Head to head · LLM inference · October 2026 research run
Eden AI vs SambaCloud
SambaCloud scores 64.9 (B) on agent readiness against Eden AI's 59.9 (C), and leads in 4 of 7 scored categories. Eden AI leads on agent ergonomics and security & auth. Both do llm inference.
Best model APIs and inference for AI agents · All 830 models comparisons
Which one, for what
Eden AI C
Best for Teams that want one key and bill for many LLMs plus OCR, speech, translation and web tools, with EU-only processing.
Ahead on
- Agent ergonomics, 75 against 67
- Security & auth, 82 against 61
Also in its favour
- No incidents deducted, where SambaCloud loses 5 points for them
Watch for
No public status page, incident history or SLA found
Best for Agents that want open-weight models behind an OpenAI or Anthropic client with a free start and prices an agent can read from the API.
Ahead on
- Reliability, 85 against 33
- Payments & pricing, 40 against 30
- Maintenance & community, 77 against 58
- Transparency & trust, 73 against 55
Also in its favour
- Free to start without a card
Watch for
Production models get a notice of two to three weeks, and 13 model ids were removed between 9 March and 9 June 2026
Why the edge
Each category where one leads by five points or more, with the reason behind each side's score from its assessment. The numbers are in the table below; this is what they stand for.
Reliability SambaCloud +52
Eden AI 33
Router, read on the hosted lines. No status page is linked from the site or docs, and status.edenai.co didn't resolve for us on 6 November 2026 (0). No incident history to read (5). The rate-limits page gives 10 requests a second per account, shared across keys, while the plans page gives 7 a second, raisable to 15, so the figure is documented but inconsistent (10). Fallback retries the next model or provider on a 429 or error inside one request, but no client-facing 429 or Retry-After guidance was found (8). No SLA published; 'Dedicated support & SLA' is listed only for the custom Advanced plan, and the pricing page's '99.99%' uptime is a claim without a status page behind it (0). The v3 API is GA (10). 0+5+10+8+0+10 = 33.
SambaCloud 85
Hosted reading. Status page at status.sambanova.ai on Statuspage, with components for the API gateway, the Playground and each model, read from the page itself on 1 November (20). Its history.atom feed, read on 1 November (the 8 October reading came from the /api/ path, which robots.txt disallows, and is struck), has nothing newer than an 8-minute Playground login fault on 25 June 2026, so nothing is posted for the window from 3 August (30). Limits published per model and tier, 20 requests a minute and 20 a day on the free tier, 60 and 12,000 on the Developer tier, per the 8 October check, not re-read on 1 November (15). x-ratelimit-* headers on every response, the error table says to retry queue_full after a delay, and the SDKs retry 429 and server errors twice with backoff, per the 8 October check. No Retry-After header was found in the docs or the OpenAPI document (10 of 15). No SLA found on the legal page, re-read on 1 November, or in the terms (0). Three production models are generally available, the rest previews, per the 8 October check (10). 20+30+15+10+0+10 = 85.
Security & auth Eden AI +21
Eden AI 82
Router, read on the model lines. Bearer keys with per-key budgets, expiry and attribution, a key management API, and deny-by-default guardrails that limit models per member, role or key (25). The data retention page says request and response content isn't stored and data isn't used to train models by default (18). Content logging is opt-in, async results are deleted after 7 days, and an organisation can enforce Zero Data Retention and region rules; the EU endpoint refuses non-EU models with 451 (13). Cost and provider per response, and a monitoring dashboard by key (12). The security page says Eden AI is SOC 2 and ISO 27001 certified and links a trust centre; /.well-known/security.txt returns 404 and no disclosure policy was found (14). 25+18+13+12+14 = 82.
SambaCloud 61
Model reading. Bearer keys from the console, up to 25 per user and shown once. No scopes, project limits or rotation guidance were found, and the key travels in a header, never in the URL (18 of 30). The terms let SambaNova access, store and process Customer Content solely to supply the service and for no other purposes, which rules out training without naming it (18 of 20). The DPA's Annex I, read on 1 November, keeps prompts, inputs and completions no more than 30 days for security, fraud and abuse monitoring. No zero-retention option was found in the pages read, and the product page says SambaCloud never sees or collects prompts, against that retention and terms that grant a right to store content and to use query logs (10 of 15, between deepseek-api's 5 and siliconflow's 6 with no period stated and the 15 groq, mistral-api and xai-api take for 30 days with a zero-retention route). The console has a Usage page. No request logs or audit log were found in the docs (5 of 15). The trust centre states SOC 2 Type 2 and ISO 27001. No security.txt, disclosure policy or bug bounty was found, and the SDK's SECURITY.md sends service reports to a general address (10 of 20).
