---
title: "Pace vs ORB"
description: "An evidence-based comparison of Pace and ORB: heavier reasoner + trust surfaces vs lean single-purpose."
canonical: https://heypace.app/compared/orb/
last-updated: 2026-08-27
---
# Pace vs ORB

An evidence-based comparison of Pace and ORB: heavier reasoner + trust surfaces vs lean single-purpose.

## Product posture

- **Product:** [ORB](https://github.com/settylokesh/ORB)
- **Maintainer:** settylokesh
- **License:** No license yet; not open source under No license yet
- **Runtime posture:** on-device
- **Speech-to-text:** Moonshine (ONNX Runtime)
- **Reasoner:** Gemma 4 E4B (4-bit, MLX)
- **Text-to-speech:** Local
- **Screen-aware:** Yes

## What the competing product does well

- Structured JSON action plans emitted by the VLM — explicit plan-then-execute loop.
- ONNX Runtime + MLX dual runtime — Moonshine for ASR, MLX for the VLM.
- Glow border around the screen to signal listening / planning / executing phases.

## Where Pace differs

Pace uses a heavier qwen3-30b-a3b reasoner with a tier picker and trust surfaces. ORB is leaner and more single-purpose. Note: ORB has no license file yet, so it's effectively all-rights-reserved.

This comparison does not claim ratings, market rank, or user-review scores.