  We compare the holographic dressed soft wall and the exponentially deformed
AdS models for spin 1/2 fermions. We present the dressed soft wall model and
its analytical solutions for the left and right modes, and the corresponding
spectra, also including modifications considering hyperfine spin-spin and meson
cloud interactions, as well as anomalous dimensions. Then, we discuss the
deformed AdS model for spin 1/2 fermions and present their effective
Schr\"odinger equations for the left and right modes, for which only numerical
solutions are available. Then, we consider a polynomial expansion of the
effective potential of the deformed AdS model and show that in the quadratic
approximation it leads to exact analytical solutions comparable with the
dressed soft wall model and obtain the corresponding spectra for left and right
modes. We show a numerical comparison of the mass spectra of spin 1/2 baryons
for the dressed soft wall and the deformed AdS models. We present a detailed
relation between the quadratic approximation of the deformed AdS and the
dressed soft wall models for their spectra, wave functions and comments on the
deep inelastic scattering on both models. We find that these two models are
{\sl not} equivalent even in the quadratic approximation, but it is possible to
relate their left and right modes for particular choices of their parameters.
