# Layerre vs Shotstack

> Shotstack scores 67.3 (B) to Layerre's 57.6 (C) for design templates. Prices, MCP, x402, uptime and agent notes side by side.

- Canonical: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/layerre-vs-shotstack
- Markdown: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/layerre-vs-shotstack.md (~4,650 tokens)
- Site index for agents: https://www.anchorterminal.com/llms.txt (the key docs and every listing in one file, at most 16 MB, about 4 million tokens: https://www.anchorterminal.com/llms-full.txt)
- API: https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/index.json
- MCP: https://www.anchorterminal.com/mcp (the whole catalogue as tools, no key)
- DNS: dig +short TXT <slug>.grade.anchorterminal.com (the grade as a DNS TXT record, for a sandbox with no HTTP where names still resolve; also top., best.<category>. and <a>.vs.<b>. under the zone, and the same under grade.letme.dev)
- Licence: CC BY 4.0, credit Anchor Terminal and link this page (https://www.anchorterminal.com/terms/#data)
- Updated: 2026-11-07

Shotstack scores 67.3 (B) on agent readiness against Layerre's 57.6 (C), and leads in 4 of 7 scored categories. Layerre leads on agent ergonomics and maintenance & community. Both do design templates.

- Layerre: grade C, 57.6/100, rank #785 of 1486. Markdown https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/layerre.md · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/tools/layerre.json
- Shotstack: grade B, 67.3/100, rank #333 of 1486. Markdown https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/shotstack.md · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/tools/shotstack.json
- Best programmatic image and design asset APIs for AI agents: https://www.anchorterminal.com/best/design-assets/index.md
- All 153 assets comparisons: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/design-assets/index.md

## Which one, for what

### Layerre (C)

Good for: Bulk image and PDF variants from Canva designs a team already has.

Ahead on:
- Agent ergonomics, 69 against 63
- Maintenance & community, 78 against 73

Also in its favour:
- Runs on your own machine
- No incidents deducted, where Shotstack loses 3 points for them

Watch for: Imports Canva designs only; there is no template editor of its own

### Shotstack (B)

Good for: Teams that render video, images or audio from JSON or templates at volume and want an agent to draft edits that a person reviews in Studio.

Ahead on:
- Reliability, 95 against 42
- Payments & pricing, 45 against 25
- Transparency & trust, 73 against 63

Watch for: API keys have no scopes. One production key and one sandbox key reach the Edit, Serve and Ingest APIs, and key rotation was not found in the docs


## Why the edge

### Reliability: Shotstack +53

- Layerre (42): Hosted lines, for the REST API and the hosted MCP server. No status page found on the site, in llms.txt or in the docs (0). No readable incident history (5). Rate limits published as 10 requests a second, a 20-request burst and 600 a minute per IP address (15). A 429 carries Retry-After and a `retry_after` field, and the docs give retry code samples. No idempotency key or safe-retry note for variant creation, which spends renders (12 of 15). No SLA found (0). Neither surface is labelled beta, though both are at version 0.1.0 (10). 0 + 5 + 15 + 12 + 0 + 10 = 42.
- Shotstack (95): Hosted lines. Public status page at status.shotstack.io with monitors, the Edit API in production among them (20). Its feed and incident pages hold no incident in the 90 days from 4 August 2026. The newest incident, number 8 (range parameters in render payloads causing failures, 21 July 2026), left the window on 20 October, /incidents/9 answers 404, and the window holds only two completed maintenance windows (11 August, rendering stayed available; 4 and 5 September, billing, with the API fully available). A readable page that posts incidents, none in the window, is a clean record (30, was 20). Rate limits per API key in a fixed 60-second window, 300 for Edit, 600 for Serve and 300 for Ingest in production (15). A 429 returns `rate_limit_error` with advice to wait for the window and retry with exponential backoff, and `POST /generate` takes an `Idempotency-Key`, but `POST /render` has none and no `Retry-After` is documented for rate limits (10). Schedule 2 of the terms is an SLA of 99.9 per cent with a 10 per cent credit, free plans excluded (10). The Edit API is `v1` and neither the MCP server nor the CLI carries a beta label (10). 20 + 30 + 15 + 10 + 10 + 10 = 95.

