The Vercel AI SDK wires a model into an app in a few lines, and running that app is still yours to do. With a toolkit you assemble the parts and operate the result — availability, durable state, governance, and the pager are yours. With a platform the system comes assembled and operated, under a contractual SLA.
The Vercel AI SDK is a TypeScript library that abstracts model providers behind one API and adds tool loops, streaming, UI hooks, and MCP support. The SDK runs on Vercel Functions or any other Node.js host. Your engineers wire it together, add Vercel Workflows or another engine for durable execution, and build the cross-region state and governance around it.
Then your team runs it — scaling the functions, handling failover and recovery, and carrying the pager. The published 99.99% SLA covers Vercel's hosting platform on a commercially reasonable efforts basis. The running agent is yours to keep available.
The Akka Agentic AI Platform gives you the agents, durable state, streaming, APIs, and governance as one pre-integrated runtime. You describe the system you want, and the platform generates it, tests it, and runs it. Because everything runs in one runtime, a system that compiles is ready for production.
Akka keeps it running around the clock, with active-active replication and automatic failover, and stands behind a contractual 99.9999% availability SLA on the running system.
Akka Specify builds agentic systems from your specifications and releases only what meets your definition of done.
| Dimension | With the Vercel AI SDK | With Akka |
|---|---|---|
| Availability | Your team owns application uptime and recovery. The 99.99% Enterprise SLA covers Vercel's hosting platform on a commercially reasonable efforts basis, excludes Excused Downtime, and caps credits at 50% of the monthly fee — a ~52-minute yearly downtime budget. | Akka owns 99.9999% on the running system — a ~31-second yearly budget — active-active, sub-1-minute RTO, zero-byte RPO. |
| State & memory | Vercel Functions are stateless and stop at 800 seconds on Pro and Enterprise, or 1,800 seconds in beta, with a 504 timeout. Durability for long-running agents comes from Vercel Workflows, built on the open-source Workflow SDK, which records each step to an event log and replays it, with each run's state kept in one home region. | Held in memory, active-active replicated — 4 ms reads, sub-10 ms writes, replayable from its own event journal. No external store on the hot path. |
| Governance | Security and privacy certifications cover the hosting platform. AI SDK 7 holds a tool call for human approval, with optional signed approvals. AI Gateway denies requests for unapproved models and providers and logs each request's model, tokens, and cost. | Akka Verify applies any control to any AI system and guarantees its enforcement on every action — HITL, HOTL, guardrails, evaluations — with every call recorded in tamper-evident storage. |
| Spec-driven delivery | v0 builds apps and agents from a chat prompt, then deploys them or opens a pull request for review. eve, the open-source agent framework from Vercel, runs scored evals that fail a CI run when a check misses its gate. | Akka Specify builds agentic systems from your specifications and releases only what meets your definition of done. |
| Model optimization | AI Gateway routes requests across providers with ordered provider and model fallbacks, rewrites or denies requests for a model by rule, and sets budgets per team, project, API key, or member. AI Gateway adds no markup to provider token prices. | Akka Optimize puts each request on the best model for the task, including smaller models trained on your data. |
| Runtime track record | The SDK is TypeScript and JavaScript only, on React, Next.js, Vue, Svelte, and Node.js. AI SDK 7 added the durable WorkflowAgent in June 2026. Vercel Workflows reached general availability in April 2026. | since 2009, 100,000+ deployments — the runtime behind systems two billion people use daily. |
| Infrastructure cost | Consumption-metered serverless compute — Active CPU while code runs, provisioned memory, and invocations — that scales with load. Vercel Workflows meters events, data written, and data retained. The agent runtime, memory, streaming, and governance around it carry their own cost. | One shared-compute runtime carries the same volume on up to 90% less infrastructure, at a fixed annual fee. Akka Optimize keeps improving the models on your own production traffic, so cost per task keeps falling as the system runs. |
| Portability | TypeScript on Vercel's serverless hosting, with BYOC on AWS in private beta and a self-hosted PostgreSQL backend for the Workflow SDK; a production deployment on Vercel accretes dependencies on that hosting model and its consumption meter. | Any cloud, on-prem, or sovereign — Java or Scala, portable specs, BSL licensing, no per-run meter. |
With the Vercel AI SDK, engineers write tool approvals into each agent's TypeScript code. AI Gateway rules decide which models a request may reach. Those controls cover AI SDK agents and model calls routed through AI Gateway.
Approve, route & log
With the Vercel AI SDK, tool approvals live in application code, written by the same TypeScript engineers who build the agent. AI SDK 7 holds a tool call until a person approves it and can sign each approval so it cannot be forged. AI Gateway applies team rules that deny unapproved models and providers and can restrict traffic to providers with zero-data-retention agreements.
These controls cover agents built with the AI SDK and model calls routed through AI Gateway. Vercel maps its controls to no AI regulation such as the EU AI Act. AI Gateway logs each request's model, provider attempts, tokens, and cost, and deletes prompts and responses after each request by default. A risk officer has no built-in path to author and version a governance contract of their own.
Block & escalate
Risk teams govern every agentic system without waiting on its developers, and every control they apply is guaranteed to be enforced. Risk teams choose from 1,718 controls drawn from 241 regulations and frameworks. Human-in-the-loop approvals, human-on-the-loop halt switches, sanitizers, guardrails, evaluations, testing gates, and simulations all run before an action executes and block or escalate anything that does not pass.
Every call is traced automatically into petabyte-scale, tamper-evident storage, and that same trace data feeds continuous evaluations that keep running in production, right alongside your agents.
Reach for the Vercel AI SDK when you are building streaming chat UIs and front-end model wiring in TypeScript, when the work lives inside a React or Next.js app and ships on serverless hosting, and when the system is interactive or low-stakes enough that some downtime is fine. The Vercel AI SDK fits when your team is ready to own the durable runtime, state, recovery, and governance that come with running it yourself.
Reach for the platform when the system has to stay up, survive failure, and recover on its own, and when it has to pass an audit and enforce governance while it runs. Akka fits when you want a single vendor accountable for availability under an SLA, and when you would rather ship the system than build and operate the plumbing underneath it.
The Akka Agentic AI Platform builds, runs, governs and optimizes agentic systems under a contractual SLA. Tell us what you are building, and we will show you how it runs in production.