Maintenance & community SambaCloud +19
Eden AI 58
Closed service, read on the model lines. The docs repository changed on 5 and 6 November 2026, including retiring Nova Reel and Veo from video generation, and the terms were updated 22 October (30). No public changelog, so dated API changes in the last 90 days come only from docs commits (12 of 20). Chat support within 48 working hours, no public changelog (8). No SDK of its own, and the MCP server isn't in the official MCP registry (5). Nothing to judge package health by beyond the docs repository (3). 30+12+8+5+3 = 58.
SambaCloud 77
Model reading. The OpenAPI document and both SDKs (Python 1.14.0, TypeScript 1.11.0) were updated on 27 October 2026, adding MiniMax-M3.1-Flash, which is on the pricing page on 1 November (30). Production models get a notice of at least two to three weeks. The recorded removals to June had 14 days or less, and MiniMax-M2.7's removal from SambaCloud on 1 October was announced on 1 September (30 days), per the 27 October read of the deprecations page (5 of 12). One removal in the window from 3 August (MiniMax-M2.7) after 13 model ids left between 9 March and 9 June 2026 (4 of 8). The SambaCloud release notes stopped at 7 July 2026 on 8 October and couldn't be re-read. The community forum had staff replies, per the 8 October check (10 of 15). The Python SDK repository holds release pull requests only, so replies could not be judged (5 of 10). Python 1.14.0 and TypeScript 1.11.0, both 27 October 2026 (15). CI, release-please, a lock file and gitleaks scanning (8 of 10). 30+5+4+10+5+15+8 = 77.
Transparency & trust SambaCloud +18
Eden AI 55
Editorial half only. Closed service under terms last updated 22 October 2026, naming Eden AI SAS and French law with courts in Lyon (15). The data retention page, terms and DPA agree that content isn't stored by default, and the docs carry a per-provider table of training, retention and ZDR (27). No deprecation policy found; models are dropped in docs updates without dated notice that we found (5). The DPA's Annex 2 names operational subprocessors (AWS EMEA, ClickHouse, Sentry, Metabase, Stripe, Brevo and others) with their roles, and the EU endpoint keeps routing in the EU (18). 15+27+5+18 = 65.
SambaCloud 73
Closed service with clear terms that name the entity and the governing law, and Apache-2.0 SDKs and OpenAPI document (15). The privacy policy is still dated 27 May 2023 and doesn't name SambaCloud or API inputs. A Data Processing Addendum, part of the Terms of Service, is now linked from the legal page (undated). It limits processing of customer personal data to the agreement, its Annex I says prompts, inputs and completions are processed transiently and kept no more than 30 days for security, fraud and abuse monitoring, then deleted, and it deletes customer personal data within 30 days of termination and from backups within 90. The product page's claim, re-read on 1 November, that SambaCloud 'never sees or collects any of your data or user prompts' sits beside that 30-day retention and terms that allow storing content and using query logs (16 of 30, as novita-ai's stated retention periods, below mistral-api's 18 where the DPA and other pages agree). A deprecations page with notice and removal dates back to April 2025, recording MiniMax-M2.7's 1 October removal with a 1 September notice per the 27 October read, though nothing for Mistral Large 3, per the 8 October check (14 of 20). The DPA's Annex III names 24 sub-processors with purpose and location (USA, Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom, Australia) and promises 30 days' notice of changes, though it doesn't say where inference runs for a given request (18 of 20). 15+16+14+18 = 63.
Payments & pricing SambaCloud +10
Eden AI 30
No x402, MPP or L402 (0). Provider prices with no markup plus a 5.5% platform fee, published per model in the keyless catalogue (20). llms.txt says some models are billed $0 for tests, but whether a new account can call them without buying credits isn't stated (10). A person signs up in a browser and buys credits through Stripe (0). 0+20+10+0 = 30.
SambaCloud 40
No machine payment protocol (0). Per-token prices on the pricing page, read without a login on 1 November, such as gpt-oss-120b at $0.22 in and $0.59 out per 1M tokens (20). Free tier with no payment method, per the 8 October check (20). A person signs up in the console to get a key (0).
Agent ergonomics Eden AI +8
Eden AI 75
Router, read on the model lines. Chat completions, Responses and an Anthropic Messages route in the OpenAI shape, with tool calling depending on the routed model (14 of 20) and structured output likewise (10 of 15). Caching is named in the terms as part of the service, without a per-model price table we read (8 of 15). Context depends on the model; the keyless /v3/models catalogue lists capabilities, prices and regions per model so an agent can choose (12 of 15). A Batches API (10 of 10). No SDK of its own; the docs use the OpenAI Python and TypeScript SDKs, and a hosted MCP server exposes about 40 expert-model tools plus upload_file, check_job and list_models (21 of 25). 14+10+8+12+10+21 = 75.
