How we compare
Most of these you should keep.
Almost everything below sits beside us rather than against us. Each one is named, and each one gets what it genuinely owns stated before anything it leaves open — a page that only attacks the competition is the first thing a compliance buyer stops believing.
The four camps
| Who they are | What they own | Where they stop | Where we sit |
|---|---|---|---|
| PLM and BOM authoringDuro (Altium) · Arena (PTC) · OpenBOM · Autodesk Fusion Manage | Where the BOM is typed. CAD sync, ECO workflow. | Export control is generally a field somebody types into. | Keep your BOM where it is. A typed-in export-control note is only as current as the day somebody typed it. Ours is a live list match, a dated countdown, and the tiers behind the part it sits on. |
| Risk and entity intelligenceSolidIntel · Exiger · Sayari · Altana · Govini · Assent · Trademo | Ownership graphs, entity resolution, N-tier data. | Deep, and entity-level rather than part-level. | They are better at ownership intelligence than we are and always will be — that is their whole business and it is not ours. We load their reports and keep them current. What we hold is the other half: the parts, the documents and the dates, walked so you can type an entity name and see what it touches. Their output is our input, with a clock on how old the answer is. |
| MES and productionManufacturo | Shop floor, inventory, traceability. | Quality and CAPA, not federal screening. | Different layer. We partner, we don’t fight. |
| The spreadsheeta spreadsheet · manufacturer compliance statements · the GSA 889 tool · “just buy pre-cleared parts” | Nothing. | Manual. | You beat a spreadsheet on how fast you get an answer, not on features. And the honest number — “we could not evaluate 23 of your 31 parts, here is exactly why” — is more persuasive than any green dashboard, because the spreadsheet cannot tell you that either.An example finding, not a benchmark. |
Keep your BOM where it is. We watch it, tell you what just broke, what breaks next and when, and which parts appear on an approved list instead.
Where the money goes
Seven things we deliberately don’t build.
These are not gaps. They are choices: everything below is work that would pull spend away from the part-and-document layer you are actually paying for. Breadth is easy to claim and impossible to check; a stated boundary is the opposite.
Deciding what a company is
We file what a cited source said about an entity and the date it said it, and when two sources disagree we show both rather than picking one. Concluding from that pile that a company is state-controlled is a legal claim, not a feature, and building a guess engine for it would create liability you would end up paying for.
ITAR and EAR classification
A classification is a legal determination with real consequences. Ours to record and keep dated, yours to make.
BOM authoring and CAD sync
You already pay for this, and duplicating it would make us a second system of record — the fastest way to turn a compliance tool into a migration project. Attaching to yours is why setup is measured in a call, not a quarter.
Vendor scores and rankings
We will tell you that four of six requests to one supplier came back and how long they took — a fact about your own correspondence, on that supplier’s page. There is no leaderboard and no sortable comparison, because the moment a ranking exists, somebody starts picking suppliers from it — and ours would be built out of how promptly somebody answers email.
Quality systems and shop floor
Adjacent, tempting, and a different discipline. Chasing it is how narrow tools become shallow suites; staying out is what keeps the screening engine specific to drone procurement rather than generic.
Certification of any kind
Not ours to issue, and nobody can buy it from a vendor. What you can buy is the evidence behind it, assembled and dated — so that is the whole of what this product is for.
Filing anything with any agency
Nothing here is transmitted to any government body. Keeping the data one-way removes an entire category of risk from your side of the desk, and there is no feature worth putting it back.
Do you actually need this?
Three questions that settle it.
Answer them before you book anything. If they come out the wrong way, we would rather you knew now.
Where does your bill of materials actually live?
If the answer is a spreadsheet, or several, you are the case this was built for. If it lives in a system you would never leave — good. We attach to it.
When a part gets flagged, what happens next?
If somebody emails the supplier and waits, and nobody records what the lists said that week, then what you are missing is not the information. It is the record.
Could you reproduce the evidence you relied on six months ago?
Not now — then. Against the list versions in force the day you shipped. If that is hard to answer, it is the question we exist for. If it is easy, you may not need us yet.
Put it against your own paperwork.
A bill of materials. Fifteen minutes, and you leave with the findings — including what we could not settle, named rather than hidden.