Alloy vs Persona

Alloy

Alloy's public docs cover journeys, evaluations, entities, documents, cases and investigations, with llms.txt, Markdown pages, OpenAPI fragments and rate-limit headers with retry-after. Access is sales-led with no public price or trial, credentials have no scopes, there is no idempotency key or server SDK, and inputs vary by each customer's workflow.

Persona

The REST API has a public OpenAPI 3.1 file, llms.txt, API keys with per-resource permissions, idempotency keys on every POST and a 60-day sandbox trial with no card. Production needs a business review and a 12-month plan from $250 a month. The status page lists 11 incidents since 10 July 2026, including 70 minutes of timeouts across all products.

Alloy

1. Get the account's base URL from the customer. Defaults are api.alloy.co and sandbox.alloy.co, and some accounts have their own hosts
2. Use unique, prefixed external IDs in sandbox. Sandbox and Production share one data store
3. Read alloy-ratelimit-remaining, and on 429 or 5xx wait for retry-after with exponential backoff and jitter
4. Expect running after about 25 seconds on journey applications and wait for the webhook instead of resubmitting
5. Send the workflow header with account-level keys, since inputs depend on the workflow configured

Persona

1. Ask for a dedicated key limited to the permissions the task needs. A new key has every standard permission until it's limited
2. Send Persona-Version on every call and an Idempotency-Key on every POST. A replayed key returns the first result, including a 500
3. Treat redact calls as irreversible. They permanently delete personal data and cascade to downstream objects
4. Stay under 300 requests a minute in production, read RateLimit-Remaining and Quota-Remaining, and back off on 429 because rejected requests still count
5. Use fields and include to cut response size. Through MCP these parameters aren't exposed, and only 14 tools take filter