Entalpa vs AWS Kiro
Kiro's spec workflow runs inside Kiro, one folder per feature. Entalpa keeps one spec of the whole system and serves it over MCP to whatever agent you already run, Kiro included.
What AWS Kiro is
AWS's agentic IDE built around spec-driven development. A feature produces three documents — requirements.md, design.md, tasks.md — which become the unit of work, with EARS notation pushing requirements toward testable, unambiguous phrasing. Agent hooks fire on file save or create to run background prompts; steering files hold rules that shape agent behaviour per directory. It comes as an IDE, a CLI and a web version. Pricing is per user and per month: a free tier at 50 credits, then $20 to $200 for 1,000 to 10,000 credits, and writing, refining and running a spec all spend them.
What AWS Kiro does well
- EARS notation is real requirements-engineering discipline, and it is the best-executed part of the product.
- Steering files are the most useful idea in the tool — per-directory rules that actually change how the agent behaves.
- Hooks give you event-driven automation that a spec store does not attempt: change a component, regenerate its tests.
- It is one product from AWS covering spec, plan and execution, which is a real answer for a team that wants one vendor.
Where the two differ
Where the spec lives
Kiro's spec files are plain markdown in your repository, under .kiro/specs/, so any agent can read them. What only Kiro does is keep them current: refining the design and tasks when a requirement changes, and ticking tasks as they run. Entalpa serves the spec over MCP, so Claude Code, Cursor, Codex and a dozen others (Kiro too) read and update the same requirements without changing editor. If half your team uses Cursor and half uses Claude Code, that difference decides it.
Per-feature files versus a project store
Kiro's three documents describe a feature. They are excellent at that and are not trying to be the place the whole project's requirements accumulate across features and across quarters: nothing merges .kiro/specs/checkout and .kiro/specs/refunds into what the system does now.
Credits for the agent's work, credits for generation
Kiro's credits meter its agent's work, spec writing and task runs included. Entalpa's meter its own AI work — turning a description into stories and requirements — while reading and writing your project over MCP spends nothing.
Which one fits
Pick AWS Kiro if
You are happy to work inside Kiro, you want spec, plan and execution from one vendor, and hooks or EARS solve a problem you actually have.
Pick Entalpa if
Your team already runs agents it likes, or the spec has to be readable by more than one tool.
Questions this raises
Does Entalpa use EARS notation?
Not as a hard grammar. Entalpa stores requirements as structured objects with acceptance criteria rather than enforcing a phrasing template. If EARS is what you want specifically, Kiro implements it better than anyone.
Can Kiro read Entalpa?
Kiro supports MCP servers, so it can be pointed at Entalpa the same way Claude Code or Cursor is — there is a setup guide for it.
Try it against whatever you are using now
Connect Entalpa to the agent you already run, point it at a real project, and see whether a locked requirement set changes anything. Free to start, no card, and reading or writing your project over MCP never spends credits.
Compared with something else