Compare
What changes when
the platform signs its own work.
Most investigation teams do not choose between CLEARSKY and a named competitor. They choose between CLEARSKY and what they are already doing: a spreadsheet plus a PDF template, a stack of generic OSINT tools held together with browser tabs, or an in-house build that survives the engineer who wrote it. Below is what each of those looks like next to CLEARSKY.
vs spreadsheets and PDFs
Where most teams actually start.
| What the recipient asks | Spreadsheet + PDF | CLEARSKY |
|---|---|---|
| "Is this real?" | Trust the analyst | Verify in 200ms at a public URL |
| "Has this been changed?" | No way to tell | Tampered verdict on payload-hash mismatch |
| "Where did this come from?" | Email thread, screenshot | Audit log, query-able |
| "On what lawful basis?" | Reconstruct months later | Recorded inline at collection time |
| "Subject access request?" | Hours per request | Self-served Receipt of Evidence |
| "Same person across cases?" | Manual cross-reference | Single ontology object |
| "Disclosure of method" | "We did some Google work" | Per-step audit log |
| "Cost" | Hidden in analyst hours | £49 to £399/mo, transparent |
vs generic OSINT tooling
Search bars with report buttons bolted on.
Plenty of capable OSINT tools exist. Most are search interfaces: you query a source, get results, copy-paste into your own deliverable. They are excellent at the search step. They typically have no view of the case, no audit log of what you did, no way to sign the deliverable so the recipient can verify it. The platform is the search; the credibility chain is still the analyst's reputation.
- Search-only tools solve "find the data". CLEARSKY solves "make the data hold up downstream".
- Browser-tab stacks require analysts to remember what they searched, in what order, on what basis. CLEARSKY records this as the operation runs.
- Per-tool exports produce different formats with different provenance treatment. CLEARSKY signs every export.
- Cross-tool dedup is manual. CLEARSKY runs Elasticsearch fuzzy + SequenceMatcher dedup on every ingest.
vs in-house custom build
The thing that survives the engineer who wrote it.
Larger teams sometimes build their own. The first version usually works. The second version, written after the first engineer leaves, usually does not. The compliance posture, the audit log invariants, the signing key management, the subject-rights portal, the proportionality gate: each is its own multi-week engineering project, and the maintenance burden compounds.
- Build cost. Single-engineer-year minimum to reach feature parity at the audit-log + signing tier alone.
- Maintenance. Compliance shifts (UK GDPR updates, EU AI Act amendments, ICO guidance) translate into in-house engineering tickets you have to staff.
- Verifier infrastructure. The public verifier is its own subdomain, its own key publication endpoint, its own incident-response process. Few in-house builds ship this.
- Audit defensibility. Saying "yes we built it ourselves" to a regulator carries more burden than "yes we use a UK-controller platform with documented controls".
We are not against in-house builds in principle. The question is whether the build is a strategic capability for your firm or an ongoing tax. For most investigation teams, it is the second.
Where CLEARSKY does NOT compete
Honest exclusions.
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01
Real-time live facial recognition. Not built. Not on the roadmap. Out of scope by design (see S14 rule on biometric galleries; we explicitly do not ship Clearview/PimEyes patterns).
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02
Closed-source / dark-web crawling at scale. Limited support via the egress-proxy and Tor-egress paths, but we are not a dark-web data broker. If your primary need is breach-data resale or stolen-credential exposure, other tools fit better.
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03
Mass-personal-data enrichment. We do not build or sell people-database products. CLEARSKY queries lawful sources under a documented basis; it does not host or resell personal-data lakes.
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04
SOC / SIEM. CLEARSKY is investigations-platform shape, not security-monitoring shape. It complements a SIEM but does not replace one.
Decide
See it on your work.
Best way to compare is on a live case. Trial is 7 days, no card. Walk through one of your existing matters and see what the signed dossier looks like.