Prompt-ops platform vs gateway-level governance.
Vellum is a strong prompt-ops platform — prompt management, versioning, evals, deployment, and monitoring built for ML / AI engineering teams shipping LLM features. DVARA is a governance platform at the gateway layer — covering policy enforcement, signed audit, MCP tool-call proxy, FinOps per tenant, and a unified API across 14+ providers (OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, Bedrock, Mistral, Cohere, Groq, Azure OpenAI, Ollama, Qwen, DeepSeek, Moonshot, ChatGLM, Grok) — and includes prompt templating + experiments as one component of the broader stack.
Where Vellum focuses. DVARA ships the same primitives as one component of a broader platform; teams that already have a deep prompt-ops investment can integrate either side-by-side.
| Feature | DVARA | Vellum |
|---|---|---|
| Prompt template registry + versioning | ✓ | ✓ |
| A/B prompt experiments with traffic split | ✓ | ✓ |
| Prompt render preview / dry-run | ✓ | ✓ |
| Eval suite + golden prompts | ✓ | ✓ |
| Model fingerprint + drift detection | ✓ | ∼ |
| Visual prompt builder (low-code IDE) | ∼ | ✓ |
Vellum is a prompt-ops studio, not a gateway. Customers typically run their LLM traffic through a separate routing layer.
| Feature | DVARA | Vellum |
|---|---|---|
| Multi-provider unified API (14+ providers) | ✓ | ∼ |
| Intelligent routing + failover | ✓ | — |
| Structured outputs across providers | ✓ | ∼ |
| Semantic cache (vector similarity) | ✓ | — |
| Latency-aware + cost-aware routing | ✓ | — |
| BYOK credential management (encrypted at rest + vault) | ✓ | ∼ |
| Feature | DVARA | Vellum |
|---|---|---|
| Policy-as-Code engine | ✓ | — |
| Policy dry-run before activation | ✓ | — |
| Immutable HMAC-signed audit trail | ✓ | — |
| PII detection and redaction | ✓ | — |
| Prompt firewall + jailbreak detection | ✓ | ∼ |
| SOC2 / HIPAA / GDPR evidence packages | ✓ | ∼ |
| EU data residency enforcement | ✓ | ∼ |
| SIEM export (Splunk / CloudWatch / Kafka) | ✓ | — |
Vellum does not currently ship MCP proxy or agent-loop tooling.
| Feature | DVARA | Vellum |
|---|---|---|
| MCP tool calls proxied and governed | ✓ | — |
| MCP PII scan on arguments + responses | ✓ | — |
| Human approval gate | ✓ | — |
| Agent loop detection + kill switch | ✓ | — |
| MCP server registry + credential store | ✓ | — |
| Per-tool cost attribution | ✓ | — |
| Feature | DVARA | Vellum |
|---|---|---|
| Real-time cost calculation per request | ✓ | ∼ |
| Budget caps with enforcement | ✓ | — |
| Cost attribution per tenant / team / key | ✓ | ∼ |
| Chargeback reports (PDF / CSV) | ✓ | — |
| Cost anomaly detection | ✓ | — |
| Auto-downgrade on soft budget breach | ✓ | — |
| Feature | DVARA | Vellum |
|---|---|---|
| Self-hosted / on-prem deployment | ✓ | ∼ |
| Air-gapped deployment | ✓ | — |
| SSO / SAML / RBAC (6 built-in roles) | ✓ | ∼ |
| Multi-tenant isolation | ✓ | ∼ |
| Multi-region active-active | ✓ | — |
Vellum is a strong choice for ML / AI engineering teams that want a low-code IDE for prompt iteration, evals, and deployment. DVARA is the choice when prompt-ops needs to sit inside a broader governance platform — gateway-level routing across 14+ providers, MCP tool-call proxy, signed audit, FinOps per tenant, and self-host. The two products overlap on prompt templates and experiments; the divergence is everywhere else. Pick by where the bigger problem is.