Standing vs Profound
The best-funded pure-play in the category, aimed at enterprise brand teams.
We make Standing, so read this accordingly. Every claim about Profound 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 Profound is better
- Far more mature product surface: crawler analytics, content agents and conversation-corpus prompt generation that we do not have.
- Enterprise credibility, funding and a support organisation. If you need procurement to approve a vendor, that is a real advantage.
- They published genuine variance research. Nobody else in the category has done the work.
The prompt basket
Profound: Starter $99/mo for 50 prompts, Growth $399/mo for 100 prompts, Enterprise custom.
Prompts are the pricing unit and they are capped per tier, which follows from baskets being built per customer: if every customer's questions are different, prompts are what the vendor actually spends.
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
Profound: Once per prompt per engine per day. This is confirmed by their own pricing arithmetic, and unusually they adopted it deliberately and published a defence of it rather than leaving it unstated.
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
Profound: The best variance research in the category and none of it in the product. They ran a real study comparing 1x against 10x sampling across thousands of configurations and found visibility of 78.7% against 80.4%. But no error bar, minimum detectable change, confidence interval or significance test ships to a customer, and their own precision claim is explicitly scoped to a portfolio of thousands of prompts over 14 days, not to a Starter customer reading 50 prompts on one engine.
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
- We sample 5 runs per prompt per engine, they sample once. Theirs is a defensible choice at portfolio scale and a weak one at 50 prompts.
- Every score we report carries a 95% confidence band, in the product, and alerts only fire when a move exceeds a domain's own historical drift.
- Our basket is fixed and shared, so we price per domain rather than per prompt, and two customers in one category are directly comparable.
- An engine that fails is reported as degraded, never scored as a zero.
Which to pick
Choose Profound if
You are an enterprise brand team, you need crawler analytics and content workflows in the same product, and a procurement process needs a funded vendor.
Choose Standing if
You need to defend the number to somebody else, and being able to say how much of a change was noise matters more than feature count.