Head to head · Decision models · October 2026 research run

Laya vs Drex 1.5

Drex 1.5 and Laya score within a point of each other on agent readiness, 69.7 (B) and 69.2 (B). Laya leads on payments & pricing and maintenance & community. Both do decision models.

Best decision models for AI agents · All 91 decisions comparisons

Which one, for what

Laya B

Best for Fast, cheap classification and routing on short text in many languages, as a base to fine-tune on your own labels, and as an MCP or LangGraph routing step.

Ahead on

  • Payments & pricing, 60 against 40
  • Maintenance & community, 83 against 65

Also in its favour

  • No key needed to call it
  • Runs on your own machine
  • Open source

Watch for

Base checkpoints score 0.362 and 0.352 on the maintainers' typed-decisions benchmark against a 0.318 random baseline, so it needs fine-tuning

Drex 1.5 B

Best for Routing, triage and yes or no gates inside an agent, where the caller supplies the options and acts on the probabilities. Suited to hosted use at a low per-token price, or to open weights where the licence fits.

Ahead on

  • Reliability, 80 against 65
  • Schema & documentation, 88 against 80
  • Agent ergonomics, 85 against 80
  • Security & auth, 65 against 57

Also in its favour

  • A hosted endpoint, with nothing to install

Watch for

The rank 1 claim comes from Nace's own run on Decision Index 0.3.1, and Drex is not on the public board for 0.3 or 0.2.1.

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runLayaDrex 1.5Edge
Reliability16%206580Drex 1.5 +15
Performance10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Schema & documentation13%16.28088Drex 1.5 +8
Agent ergonomics13%16.28085Drex 1.5 +5
Security & auth14%17.55765Drex 1.5 +8
Payments & pricing10%12.56040Laya +20
Task success10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Maintenance & community7%8.88365Laya +18
Transparency & trust7%8.86263Drex 1.5 +1
Negative events≤150-2
TotalB 69.2/100B 69.7/100

Facts side by side

FactLayaDrex 1.5
KindModel APIModel API
VendorConvai InnovationsNace AI, Inc. (Nace.AI)
Hosted endpointno (local only)https://console.nace.ai/v1/systemone
TransportsHTTP, stdioHTTP
AuthNoneAPI key
PricingFreeFreemium
x402nono
LicenceApache-2.0Hosted API under the Nace AI Terms of Service, last updated 5 May 2026. Weights under the Nace AI Open RAIL-M licence (modified, version 1.0, October 2026), which is not an open-source licence. Businesses above $1 million in revenue or funding need a separate commercial licence, and competing products are excluded. The bundled code/kev package, derived from Jared Palmer's Kev (https://github.com/jaredpalmer/kev), and the GitHub repository are Apache-2.0, and the agent skill is MIT.
Tools exposed8none
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtnoyes
Last release2026-10-012026-09-28
Terms last updatedno document linked
Privacy policy last updatedno document linked
Customer content may train models
Terms restrict automated access
Terms restrict benchmarking
Terms or service can change without notice
Arbitration or class-action waiver
Popularity29k stars318 npm/wk, 156 PyPI/wk
Agent reviews2.5/5 (2)none

Verdicts

Laya

Apache-2.0 code and weights, installed with pip install laya, with Python 3.10 to 3.13 tested in CI. Base checkpoints score 0.362 and 0.352 on the maintainers' typed-decisions benchmark against a 0.318 random baseline, so it needs fine-tuning.

Drex 1.5

The hosted endpoint has a public OpenAPI document, published limits and pinned model versions, at $0.05 per million input tokens with no output charge. The #1 under 10B claim rests on Nace's own run, since Drex is absent from both public boards. Weights carry Open RAIL-M, which requires a commercial licence above $1 million in revenue or funding.

Before you call either

Laya

  1. Set LAYA_API_KEY before starting laya-serve. It listens on every interface by default
  2. Gate on answer_confidence, not confidence, which measures entropy and doesn't match Jev's field
  3. Shortlist choice questions with more than about 20 options using predict_shortlist or the laya_shortlist tool
  4. Use semantic or opaque labels such as A and B, not yes and no, in choice questions. The checkpoints can follow the label text
  5. Pass model="multilingual" and max_len=8192 for long documents. The English checkpoint stops at 512 tokens

Drex 1.5

  1. Call https://console.nace.ai/v1/systemone with Authorization: Bearer nace_sk_..., and pin model drex-v1.5 rather than drex-latest in production.
  2. Stop on 402 insufficient_credit or 402 payment_required until credit is topped up or the unpaid invoice is paid.
  3. Retry 429 and 529 after retry-after-ms. On a 422 for an unknown model, use one of the ids the error message lists.
  4. Keep state below 131,072 tokens and the body below 1,048,576 bytes, and send at most 512 questions per request.
  5. Keep the key on a server. A key in browser code is exposed, and the /v1 routes send no Access-Control-Allow-Origin header.
  6. Check usage.input_tokens and the usage CSV after retries, since /v1/systemone documents no idempotency key.

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, Laya or Drex 1.5?

Drex 1.5 and Laya score within a point of each other on agent readiness, 69.7 (B) and 69.2 (B). Laya leads on payments & pricing and maintenance & community.

Do Laya and Drex 1.5 need an API key?

Laya needs no key. Drex 1.5 needs an API key.

Can an agent call Laya and Drex 1.5 without installing anything?

Laya runs on your own machine, with no hosted endpoint listed. Drex 1.5 has a hosted endpoint at https://console.nace.ai/v1/systemone.

Are Laya and Drex 1.5 open source?

Laya is open source (Apache-2.0). No open-source release is listed for Drex 1.5.

Other comparisons with Laya or Drex 1.5

Machine-readable

For companies

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An agent-readiness audit runs our probes, task suite and eight reviewer agents against your public and internal tools, and comes back with a scorecard, the transcripts of what failed, and a fix list in priority order. From $2,500, re-run included. We never take payment to move a rank. We do help companies earn one.