Compare
Most prospects we talk to already have a research workflow — a shared spreadsheet, an in-house scraper, or a retained research desk. Here's how Constellation stacks up on the four axes that decide which one is worth keeping.
| Axis | Constellation | Manual spreadsheet scraping | In-house engineering scrapers | Outsourced research agencies |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Speed | Minutes — the open-web collector ingests a source on first ask and serves structured answers immediately. | Hours to days — every new pull is a human opening tabs, copying fields, and pasting into rows. | Weeks to ship — a new source means a ticket, a deploy, and a debug window before the first row lands. | Days to weeks — agency briefs round-trip through email, intake forms, and an analyst's calendar. |
| Repeatability | A saved source reruns on a schedule — same schema, same fields, no analyst babysit. | Manual by definition — the next person starts from a blank sheet unless someone documented the steps. | High once it ships, but every regression, captcha change, or schema shift means another engineering ticket. | Variable — agency output quality swings with the assigned researcher and how clean the brief was. |
| Total cost | A flat per-page subscription — analyst time stays in the interpretation, not the retrieval. | Free in dollars, expensive in headcount — every competitive focus group, comp set, or filing drop eats analyst hours. | High upfront and ongoing — engineering salaries plus the maintenance drag of every new page or layout change. | Premium per deliverable — agency retainers and per-brief pricing scale with research volume, not insight. |
| Data freshness | Scheduled monitors flag changes as they happen — the alert inbox surfaces deltas, not the same data again. | Only as fresh as the last person who ran it — usually stale by the time the memo is due. | Same as Constellation when it runs, but only on the schedule the scraper can survive — breakages go silent. | Bounded by the brief's cadence — re-runs need a new ticket and a new invoice. |
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