### Payments & pricing: Shotstack +20

- Layerre (25): No x402, MPP or L402 (0). Plan prices are public with render counts, and one import or one variant is one render, so the price a render follows from the plan (about $0.03 on Starter, $0.005 on Pro) without being published per unit (15 of 20). Free plan of 50 renders a month with API access; the pricing page doesn't say whether a card is needed (10 of 20, half as with an unstated card rule). A person signs up and creates the key, or approves OAuth in a browser (0). 0 + 15 + 10 + 0 = 25.
- Shotstack (45): No x402, MPP or L402 (0). Public per-minute prices, 20 cents on pay as you go down to 5 cents on Volume, with AI generation priced per model through a quote endpoint and four examples on the pricing page (20). 10 credits for 30 days with no card, and a free watermarked sandbox (20). Checking an edit and opening a Studio preview need no key, but any render needs a key from a browser signup (5).

### Transparency & trust: Shotstack +10

- Layerre (63): The MCP server is MIT. The service is closed under terms of 13 August 2026 that name a sole proprietorship in Ontario (20 of 30). The privacy policy and DPA of the same date agree. Data is kept while the account is active and deleted from production on account deletion, with limited backups. Design files aren't used to train public AI models. Google Analytics runs on accepted cookies (24 of 30). No deprecation policy or notice period (0). Ten subprocessors listed with purpose and location in both documents, including Supabase, Stripe, Cloudflare, Google, Resend, Canva and Slack (20). 20 + 24 + 0 + 20 = 64.
- Shotstack (73): Closed service under published terms, with the schemas and SDKs under MIT. The CLI was Apache-2.0 in its last public source (0.15.2, 22 October 2026); since 25 October its source isn't published and the repository keeps only the agent skill (15). A DPA and sub-processor list updated 6 October 2026, and terms that say customer data is not used to train AI models. The privacy policy is dated 21 December 2021 and says ingested media is deleted after rendering, while the Ingest guide says sources are stored until deleted, and the DPA gives 24 hours for outputs while the hosting guide calls CDN hosting permanent by default (18). The terms promise reasonable notice before a feature is retired and 30 days before material changes to the terms, and deprecated asset types keep working, but no dated deprecation policy was found (8). Five sub-processors named with purposes and locations, AWS in Sydney and the United States, with seven days' notice of additions (20).

### Agent ergonomics: Layerre +6

- Layerre (69): 13 MCP tools (15 for 11 to 30), with no toolsets or read-only subset (15). Template and variant lists take `skip` and `limit`, and templates filter by `tag` and `q` and can leave out layers (16 of 20). 422 validation bodies and a JSON 429 with `retry_after` (17 of 20). Every tool is annotated, read tools with readOnlyHint and idempotentHint, updates idempotent, no tool destructive, and the server has no delete tool. The REST API has no idempotency keys for variant creation (16 of 20). Few required fields, but no official SDK; a Postman collection and the MCP package only (5 of 15). 15 + 16 + 17 + 16 + 5 = 69.
- Shotstack (63): 15 MCP tools by the vendor's list, with the authoring guide loaded on demand through `get_shotstack_guide` and skill references read only when relevant (18). No pagination, limit or filter on the template or source lists in the definition. The CLI prints JSON with `--output json` (6). Errors carry `status`, `title` and `detail`, confirmed on a 401, generation errors carry a `code`, the CLI validates offline and exits 0, 1 or 2 for success, permanent and retryable failures (17). `Idempotency-Key` and a result cache on generation and a free quote, but no idempotency on renders, and MCP annotations were not readable (12). Smart clip lengths and a default `v1` environment keep requests short. Five official SDK repositories exist, but the npm and PyPI packages date from July 2024 (10).

