Head to head · Decision models · October 2026 research run
GLiClass vs Drex 1.5
Drex 1.5 scores 69.7 (B) on agent readiness against GLiClass's 49.9 (D), and leads in 5 of 7 scored categories. GLiClass leads on payments & pricing. Both do decision models.
Best decision models for AI agents · All 91 decisions comparisons
Which one, for what
GLiClass D
Best for Topic, intent and sentiment routing over a known label set on the owner's own CPU or GPU, where many labels must be scored at once.
Ahead on
- Payments & pricing, 60 against 40
Also in its favour
- No key needed to call it
- Open source
Watch for
No calibration evidence. The cards report F1 only, and the docs tell users to calibrate thresholds on their own traffic
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 43
- Schema & documentation, 88 against 49
- Agent ergonomics, 85 against 60
- Security & auth, 65 against 38
- Maintenance & community, 65 against 44
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 this run | GLiClass | Drex 1.5 | Edge |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Reliability | 16%20 | 43 | 80 | Drex 1.5 +37 |
| Performance | 10%pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Schema & documentation | 13%16.2 | 49 | 88 | Drex 1.5 +39 |
| Agent ergonomics | 13%16.2 | 60 | 85 | Drex 1.5 +25 |
| Security & auth | 14%17.5 | 38 | 65 | Drex 1.5 +27 |
| Payments & pricing | 10%12.5 | 60 | 40 | GLiClass +20 |
| Task success | 10%pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Maintenance & community | 7%8.8 | 44 | 65 | Drex 1.5 +21 |
| Transparency & trust | 7%8.8 | 64 | 63 | GLiClass +1 |
| Negative events | ≤15 | 0 | -2 | |
| Total | D 49.9/100 | B 69.7/100 |
Facts side by side
| Fact | GLiClass | Drex 1.5 |
|---|---|---|
| Kind | Model API | Model API |
| Vendor | Knowledgator | Nace AI, Inc. (Nace.AI) |
| Hosted endpoint | no (local only) | https://console.nace.ai/v1/systemone |
| Transports | HTTP | HTTP |
| Auth | None | API key |
| Pricing | Free | Freemium |
| x402 | no | no |
| Licence | Apache-2.0 (library and the model weights we checked) | 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. |
| Read-only variant documented | no | no |
| llms.txt | no | yes |
| Last release | 2026-07-21 | 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 | 555 stars, 13k PyPI/wk | 318 npm/wk, 156 PyPI/wk |
Verdicts
GLiClass
An Apache-2.0 classifier that scores a whole label set in one encoder pass on the owner's hardware, with single-label, multi-label, hierarchical and few-shot modes. It returns label scores with no calibration claim, the bundled server has no authentication, and the last three test runs on the main branch, on 24 September 2026, failed.
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
GLiClass
- Pass
--host 127.0.0.1topython -m gliclass.serve, or put the port behind your own gateway. The server checks no credential - On a machine without a GPU add
--device cpu --dtype float32 --num-gpus-per-replica 0. The default configuration expects CUDA - Send one text a request to
POST /gliclass. An array intextsis cut to its first item without an error - Set
multi_labelto false for one label from a set. The default scores each label independently, so scores do not sum to 1 - Keep text plus labels under the pipeline's 1,024-token
max_length, or useZeroShotClassificationWithChunkingPipeline. Longer input is truncated silently
Drex 1.5
- Call https://console.nace.ai/v1/systemone with Authorization: Bearer nace_sk_..., and pin model drex-v1.5 rather than drex-latest in production.
- Stop on 402 insufficient_credit or 402 payment_required until credit is topped up or the unpaid invoice is paid.
- Retry 429 and 529 after retry-after-ms. On a 422 for an unknown model, use one of the ids the error message lists.
- Keep state below 131,072 tokens and the body below 1,048,576 bytes, and send at most 512 questions per request.
- Keep the key on a server. A key in browser code is exposed, and the /v1 routes send no Access-Control-Allow-Origin header.
- Check usage.input_tokens and the usage CSV after retries, since /v1/systemone documents no idempotency key.
Questions
Which is better for AI agents, GLiClass or Drex 1.5?
Drex 1.5 scores 69.7 (B) on agent readiness against GLiClass's 49.9 (D), and leads in 5 of 7 scored categories. GLiClass leads on payments & pricing.
Do GLiClass and Drex 1.5 need an API key?
GLiClass needs no key. Drex 1.5 needs an API key.
Can an agent call GLiClass and Drex 1.5 without installing anything?
No hosted endpoint is listed for GLiClass. Drex 1.5 has a hosted endpoint at https://console.nace.ai/v1/systemone.
Are GLiClass and Drex 1.5 open source?
GLiClass is open source (Apache-2.0 (library and the model weights we checked)). No open-source release is listed for Drex 1.5.
Other comparisons with GLiClass or Drex 1.5
- Celeris-1 Decision vs GLiClass
- Celeris-1 Decision vs Drex 1.5
- Clef vs GLiClass
- Clef vs Drex 1.5
- Laya vs GLiClass
- Laya vs Drex 1.5
- Decider vs GLiClass
- Decider vs Drex 1.5
- GLiClass vs Kev
- GLiClass vs Liquid d1
- GLiClass vs Microsoft-Decision-1
- GLiClass vs OpenAI Decisions API
- GLiClass vs pplx-decider
- GLiClass vs Strands Decider 2B
- GLiClass vs Jev
- GLiClass vs Vela 2.0
- Kev vs Drex 1.5
- Liquid d1 vs Drex 1.5
- Microsoft-Decision-1 vs Drex 1.5
- Drex 1.5 vs OpenAI Decisions API
- Drex 1.5 vs pplx-decider
- Drex 1.5 vs Strands Decider 2B
- Drex 1.5 vs Jev
- Drex 1.5 vs Vela 2.0
Machine-readable
- This page as Markdown
/compare/gliclass-vs-nace-drex.md· slim.min.md· JSON.json(or sendAccept: text/markdown) - Each listing in full
/api/v1/tools/gliclass.json·/api/v1/tools/nace-drex.json - From a terminal
anchor compare gliclass nace-drex(the CLI) - Over MCP
compare_tools {"a": "gliclass", "b": "nace-drex"}at/mcp, no key