nexos.ai vs Unify: which is better for your business?

With the increasing importance of artificial intelligence in both private and business lives, we need more tools to manage AI workflows. These include large language model (LLM) APIs (application programming interfaces), which allow programmers to integrate an LLM like ChatGPT, Gemini, or Llama as a part of their software implementation.

The issue is that different LLMs work better with different tasks, and sometimes, you need to connect to a few different APIs to make the most out of AI capabilities. This is where AI orchestration comes in. Instead of having to connect to each API separately, which is both resource-intensive and expensive, AI orchestration services like nexos.ai and Unify offer a way around this.

Thanks to AI orchestration, you can direct your prompts to a single API. The AI orchestration tool will reroute the prompts to the best-suited LLM, evaluating and improving the cost-effectiveness in the process.

In this article, I compare the features of nexos.ai and Unify to answer the question of which one is better for your needs.

What is AI orchestration?

AI orchestration can be a huge advantage to enterprises using AI in their day-to-day work. It can bring cost-effective solutions to AI prompting while also being an invaluable tool for improving overall performance.

nexos.ai and Unify are both solutions that offer AI orchestration services to help developers leverage various AI models in their prompting. Their primary role is to serve as intermediaries between developers and various LLMs, simplifying AI workflow. However, both fulfill that task in slightly different ways.

nexos.ai is a newcomer to AI orchestration, offering a centralized platform for AI integration. It offers enterprises a ready-to-use product, leveraging routing, caching, and analytics to ensure your software’s prompts are realized in the best possible model.

Unify takes a slightly different approach to the topic, focusing on customization options. Thanks to the ability to create custom routing models, developers can create robust systems to handle their prompts in the most cost-effective manner.

nexos.ai vs. Unify: deep dive

While nexos.ai and Unify solve a very similar issue, they take different approaches to achieve effective AI orchestration. nexos.ai focuses on simplifying the process and centralizing AI orchestration, while Unify is much more focused on providing developers with the tools they need to create custom flows. To help you decide which service is best for your company, I compare their functionalities.

Key features

When comparing these two products, I have to note that they’re extremely similar in many ways. They both focus on providing excellent AI orchestration, with top-tier analytics and automation tools helping to select the right product.

nexos.ai is a new player in the AI orchestration market, offering a centralized platform for all enterprise AI activities. nexos.ai allows you to manage and deploy over 200 AI models through a secure interface, addressing many of the challenges you typically face with AI use.

nexos.ai’s key features include:

• Prompt evaluations. This allows users to compare prompt effectiveness across different models and providers, which aids in improving AI tools, making better decisions, and reducing costs by identifying the most efficient options.
• Smart model routing. This feature automatically selects the best model for each prompt, improving accuracy, speed, and user satisfaction while streamlining AI workflows.
• Prompt-to-API. This transforms AI models and prompts into ready-to-use REST APIs, saving time and resources for teams.
  

Unify is a fully customizable LLM operations platform, which helps simplify working with multiple LLMs. It’s great for developers who need to quickly switch between AI models without making modifications to their code.

Unify's key features include:

• Unified access. Developers can use a single API key to switch between different models (such as OpenAI’s GPT-4 or open-source alternatives) without changing their code, thereby reducing vendor lock-in.
• Custom routing models. Users have the option to train custom routing models on their own data. This allows the system to learn which model or provider combination performs best in various contexts and adjust over time.
• Evaluation and guardrails. The platform supports the integration of custom evaluation metrics, guardrails, and human feedback loops, which can help ensure that outputs meet specified quality and safety standards.

As you can see, nexos.ai and Unify both offer diverse services in the AI orchestration space. I've compared some of the most important aspects of their offers.

Aspect	nexos.ai	Unify
Primary function	A platform for centralized integration and management of over 200 AI models for enterprises.	A platform focused on customizing operations with multiple LLMs.
Key features	Emphasizes automated performance optimization and offers smart model routing, prompt-to-API conversion, and guardrails.	Offers a modular design with capabilities for custom logging, evaluations, guardrails, and workflow orchestration.
Customization	Provides a standardized solution with automated optimizations.	Allows users to train custom routing models and build tailored interfaces.
Model selection	Uses automated selection methods based on performance and cost metrics.	Routes requests based on user-defined criteria such as quality, speed, and cost, with ongoing benchmarking.
Security and compliance	Includes enterprise-level security and compliance controls.	Security and compliance are considered but not the primary focus of the feature set.
Intended users	Geared toward enterprises needing integrated management of multiple AI models.	Designed for developers and organizations seeking flexible, customizable LLM operations.

