# Drex 1.5 vs Vela 2.0 (slim)

> Drex 1.5 scores 69.7 (B) to Vela 2.0's 66.5 (B) for decision models. Prices, MCP, x402, uptime and agent notes side by side.

- Full: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/nace-drex-vs-vela.md (~2,650 tokens) · this version ~780 tokens · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/nace-drex-vs-vela.json · canonical https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/nace-drex-vs-vela
- Index: https://www.anchorterminal.com/llms.txt · API: https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/index.json · Updated: 2026-10-10

Drex 1.5 scores 69.7 (B) on agent readiness against Vela 2.0's 66.5 (B), and leads in 5 of 7 scored categories. Vela 2.0 leads on payments & pricing and maintenance & community. Both do decision models.

- Drex 1.5: B 69.7, rank #172 of 954 · https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/nace-drex.min.md
- Vela 2.0: B 66.5, rank #291 of 954 · https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/vela.min.md
- Drex 1.5, good 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 57; Schema & documentation, 88 against 78; Agent ergonomics, 85 against 79; Security & auth, 65 against 60; Transparency & trust, 63 against 48. Also A hosted endpoint, with nothing to install.
- Vela 2.0, good for Self-hosted routing and guardrail checks in one call, where span offsets for personal data or unsupported claims matter. Ahead on Payments & pricing, 60 against 40; Maintenance & community, 84 against 65. Also No key needed to call it; Open source.

| Category | Drex 1.5 | Vela 2.0 |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Reliability (16%) | 80 | 57 |
| Performance (10%) | pending | pending |
| Schema & documentation (13%) | 88 | 78 |
| Agent ergonomics (13%) | 85 | 79 |
| Security & auth (14%) | 65 | 60 |
| Payments & pricing (10%) | 40 | 60 |
| Task success (10%) | pending | pending |
| Maintenance & community (7%) | 65 | 84 |
| Transparency & trust (7%) | 63 | 48 |

| Fact (where they differ) | Drex 1.5 | Vela 2.0 |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Vendor | Nace AI, Inc. (Nace.AI) | vLLM Semantic Router project and KR Labs |
| Hosted endpoint | `https://console.nace.ai/v1/systemone` | no (local only) |
| Auth | API key | None |
| Pricing | Freemium | Free |
| Licence | 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. | Apache-2.0 (weights, code and documentation). The 0.3B's tokeniser keeps the Gemma Terms of Use, and training data keeps its own licences |
| llms.txt | yes | no |
| Last release | 2026-09-28 | 2026-10-06 |
| Terms last updated |  | no document linked |
| Privacy policy last updated |  | no document linked |
| Popularity | 318 npm/wk, 156 PyPI/wk | 6.1k stars |