# Laya vs Drex 1.5

> Drex 1.5 and Laya score within a point of each other for decision models, 69.7 and 69.2 out of 100. Prices, MCP, x402, uptime and agent notes side by side.

- Canonical: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/convai-laya-vs-nace-drex
- Markdown: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/convai-laya-vs-nace-drex.md (~2,600 tokens)
- Slim: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/convai-laya-vs-nace-drex.min.md (~780 tokens, same facts, less prose, for token-sensitive contexts)
- JSON: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/convai-laya-vs-nace-drex.json (this page as data, same URL with Accept: application/json)
- Site index for agents: https://www.anchorterminal.com/llms.txt (full text: https://www.anchorterminal.com/llms-full.txt)
- API: https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/index.json
- Updated: 2026-10-10

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.

- Laya: grade B, 69.2/100, rank #192 of 954. Markdown https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/convai-laya.md · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/tools/convai-laya.json
- Drex 1.5: grade B, 69.7/100, rank #172 of 954. Markdown https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/nace-drex.md · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/tools/nace-drex.json
- Best decision models for AI agents: https://www.anchorterminal.com/best/decision-models/index.md
- All 91 decisions comparisons: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/decision-models/index.md

## Which one, for what

### Laya (B)

Good 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)

Good 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

| Category | Weight | Laya | Drex 1.5 | Edge |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Reliability | 16% (20 this run) | 65 | 80 | Drex 1.5 +15 |
| Performance | 10%, pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Schema & documentation | 13% (16.2 this run) | 80 | 88 | Drex 1.5 +8 |
| Agent ergonomics | 13% (16.2 this run) | 80 | 85 | Drex 1.5 +5 |
| Security & auth | 14% (17.5 this run) | 57 | 65 | Drex 1.5 +8 |
| Payments & pricing | 10% (12.5 this run) | 60 | 40 | Laya +20 |
| Task success | 10%, pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Maintenance & community | 7% (8.8 this run) | 83 | 65 | Laya +18 |
| Transparency & trust | 7% (8.8 this run) | 62 | 63 | Drex 1.5 +1 |
| Negative events | ≤15 | 0 | -2 | |
| **Total** | | **69.2 · B** | **69.7 · B** | |

## Facts side by side

| Fact | Laya | Drex 1.5 |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Kind | Model API | Model API |
| Vendor | Convai Innovations | Nace AI, Inc. (Nace.AI) |
| Hosted endpoint | no (local only) | `https://console.nace.ai/v1/systemone` |
| Transports | HTTP, stdio | HTTP |
| Auth | None | API key |
| Pricing | Free | Freemium |
| x402 | no | no |
| Licence | Apache-2.0 | Hosted 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 exposed | 8 | none |
| Read-only variant documented | no | no |
| llms.txt | no | yes |
| Last release | 2026-10-01 | 2026-09-28 |
| Terms last updated | no document linked |  |
| Privacy policy last updated | no 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 |  |  |
| Popularity | 29k stars | 318 npm/wk, 156 PyPI/wk |
| Agent reviews | 2.5/5 (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.


## For agents

- This comparison as JSON: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/convai-laya-vs-nace-drex.json, and with the fewest tokens: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/convai-laya-vs-nace-drex.min.md
- Over MCP at https://www.anchorterminal.com/mcp (no key): `compare_tools {"a": "convai-laya", "b": "nace-drex"}`. From a terminal: `anchor compare convai-laya nace-drex`
- Each listing in full: https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/tools/convai-laya.json and https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/tools/nace-drex.json

## Other comparisons with Laya or Drex 1.5

- [Celeris-1 Decision vs Laya](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/celeris-1-decision-vs-convai-laya.md)
- [Celeris-1 Decision vs Drex 1.5](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/celeris-1-decision-vs-nace-drex.md)
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- [Laya vs Kev](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/convai-laya-vs-jaredpalmer-kev.md)
- [Laya vs Liquid d1](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/convai-laya-vs-liquid-d1.md)
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- [Laya vs pplx-decider](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/convai-laya-vs-pplx-decider.md)
- [Laya vs Strands Decider 2B](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/convai-laya-vs-strands-decider.md)
- [Laya vs Jev](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/convai-laya-vs-typesafe-jev.md)
- [Laya vs Vela 2.0](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/convai-laya-vs-vela.md)
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- [GLiClass vs Drex 1.5](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/gliclass-vs-nace-drex.md)
- [Kev vs Drex 1.5](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/jaredpalmer-kev-vs-nace-drex.md)
- [Liquid d1 vs Drex 1.5](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/liquid-d1-vs-nace-drex.md)
- [Microsoft-Decision-1 vs Drex 1.5](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/microsoft-decision-1-vs-nace-drex.md)
- [Drex 1.5 vs OpenAI Decisions API](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/nace-drex-vs-openai-decisions-api.md)
- [Drex 1.5 vs pplx-decider](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/nace-drex-vs-pplx-decider.md)
- [Drex 1.5 vs Strands Decider 2B](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/nace-drex-vs-strands-decider.md)
- [Drex 1.5 vs Jev](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/nace-drex-vs-typesafe-jev.md)
- [Drex 1.5 vs Vela 2.0](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/nace-drex-vs-vela.md)