Standing vs AthenaHQ
A well-funded pure-play with strong content and a credit-based model.
We make Standing, so read this accordingly. Every claim about AthenaHQ below comes from their own published pricing, documentation or help centre, verified August 6, 2026. Where they have not published something we say so rather than guessing, and the first section is where they beat us.
Where AthenaHQ is better
- Far more content and a much larger site, including 83 industry pages.
- No prompt cap. If you want to track hundreds of questions, the credit model allows it.
- More mature product and a funded team.
The prompt basket
AthenaHQ: Starter $295/mo for 3,600 credits, where one credit is one AI response.
Credits rather than prompts, with no per-tier prompt cap published. Their calculator accepts anywhere from 1 to 100,000 prompts, so the credit budget is the binding constraint rather than a basket size.
Standing: a fixed basket built from your category, priced per domain rather than per prompt. It is the smallest basket in the category and the only fixed one, which is the trade: fewer questions, but the same questions every scan, so a change in the score is a change in the answers rather than a change in what we asked. It also means two customers in one category are directly comparable.
How many times each question is asked
AthenaHQ: Not published, and no repeat-run control exists in the product. Their published credit formula contains no repetition term. The one 4x multiplier is paraphrase fan-out, defined in their API as paraphrased variations to surface a wider set of responses. That is coverage breadth rather than noise reduction, and it confounds phrasing variance with sampling variance, so it cannot isolate run-to-run noise. Scheduler granularity is a day of the week.
Standing: 5 runs per prompt per engine on paid scans, 3 on the free check, published. Roughly 300 responses per paid scan. This is the number that decides whether a score is a measurement or a single draw from a distribution.
What each publishes about uncertainty
AthenaHQ: None for run-to-run variance. More seriously, their missing-data policy is the exact anti-pattern: days with no data are returned as zeros so the series is gap-free and chartable, which makes a failed scan indistinguishable from a genuine zero. They demonstrably can write caveats when they choose, disclosing attribute-extraction sampling in a changelog and disclaiming causality in a blog post.
Standing: a 95% confidence band on every score, shown in the product, with alerts gated on whether a move exceeds that domain's own historical drift. An engine that fails more than half its calls reports that it did not respond rather than a measured zero. Our own weakness, stated: the band covers within-scan sampling and does not cover platform drift between scans, which is why the model version is on the report.
Where Standing is better
- A failed engine is reported as degraded. Returning zeros for missing days manufactures drops that never happened, and it is the single worst practice in the category.
- Published sampling and a published confidence band.
- $99 against $295 as the entry point.
Which to pick
Choose AthenaHQ if
You want to track a very large number of prompts and the budget supports $295/mo.
Choose Standing if
You need missing data and measured absence to be different things on the chart.