auditing Historical State: Use table version history to reconstruct what the numbers looked like before a pricing or schema change.
- CI-Driven Data Workflows: Drive connections, queries and change tailing from pipelines using the single CLI binary.