Praex vs Thinking Orbs: Features, Pricing & Which Is Better (2026)

A side-by-side comparison of Praex and Thinking Orbs — features, pricing, and ideal use cases — to help you decide which AI tool fits your workflow.

Praex

Freemium

Open-source AI coding copartner with its own Velox, Faber and Lucia models, available in terminal, mobile and web.

Own Model Family: Velox II, Faber II and Lucia II are tuned and served by Praex on its own infrastructure, sized from quick edits to frontier-scale problems.
Terminal CLI: Install with a one-line script and let the agent read files, run commands, edit code and verify tests directly in your terminal.
Cross-Device Sessions: Start a task in the terminal, steer it from your phone and review it on the web with the same agent, memory and session.
Bring Your Own Keys: Run Praex on any model with your own API keys or hardware at no extra cost.
Open-Source Core: The CLI is an MIT-licensed fork of opencode, so the agent harness can be inspected and modified.
No Sign-Up Chat: Start chatting on the web with the free Velox II model without creating an account.

Fixing Failing Builds: Hand the agent a broken deploy and let it read configs, run tests and patch source until tests pass.
Everyday Quick Edits: Use the free Velox II model for instant answers and small code changes in the terminal.
Deep Reasoning Tasks: Escalate to Faber II on Pro for complex coding and multi-step reasoning.
Mobile Task Steering: Kick off a refactor at your desk and monitor or redirect it from your phone.
Self-Hosted Workflows: Point the CLI at your own models or keys to keep code on infrastructure you control.

Yogesh

Free

Thinking Orbs is a lightweight React library of animated orb status indicators for AI interfaces such as thinking, searching and compacting.

State-Based Orbs: An Orb component with states like reasoning, searching, working, retrying, compacting and waiting to mirror what the agent is doing.
Zero Dependencies: The React orb needs nothing but React and the plain JS version needs nothing at all, at about 3.8 KB gzipped.
Customizable Props: Control variant, size, speed, density, dot size, tilt, pause and screen-reader label to fit any interface.
Opt-in Shapes and Renders: Import extra shapes like cube and renders like halftone separately so only used code is bundled.
Flexible Installation: Install from npm, pnpm, yarn or bun, or copy the component into a project with shadcn.
Tintable with CSS: Color orbs with text-* utility classes so they match the host UI theme.
Interactive Playground: A web playground to preview all states, shapes and renders before integrating.
llms.txt Support: Publishes an llms.txt so coding assistants can integrate the library correctly.

Chat Interface Status: Show a thinking or reasoning animation while an LLM responds.
Agent Progress Display: Indicate searching, working or background-task states in an agentic coding UI.
Context Compaction Feedback: Visualize compacting states when conversation history is summarized.
Retry and Waiting States: Signal retries or waiting-for-input states with distinct orb variants.
Design System Components: Add a polished AI loading indicator to an in-house React component library.
Prototype AI Products: Quickly drop a refined status animation into demos and prototypes.