laravel prism or Neuron ai?

[ziming]

for those who used both, how would you compare or choose between them?

hope this question is allowed here

[ilvalerione]

Hi @ziming
Thank you for posting your question. Your doubt or curiosity could be the same of many other people, so any question is welcome if it can contribute in sharing valuable information and resources.

My contribution could be to underlying the most important technical differences between the projects. Based on their different approaches you could understand which one is the best solution for your use case.

Encapsulation

When I started working on Neuron one of my first goal was encouraging encapsulation. My intention was to decouple the agent definition from its usage. The agent is basically a class that includes all the moving parts of the agent implementation, so you can run it wherever you want with just a line of code.
You can clearly see it in the example: https://docs.neuron-ai.dev/agent

Prism push you to write all the code "in line". In a certain sense it doesn't have a clear Agent concept. It's more like a library.

Chat History & Memory

Prism doesn't have any history and memory management. This is instead one of the most important components of the Neuron framework. Neuron automatically manages the chat history in multi turns conversations enabling also the persistence of the chat history on file, or SQL database. This built-in component brings many benefits, first of all you don't have to write the code to manage multi turn conversations.

Here is the link to the documentation to learn more about this feature: https://docs.neuron-ai.dev/chat-history-and-memory

RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation)

To implement a RAG you need to interact with embeddings generators, and vector store. Prism provides some methods to get embeddings of a text, but doesn't have any structure to implement a RAG out of the box.
Neuron is explicitly built to support these use cases with components to automatically interact with embeddings providers and vector database. Here is the link to learn more about RAG: https://docs.neuron-ai.dev/rag

Furthermore using Neuron you can easily implement a data loading pipeline to process incoming files and text to fill your vector database over time. Data loaders include interfaces to deal with file readers, text splitters, and more.

Documentation for data loaders: https://docs.neuron-ai.dev/components/data-loader

Framework Agnostic

I never considered an advantage to be strictly coupled with a framework. With Neuron I want to support the entire PHP ecosystem giving developers the freedom to use Neuron in any stack. This is also one of the most important reasons why it's reasonable to imagine that Neuron will have a larger developer community than Prism or other packages that are limited to use only on one framework.

Monitoring & Debugging

Integrating AI Agents into your application you’re not working only with functions and deterministic code, you program your agent also influencing probability distributions. Same input ≠ output. That means reproducibility, versioning, and debugging become real problems.
Why is the model taking certain decisions? What data is the model reacting to? Prompting is not programming in the common sense. No static types, small changes break output, long prompts cost latency, and no two models behave exactly the same with the same prompt. We designed NeuronAI with built-in observability features, so you can monitor AI agents were running, helping you maintain production-grade implementations with confidence.

Learn more about monitoring: https://docs.neuron-ai.dev/advanced/observability

Agentic Workflow

Workflow allows you to orchestrate multi-agent applications with support for streaming and Human-In-The-Loop pattern.

I hope it can help you understand the direction of the project. Feel free to contribute with your considerations.

[vesper8]

Excellent response from the creator of Neuron-AI. I was just asking myself the same question. Have been using Prism for many months and have implemented my own encapsulation and chat history/memory, but now I am curious to try neuron-ai and appreciate that it is actively developed.

Framework Agnostic is not exactly a win in my book personally as I have used Laravel exclusively for over 10 years and have no reason to dabble outside of it. If there was a Laravel wrapper for Neuron AI.. now that would be a win!

[ilvalerione]

I challenged the community a couple of times during the latest months about a Laravel bridge for Neuron and as far as I can see there is no motivation from Laravel developers in introducing this additional layer between you and Neuron.

Here is a Laravel package from the community: https://neuronhub.dev/package/9

I am a seasoned Laravel developer myself, and even today it's not clear to me the value an additional layer can bring, and I'm not getting valuable feedback in this direction from the thousends of developers building with Neuron in Laravel applications. It seems not about go outside of Laravel, but reduce useless dependency risks.

If you have any point of view on this, feel free to tell us more so we can eventually find a valuable direction to improve the developer experience.

I get this opportunity to update the previous feedback since Neuron improved so much during the last few months.