Head to head · Decision models · October 2026 research run

Drex 1.5 vs pplx-decider

Drex 1.5 scores 69.7 (B) on agent readiness against pplx-decider's 62.9 (B), and leads in 6 of 7 scored categories. Both do decision models.

Best decision models for AI agents · All 91 decisions comparisons

Which one, for what

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 61
  • Agent ergonomics, 85 against 76
  • Payments & pricing, 40 against 25
  • Transparency & trust, 63 against 52

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.

pplx-decider B

Best for High-volume classification, routing and rubric scoring over text and images where a team wants a low hosted price and the option to run the same weights itself.

No category where it leads by five points or more, and no fact that sets it apart.

Watch for

The Decisions API was released in October 2026, so its incident record is days long, and Perplexity's FAQ says it gives no uptime guarantee

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runDrex 1.5pplx-deciderEdge
Reliability16%208061Drex 1.5 +19
Performance10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Schema & documentation13%16.28890pplx-decider +2
Agent ergonomics13%16.28576Drex 1.5 +9
Security & auth14%17.56561Drex 1.5 +4
Payments & pricing10%12.54025Drex 1.5 +15
Task success10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Maintenance & community7%8.86562Drex 1.5 +3
Transparency & trust7%8.86352Drex 1.5 +11
Negative events≤15-20
TotalB 69.7/100B 62.9/100

Facts side by side

FactDrex 1.5pplx-decider
KindModel APIModel API
VendorNace AI, Inc. (Nace.AI)Perplexity
Hosted endpointhttps://console.nace.ai/v1/systemonehttps://api.perplexity.ai/v1/decisions
TransportsHTTPHTTP
AuthAPI keyAPI key
PricingFreemiumPay per use
Price for decision modelsnot publishedfree
x402nono
LicenceHosted 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.Apache-2.0 for the published weights. The hosted Decisions API is a proprietary service
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtyesyes
Last release2026-09-282026-10-05
Terms last updatedcouldn't be read
Privacy policy last updatedcouldn't be read
Customer content may train modelscouldn't be read
Terms restrict automated accesscouldn't be read
Terms restrict benchmarkingcouldn't be read
Terms or service can change without noticecouldn't be read
Arbitration or class-action waivercouldn't be read
Popularity318 npm/wk, 156 PyPI/wknone

Verdicts

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.

pplx-decider

The hosted Decisions API has an OpenAPI description, typed questions, documented limits and a published price of $0.02 per million input tokens, and the v1.1 weights are public under Apache-2.0. The API is days old, the official Python SDK has no method for it, and the governing terms and privacy notice could not be read on 9 October 2026.

Before you call either

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.

pplx-decider

  1. Send Authorization: Bearer. A key in x-api-key returns 401 on this endpoint.
  2. Set model on every request. A missing or unknown model returns 400, and the guide shows a -latest name rejected.
  3. Resize images to 2,048 tiles of 32 by 32 pixels or fewer before sending. Larger images end in a 504 after about a minute.
  4. Check the HTTP status before parsing an error. 404 and 405 have empty bodies, 504 can be HTML, and error.code changes type.
  5. For the weights, use the repository's autojev code. The card says default causal inference does not reproduce the evaluated setup.

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, Drex 1.5 or pplx-decider?

Drex 1.5 scores 69.7 (B) on agent readiness against pplx-decider's 62.9 (B), and leads in 6 of 7 scored categories.

Do Drex 1.5 and pplx-decider need an API key?

Both need an API key.

Can an agent call Drex 1.5 and pplx-decider without installing anything?

Yes. Drex 1.5 has a hosted endpoint at https://console.nace.ai/v1/systemone and pplx-decider at https://api.perplexity.ai/v1/decisions.

Other comparisons with Drex 1.5 or pplx-decider

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