Which scales better?

While both products offer excellent AI orchestration capabilities, nexos.ai excels in scalability. Due to its focus on automating the workflow based on relatively simple metrics, its system is bound to respond better to scaling than Unify, which is geared more toward developers looking for customizability. Another factor that really boosts nexos.ai is its security approach, which limits additional hurdles that have to be overcome before scaling.

This doesn’t mean Unify isn’t capable of scaling. Quite the contrary, it has the potential to be an excellent scaling tool, but it requires slightly more effort and knowledge from your team to set up correctly. If your organization is filled with specialists who feel they’re up to the task, Unify will provide you with a more tailored approach to AI orchestration. This might be more expensive to implement, but can pay dividends in the future.

Intelligent caching and load balancing

nexos.ai uses exact and semantic intelligent caching to help your software pick the right model. This means that the software will remember both exact terms and their contextual meanings.This means that if you enter the prompt “what is the capital of the United States?” for example, the model will also remember to route prompts like “tell me the capital of the United States” and “name the capital of the USA” to a given model.

When combined with nexos.ai’s smart routing and balancing model, this can make your prompts quickly sent to the right LLM, even if it’s seeing a particular prompt for the first time.

On the other hand, Unify focuses its caching on exact caching, creating a list that is then stored in a .json file. This solution allows you to add your own prompts to the cache and customize its contents to your liking. Here, more responsibility falls on the user to develop their own solutions rather than relying on the built-in automations. This, with a bit of effort, allows you to build a tailored load-balancing solution.

Security overview: is nexos.ai more secure than Unify?

nexos.ai is founded by the team behind Nord Security, helping guarantee enterprise-level security and compliance for the product. nexos.ai focuses on compliance and data protection by introducing safeguards that will detect and stop private information from being shared with outside LLMs, instead routing them to a company’s self-hosted LLMs if available. This approach also allows access monitoring, making sure that, e.g., ex-employees can’t access data after termination.

Unify, being more customizable, doesn’t have a security suite that is as robust. However, it uses standard security protocols to ensure compliance and data protection. That said, the way Unify is designed means that enterprises will be easily able to implement their own security measures on top of the Unify infrastructure.

Given all that, I believe nexos.ai is the better choice for companies looking for a quickly implementable solution that doesn’t require too much security input from the users. Unify will be better for companies with advanced security mechanisms already in place, allowing them to leverage its customizability.

Monitoring and analytics: how do nexos.ai and Unify stack up?

AI orchestration requires data to operate, and both nexos.ai and Unify offer advanced functionalities to monitor, analyze, and use data to save money and resources. That data will not only drive your enterprise's performance but also impact the future of the two products.

Analytics

nexos.ai offers a comprehensive analytics suite that monitors key performance metrics, including response times, model efficiency, and cost distribution. It is achieved by real-time monitoring and detailed logging. Unify also uses AI to suggest improvements to processes based on the data it uncovers.

Unify focuses on expanding its LLM routing capabilities by introducing automated benchmarking to its analytics capabilities. The system allows users to select the best models dynamically based on their needs, thanks to a centralized console for auditing and debugging every API call.

The future of nexos.ai and Unify

Both nexos.ai and Unify are looking to expand their offerings and adapt them to innovations in the LLM space. nexos.ai is looking to expand its offering by investing in automated workload scaling, enhanced model comparison features, and further security enhancements. Unify is looking to build its automated benchmarking capabilities, along with adaptive AI models.

Possible avenues of growth for AI orchestration include, for example, AI governance tools that would enforce compliance and ethical AI use. Another potential path is autonomous AI management, which would further limit the human input needed. Thus, being an early-implementer of AI orchestration will enable organizations to be on the cutting edge of LLM development.

nexos.ai vs Unify: key takeaways

nexos.ai and Unify both offer interesting solutions to AI orchestration challenges. Unify focuses mainly on customization and manually tailoring your orchestration pipeline to your needs. On the other hand, nexos.ai is a more hands-off experience, offering excellent orchestration even for companies without a team of AI developers to build a custom pipeline.

Thus, I recommend nexos.ai for most companies that are only starting to use AI orchestration. Meanwhile, advanced users looking for complete control of the orchestration process should explore the options offered by Unify. The key to a successful pipeline will always be balancing your organization’s budget and technical resources with its needs.

Whatever the case, I encourage you to contact each product's sales representatives to learn more about how their software can help grow your company. By carefully tailoring AI orchestration tools to your company, you'll be able to save money while improving your product.