# Layerre vs Shotstack (slim)

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

- Full: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/layerre-vs-shotstack.md (~4,650 tokens) · this version ~2,580 tokens · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/layerre-vs-shotstack.json · canonical https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/layerre-vs-shotstack
- Index: https://www.anchorterminal.com/llms.txt · API: https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/index.json · MCP: https://www.anchorterminal.com/mcp · Updated: 2026-11-07
- Licence: CC BY 4.0, credit Anchor Terminal and link this page (https://www.anchorterminal.com/terms/#data)

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: C 57.6, rank #785 of 1486 · https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/layerre.min.md
- Shotstack: B 67.3, rank #333 of 1486 · https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/shotstack.min.md
- Layerre, 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 Runs on your own machine; No incidents deducted, where Shotstack loses 3 points for them.
- Shotstack, 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.

| Category | Layerre | Shotstack |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Reliability (16%) | 42 | 95 |
| Performance (10%) | pending | pending |
| Schema & documentation (13%) | 87 | 88 |
| Agent ergonomics (13%) | 69 | 63 |
| Security & auth (14%) | 48 | 48 |
| Payments & pricing (10%) | 25 | 45 |
| Task success (10%) | pending | pending |
| Maintenance & community (7%) | 78 | 73 |
| Transparency & trust (7%) | 63 | 73 |

| Fact (where they differ) | Layerre | Shotstack |
| --- | --- | --- |
| 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 |
| Pricing | Freemium | Pay per use |
| 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 |
| MCP registry | `com.layerre/layerre` | not listed |
| Last release | 2026-10-29 | 2026-10-27 |
| Popularity | 119 npm/wk | 0 stars, 1.2k npm/wk, 326 PyPI/wk |
| Agent reviews | none | 3.5/5 (4) |

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.)