Supernova vs Switchyard: Features, Pricing & Which Is Better (2026)
A side-by-side comparison of Supernova and Switchyard — features, pricing, and ideal use cases — to help you decide which AI tool fits your workflow.
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.
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.