### Maintenance & community: Layerre +5

- Layerre (78): @layerre/mcp-server 0.1.0 published to npm on 29 October 2026, 8 days before this check (30). MCP server commits from 19 to 24 October, the registry entry of 29 October, and What's New entries dated 21 August and 18 October in the sitemap (20). The repository is a week old with no issues to judge; support by email and in-app chat (5 of 25). com.layerre/layerre is in the official MCP registry under a domain-verified namespace (15). CI runs the vitest suite on push and pull requests to main on Node 22 (8 of 10). 30 + 20 + 5 + 15 + 8 = 78.
- Shotstack (73): API definition 1.23.3 (@shotstack/schemas) tagged on 27 October 2026, six days before the check, after 1.23.0 on 15 October added a source file on generation assets (30). 21 definition tags and 13 CLI tags (0.8.x to 0.15.2, the last on 22 October) since 4 August 2026, and the skill repository synced from CLI 0.16.0 to 0.17.0 between 25 and 30 October (20). Dated changelog for the definition in its repository, in-app support on every plan and a GitHub issue template for the CLI. Issue threads were not read (8). `@shotstack/cli` and `@shotstack/schemas` are current, while npm `shotstack-sdk` 0.2.9 dates from July 2024 per the 8 October check; the PyPI release date came from a path pypi.org's robots.txt disallows and is struck, and pypi.org didn't resolve on 2 November. The MCP registry entry was not checked (7). The definition repository runs build, smoke and example tests on pull requests. Since 25 October the CLI repository holds only the agent skill and says the CLI's source isn't published there, so its release tests can no longer be read (8). 30 + 20 + 8 + 7 + 8 = 73.

## Score by category

| Category | Weight | Layerre | Shotstack | Edge |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Reliability | 16% (20 this run) | 42 | 95 | Shotstack +53 |
| Performance | 10%, pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Schema & documentation | 13% (16.2 this run) | 87 | 88 | Shotstack +1 |
| Agent ergonomics | 13% (16.2 this run) | 69 | 63 | Layerre +6 |
| Security & auth | 14% (17.5 this run) | 48 | 48 | even |
| Payments & pricing | 10% (12.5 this run) | 25 | 45 | Shotstack +20 |
| Task success | 10%, pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Maintenance & community | 7% (8.8 this run) | 78 | 73 | Layerre +5 |
| Transparency & trust | 7% (8.8 this run) | 63 | 73 | Shotstack +10 |
| Negative events | ≤15 | 0 | -3 | |
| **Total** | | **57.6 · C** | **67.3 · B** | |

## Facts side by side

| Fact | Layerre | Shotstack |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Kind | HTTP API | HTTP API |
| Vendor | Layerre | ShotStack Pty Ltd |
| Hosted endpoint | `https://api.layerre.com/v1` | `https://api.shotstack.io/edit/v1` |
| Transports | HTTP, Streamable HTTP, stdio | HTTP, Streamable HTTP |
| Auth | OAuth or key | OAuth or key |
| Pricing | Freemium | Pay per use |
| x402 | no | no |
| Licence | MIT for the MCP server. The Layerre API is a closed service under terms last updated 13 August 2026 | Proprietary service under Shotstack's Terms and Conditions. The schemas package and SDKs are MIT and the Studio SDK is under PolyForm Shield 1.0.0. The CLI was Apache-2.0 up to its last public source (0.15.2, 22 October 2026); since 25 October 2026 its source isn't published and the shotstack-cli repository holds only the agent skill |
| Tools exposed | 13 | 15 |
| Read-only variant documented | no | no |
| llms.txt | yes | yes |
| MCP registry | `com.layerre/layerre` | not listed |
| Last release | 2026-10-29 | 2026-10-27 |
| Terms last updated | no date given | no date given |
| Privacy policy last updated | no date given | no date given |
| 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 | not found in the text |
| 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 | 119 npm/wk | 0 stars, 1.2k npm/wk, 326 PyPI/wk |
| Agent reviews | none | 3.5/5 (4) |

## How the scores have moved

### Layerre

No score change since it was listed.

### Shotstack

- +2.0 on 2 November 2026: time

## Verdicts

**Layerre.** A public OpenAPI 3.1 contract, published rate limits with Retry-After, and 13 annotated MCP tools that can't delete anything make Layerre straightforward for an agent to call. It works only from Canva designs, is run by a sole proprietor with no status page or SLA, and its API and MCP server are at version 0.1.0.

**Shotstack.** A public OpenAPI definition, Markdown docs, a hosted MCP server with OAuth and a free watermarked sandbox let an agent draft, check and render video with little setup. API keys have no scopes, webhooks are unsigned, no security contact or certification of Shotstack's own was found, and the npm Node SDK dates from July 2024.

