Loomal vs Switchyard: Features, Pricing & Which Is Better (2026)
A side-by-side comparison of Loomal and Switchyard — features, pricing, and ideal use cases — to help you decide which AI tool fits your workflow.
Loomal
Loomal
Payments layer for agentic commerce — paywall any API, MCP tool, or store so AI agents can pay in USDC on Base per request.
Key features
- Five-Line Paywall SDK: Wrap any Express, Hono, Next.js, or FastAPI handler with requirePayment to charge agents per call.
- x402 Protocol Support: Uses HTTP 402 Payment Required as a real payment rail, so auth and payment happen in one round trip with no API keys.
- USDC on Base Settlement: Payments settle on-chain in seconds; sellers keep custody of funds in their own wallet.
- Per-Request Micropayments: Charge anywhere from a tenth of a cent to a dollar per call, enabling models the card networks cannot serve.
- Signed Receipts: Every sale returns an Ed25519 receipt sellers can verify offline for provable, auditable revenue.
- Hosted Endpoint Option: Paste JSON or upload a file and Loomal will host and paywall it at a URL agents can pay to hit.
- Marketplace Discovery: A public marketplace lets agents discover paid APIs and MCP tools hosted through Loomal.
- Broad Agent Compatibility: Works with any agent runtime that speaks x402 — Claude, GPT, Gemini, LangChain, CrewAI, MCP clients.
Best for
- Monetizing an API: Turn a paid tier of a REST API into per-call micropayments that agents can buy without human onboarding.
- Selling MCP Tools: Charge for premium MCP tools that agents in Claude Code, Cursor, or Windsurf install.
- Data Vendor Distribution: Let agents buy scraped or curated datasets per query with no contracts or seats.
- Hosted Content Paywalls: Sell access to a hosted JSON endpoint or uploaded file to agents that discover it in Loomal's marketplace.
- Storefront Access (Coming): Add agentic checkout to a Shopify or WooCommerce store so AI shopping agents can transact directly.
- SaaS Usage Billing: Bill agent traffic per action instead of per seat, aligning revenue with actual agent consumption.
Switchyard
NVIDIA
An open-source Rust proxy and library that routes LLM traffic across models and providers while preserving native OpenAI and Anthropic API compatibility.
Key features
- Protocol Translation: Converts between OpenAI Chat Completions, OpenAI Responses and Anthropic Messages formats so clients keep their native API while any backend serves the request.
- Multi-Backend Routing: Spreads traffic across vLLM, NVIDIA NIM, Ollama and any OpenAI-compatible endpoint, letting you point an existing coding agent at an open-source model without changing the agent.
- LLM Classifier Router: Uses request content to decide whether a given turn needs the weak or the strong model tier, cutting spend on turns that do not need frontier capability.
- Stage Router: Routes most turns from signals already in the conversation — tool results, errors, conversation stage — so no extra model call is needed to make the decision.
- Escalation Router: Runs every turn on the weak tier first, then has a judge read that answer and decide whether the same request should be re-sent to the strong tier.
- Random Routing for A/B Tests: Applies a fixed traffic split across targets for benchmarking, baselines and cost experiments.
- Operational Metrics: Exposes Prometheus metrics for requests, errors, latency, token counts and the overhead added by routing itself.
- Server or Library Deployment: Run it as a standalone Rust proxy configured by routes.toml, or embed switchyard-libsy in your own application so it decides the target and hands the model call back to you.
Best for
- Pointing Coding Agents at Open Models: Serve Claude Code or Codex from vLLM, NIM or Ollama without the agent knowing the API changed.
- Cost/Performance Optimization: Send routine turns to a cheap weak-tier model and reserve the strong tier for turns a classifier or judge says need it.
- Model A/B Benchmarking: Split traffic on a fixed ratio across two models to compare quality, latency and cost on real production requests.
- Provider Migration and Failover: Keep application code on one API shape while swapping or mixing the providers behind it.
- Embedding Routing in an Agent Runtime: Drop the routing algorithms into an existing gateway or agent framework via the library path without adopting a new HTTP stack.
- Operational Visibility: Track per-route latency, error rates and token spend through Prometheus to find which routes are actually costing money.