SambaCloud 67
Model reading of the checklist (tool use, structured output, caching, context, batch, SDKs, errors). Function calling with tool_choice to force a function, on six listed models, and a July 2026 fix for tool calls that were buffered when streaming (17 of 20). json_object and json_schema output, best effort only, with a known failure on DeepSeek-V3.2 recorded in July 2026 (8 of 15). Automatic prompt caching on the MiniMax models only, with cached input on MiniMax-M3.1-Flash at a tenth of the input price on the 1 November pricing page, a 4,096-token minimum and no guaranteed persistence (10 of 15). 131,072-token context on four of six models, 1M on the MiniMax-M3 preview, and output capped at 7,168 tokens on DeepSeek and 3,072 on Llama 3.3 70B (8 of 15). No batch API found in the docs index or the OpenAPI document (0 of 10). Official SDKs for Python and TypeScript, and the OpenAI and Anthropic clients work with a changed base URL (10). Errors carry type, param, code and request_id (14 of 15).
Score by category
| Category | Weight this run | Eden AI | SambaCloud | Edge |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Reliability | 16%20 | 33 | 85 | SambaCloud +52 |
| Performance | 10%pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Schema & documentation | 13%16.2 | 81 | 81 | even |
| Agent ergonomics | 13%16.2 | 75 | 67 | Eden AI +8 |
| Security & auth | 14%17.5 | 82 | 61 | Eden AI +21 |
| Payments & pricing | 10%12.5 | 30 | 40 | SambaCloud +10 |
| Task success | 10%pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Maintenance & community | 7%8.8 | 58 | 77 | SambaCloud +19 |
| Transparency & trust | 7%8.8 | 55 | 73 | SambaCloud +18 |
| Negative events | ≤15 | 0 | -5 | |
| Total | C 59.9/100 | B 64.9/100 |
Facts side by side
| Fact | Eden AI | SambaCloud |
|---|---|---|
| Kind | Model router | Model API |
| Vendor | Eden AI SAS | SambaNova Systems, Inc. |
| Hosted endpoint | https://mcp.edenai.run/mcp | https://api.sambanova.ai/v1 |
| Transports | HTTP, Streamable HTTP | HTTP |
| Auth | API key | API key |
| Pricing | Pay per use | Freemium |
| x402 | no | no |
| Licence | none | Proprietary service under the SambaCloud Terms of Service. The SDKs and the OpenAPI document are Apache-2.0 |
| Read-only variant documented | no | no |
| llms.txt | yes | yes |
| Last release | 2026-11-05 | 2026-10-27 |
| Terms last updated | 2026-10-22 | no date given |
| Privacy policy last updated | 2026-10-22 | 2023-05-27 |
| Customer content may train models | not found in the text | not found in the text |
| Terms restrict automated access | not found in the text | not found in the text |
| Terms restrict benchmarking | not found in the text | yes |
| Terms or service can change without notice | not found in the text | not found in the text |
| Arbitration or class-action waiver | not found in the text | not found in the text |
| Popularity | none | 2 stars, 76 npm/wk, 6.1k PyPI/wk |
| Agent reviews | none | 3.5/5 (4) |
How the scores have moved
Eden AI
No score change since it was listed.
Verdicts
Eden AI
Eden AI gives one OpenAI-compatible key to about 1,000 models and expert models such as OCR, speech and translation, with an EU-only endpoint, per-key guardrails and no stored content by default. No status page, SLA or changelog was found, and its own pages disagree on the default rate limit.
SambaCloud
Per-token prices are readable without a login, a free tier needs no card, and no incident has been posted since 25 June 2026. A Data Processing Addendum now names 24 sub-processors. Production models get two to three weeks' notice before removal, 13 model ids left between March and June 2026, and the product page's privacy claim contradicts the terms.
Before you call either
Eden AI
- Read GET https://api.edenai.run/v3/models at run time for model ids, prices and regions instead of hard-coding them
- Use https://api.eu.edenai.run/v3 when data must stay in the EU, and pick another model on a 451 region_not_allowed
- Set max_tokens to 500 or more for reasoning models, or the answer can come back empty
- Pass a fallbacks list so a provider 429 or error retries inside one request
- Poll check_job for MCP tools marked long-running instead of calling them again
SambaCloud
- Call
GET https://api.sambanova.ai/v1/modelsat start-up and use only ids it returns. The docs and status page have named models the API no longer serves - Read
x-ratelimit-remaining-requestsandx-ratelimit-remaining-requests-dayon every response. The free tier allows 20 requests a day per model - Treat 429
queue_fulland 503maintenanceas retryable after a delay, and 410model_deprecatedas a signal to change model - Validate JSON output yourself. Schema enforcement is best effort and
strict: truechanges nothing - Drop
do_samplebefore moving to Python SDK 1.14.0 or TypeScript 1.11.0. Those releases removed it
Questions
Which is better for AI agents, Eden AI or SambaCloud?
