Stirling-PDF vs Speakeasy
Side-by-side trajectory, velocity, and editorial themes.
Stirling PDF widens distribution while it iterates on file-management ergonomics.
Stirling PDF is in a steady V2-maturing rhythm. 2.9.0 introduced server-side file sharing and alpha group signing (visual and certificate-based). 2.10.0 broadened distribution with AppImage, RPM, Homebrew, AUR, Scoop, and winget support and a new pixel-compare mode. 2.10.1 unified the Mac installer for x86 and arm. 2.11.0 ships a redesigned file-management UI as a preview, directly answering the recurring 'forced file management' feedback since the V2 launch.
The project is balancing breadth — file sharing, group signing alpha, more package formats — against UX refinement around how users discover and operate on files. Group signing in particular reads as a deliberate enterprise-feature land grab from an open-source angle, putting pressure on the lower end of the Adobe Acrobat market. The desktop story has moved from optional login to no required login at all, which suggests the team is taking the local-first install seriously.
Expect the file-management UI preview to stabilize quickly given how loud the prior feedback was, group signing to graduate out of alpha within a release or two, and continued packaging work to cover more Linux distributions and a wider self-host surface.
Speakeasy's Gram is shipping daily — multi-MCP chat, Codex hooks, and long-running assistants in one week.
Speakeasy's Gram platform is moving at multiple-releases-per-day cadence across two trains. The Platform train has shipped issuer-gated OAuth from the playground, release-stage badges, OpenRouter credit monitoring with auto-reconciliation, a v2 assistant runtime foundation, hook telemetry attribution in Datadog, Codex (OpenAI) hooks support, OTEL forwarding to customer destinations, Slack Block Kit with interactive replies, and a full migration to WorkOS-native auth. The Elements train added multi-MCP server chat configuration with namespaced tool merging, and a resilience fix so a failing MCP server doesn't wipe out tools from healthy ones in the same chat. Long-running assistants gained token-aware context compaction, self-wake triggers, and long-term memory via vector embeddings.
Gram is being built as an MCP-native assistant platform — every release reads like infrastructure for assistants that compose many MCP servers, run for a long time, recover from failures, and integrate with enterprise auth and telemetry. The architectural choices (multi-MCP merging with namespacing, per-assistant Fly apps, OTEL forwarding, WorkOS) say the target buyer is a platform team building real production agents, not a tinkerer. Self-healing chat history, credit-exhaustion 402 responses, and per-server failure isolation are the kinds of features that only matter at scale — Speakeasy is building for that scale already.
Expect Gram to formalize its v2 assistant runtime in the next sprint, add usage-based pricing tied to OpenRouter credits and Fly machine-hours, and ship deeper MCP server lifecycle tooling (version pinning, canary deploys for new tool versions). A managed MCP server catalog is a plausible adjacency given how much of the platform already presumes multi-MCP composition.
See more alternatives to Stirling-PDF →
See more alternatives to Speakeasy →