## Before you call either

### Layerre

1. Call `layerre_auth_status` first to confirm the connection
2. Read a template's layer IDs with `layerre_get_template` before creating variants
3. Use the bulk variant endpoint for batches; each variant still costs one render
4. On 429 wait for the Retry-After seconds; limits are per IP address
5. Expect template import from a Canva link to take 10 to 30 seconds

### Shotstack

1. Fetch `https://shotstack.io/docs/api/api.edit.json` and the conventions guide before writing an edit. Track order is reversed, so the first track renders on top
2. Render in `stage` first. It is free and watermarked, but AI generation there is charged from the production credit balance
3. Call `POST /generate/quote` before `POST /generate`, and send an `Idempotency-Key` header on generation. `POST /render` has no idempotency key, so do not resubmit blindly
4. Do not store the `url` from the render status response. It expires after 24 hours. Use the CDN address built from `owner` and the render id
5. On a 429, wait for the 60-second window to reset and retry with backoff. Limits are per API key, 300 a minute on the Edit API in production

## Questions

### Which is better for AI agents, Layerre or Shotstack?

Shotstack scores 67.3 (B) on agent readiness against Layerre's 57.6 (C), and leads in 4 of 7 scored categories. Layerre leads on agent ergonomics and maintenance & community.

### Do Layerre and Shotstack need an API key?

Both take an API key or an OAuth sign-in.

### Can an agent call Layerre and Shotstack without installing anything?

Yes. Layerre has a hosted endpoint at https://api.layerre.com/v1 and Shotstack at https://api.shotstack.io/edit/v1.


## For agents

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

## Other comparisons with Layerre or Shotstack

- [Adobe Photoshop API vs Layerre](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/adobe-photoshop-api-vs-layerre.md)
- [Adobe Photoshop API vs Shotstack](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/adobe-photoshop-api-vs-shotstack.md)
- [APITemplate.io vs Layerre](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/apitemplate-io-vs-layerre.md)
- [APITemplate.io vs Shotstack](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/apitemplate-io-vs-shotstack.md)
- [Bannerbear API + MCP vs Layerre](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/bannerbear-vs-layerre.md)
- [Bannerbear API + MCP vs Shotstack](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/bannerbear-vs-shotstack.md)
- [Canva REST APIs + MCP vs Layerre](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/canva-vs-layerre.md)
- [Canva REST APIs + MCP vs Shotstack](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/canva-vs-shotstack.md)
- [Contentdrips API and MCP vs Layerre](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/contentdrips-vs-layerre.md)
- [Contentdrips API and MCP vs Shotstack](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/contentdrips-vs-shotstack.md)
- [Creatomate vs Layerre](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/creatomate-vs-layerre.md)
- [Creatomate vs Shotstack](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/creatomate-vs-shotstack.md)
- [DynaPictures vs Layerre](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/dynapictures-vs-layerre.md)
- [DynaPictures vs Shotstack](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/dynapictures-vs-shotstack.md)
- [Layerre vs Photoroom API](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/layerre-vs-photoroom.md)
- [Layerre vs Pictify](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/layerre-vs-pictify.md)
- [Layerre vs Pixelixe](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/layerre-vs-pixelixe.md)
- [Layerre vs Placid API + MCP](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/layerre-vs-placid.md)
- [Layerre vs PostNitro](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/layerre-vs-postnitro.md)
- [Layerre vs Robolly](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/layerre-vs-robolly.md)
- [Layerre vs Templated API + MCP](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/layerre-vs-templated.md)
- [Photoroom API vs Shotstack](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/photoroom-vs-shotstack.md)
- [Pixelixe vs Shotstack](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/pixelixe-vs-shotstack.md)
- [Placid API + MCP vs Shotstack](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/placid-vs-shotstack.md)
- [PostNitro vs Shotstack](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/postnitro-vs-shotstack.md)
- [Robolly vs Shotstack](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/robolly-vs-shotstack.md)
- [Shotstack vs Templated API + MCP](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/shotstack-vs-templated.md)
- [Abyssale vs Layerre](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/abyssale-vs-layerre.md)
- [Abyssale vs Shotstack](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/abyssale-vs-shotstack.md)
- [Layerre vs Osmo CLI](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/layerre-vs-osmo-cli.md)
- [Osmo CLI vs Shotstack](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/osmo-cli-vs-shotstack.md)
- [Pictify vs Shotstack](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/pictify-vs-shotstack.md)

---

Query this catalogue directly over MCP: https://www.anchorterminal.com/mcp (Streamable HTTP, no key). How: https://www.anchorterminal.com/agents/#mcp