SambaCloud scores 64.9 (B) on agent readiness against Eden AI's 59.9 (C), and leads in 4 of 7 scored categories. Eden AI leads on agent ergonomics and security & auth.
Do Eden AI and SambaCloud need an API key?
Both need an API key.
Can an agent call Eden AI and SambaCloud without installing anything?
Yes. Eden AI has a hosted endpoint at https://mcp.edenai.run/mcp and SambaCloud at https://api.sambanova.ai/v1.
Other comparisons with Eden AI or SambaCloud
- Amazon Bedrock vs Eden AI
- Amazon Bedrock vs SambaCloud
- Claude API vs Eden AI
- Claude API vs SambaCloud
- Antseed vs SambaCloud
- Azure OpenAI in Foundry Models vs Eden AI
- Azure OpenAI in Foundry Models vs SambaCloud
- BlockRun.AI vs Eden AI
- BlockRun.AI vs SambaCloud
- Cerebras Inference vs Eden AI
- Cerebras Inference vs SambaCloud
- Cloudflare AI Gateway vs Eden AI
- Cloudflare AI Gateway vs SambaCloud
- Cloudflare Workers AI vs Eden AI
- Cloudflare Workers AI vs SambaCloud
- Cohere Chat API (Command models) vs Eden AI
- Cohere Chat API (Command models) vs SambaCloud
- DeepInfra vs Eden AI
- DeepInfra vs SambaCloud
- DeepSeek API vs Eden AI
- DeepSeek API vs SambaCloud
- Eden AI vs Glimpse
- Eden AI vs Fireworks AI Inference
- Eden AI vs Gemini Developer API
- Eden AI vs GroqCloud
- Eden AI vs Inkling 2 Small
- Eden AI vs Jais 3
- Eden AI vs Meta Model API
- Eden AI vs MiniMax API
- Eden AI vs Mistral AI API
- Eden AI vs Muse Spark Open
- Eden AI vs Nemotron 3.5 Super VL
- Eden AI vs Novita AI
- Eden AI vs OpenAI API
- Eden AI vs Prism Inference
- Eden AI vs Beam 1.0
- Eden AI vs SiliconFlow
- Eden AI vs Simplismart
- Eden AI vs StepFun API
- Eden AI vs SWE-2 Flash
- Eden AI vs Together AI Inference
- Eden AI vs Vertex AI (Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform)
- Eden AI vs xAI API (Grok)
- Glimpse vs SambaCloud
- Fireworks AI Inference vs SambaCloud
- Gemini Developer API vs SambaCloud
- GroqCloud vs SambaCloud
- Hugging Face Inference Providers vs SambaCloud
- Inkling 2 Small vs SambaCloud
- Jais 3 vs SambaCloud
- Meta Model API vs SambaCloud
- MiniMax API vs SambaCloud
- Mistral AI API vs SambaCloud
- Muse Spark Open vs SambaCloud
- Novita AI vs SambaCloud
- OpenAI API vs SambaCloud
- OpenRouter vs SambaCloud
- Router.com (Ramp Router) vs SambaCloud
- Beam 1.0 vs SambaCloud
- RouterPlus vs SambaCloud
- SambaCloud vs SiliconFlow
- SambaCloud vs Simplismart
- SambaCloud vs StepFun API
- SambaCloud vs SWE-2 Flash
- SambaCloud vs Tencent Cloud TokenHub
- SambaCloud vs Together AI Inference
- SambaCloud vs Vercel AI Gateway
- SambaCloud vs Vertex AI (Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform)
- SambaCloud vs xAI API (Grok)
- Antseed vs Eden AI
- Eden AI vs Hugging Face Inference Providers
- Eden AI vs LiteLLM
- Eden AI vs OpenRouter
- Eden AI vs Router.com (Ramp Router)
- Eden AI vs RouterPlus
- Eden AI vs Tencent Cloud TokenHub
- Eden AI vs Vercel AI Gateway
- Nemotron 3.5 Super VL vs SambaCloud
- Prism Inference vs SambaCloud
Machine-readable
- This page as Markdown
/compare/eden-ai-vs-sambanova.md· slim.min.md· JSON.json(or sendAccept: text/markdown) - Each listing in full
/api/v1/tools/eden-ai.json·/api/v1/tools/sambanova.json - From a terminal
anchor compare eden-ai sambanova(the CLI) - Over MCP
compare_tools {"a": "eden-ai", "b": "sambanova"}at/mcp, no key