The honest comparison
There are three common ways organisations try to make their documents answer questions. Here's where each one breaks — and where Marella is different, on the record.
| What regulated buyers need | Public AI chatbots | Enterprise search | Build in-house | Marella |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Answers from your documents only | No answers from the open internet | Partly finds documents, doesn't answer | Yes if you build it | Yes corpus-grounded by design |
| Passage-level citations on every answer | No confidence, not evidence | No links to files at best | Partly hard to get right | Yes one click to the source |
| Says so when the documents don't answer | No guesses fluently | Partly empty results page | Partly depends on the build | Yes honest by default |
| Your data never trains shared models | No check the terms, carefully | Partly vendor-dependent | Yes | Yes contractual commitment |
| Access mirrors departments & roles | No one account, no walls | Partly often bolted on | Partly months of work | Yes structural, with audit |
| Handles scans and messy legacy files | Partly upload limits, no pipeline | No indexes clean text | Partly the hardest 20% | Yes built for ugly corpora |
| Knowledge that compounds (entities, ontology) | No every chat starts cold | No an index, not memory | No a research project | Yes the knowledge network |
| UK hosting or private deployment | No their cloud, their rules | Partly varies | Yes your infrastructure | Yes UK cloud or your estate |
| ISO 27001-certified provider | Partly certified, but see rows above | Partly varies | No you carry the audit | Yes cert no. 24112, UKAS |
| Time to a working deployment | Yes instant — that's the problem | Partly months | No quarters, then upkeep | Yes under six weeks |
◐ means "sometimes, with caveats" — vendor- or build-dependent. Column judgements describe the typical case, not every product; bring your shortlist to a demo and we'll compare specifics.
The build-it-yourself trap
A credible in-house build isn't a model API call. It's retrieval that survives messy scans, permissions that mirror your org chart, citations that hold up to checking, evaluation, hosting, and a UI people actually adopt — then the upkeep, forever. Most teams that start discover the last 20% of documents costs 80% of the effort.
Marella is that engineering, already done, already certified, and delivered with the team who built it — typically live inside six weeks.
- Document parsing that survives scans and faxes
- Hybrid retrieval, tuned and evaluated
- Passage-level citation plumbing
- Departments, roles, decision traces, audit log
- Ingestion queues, integrations, admin console
- A workbench your staff will actually open
The questions that decide it
We already pay for Microsoft Copilot — why add Marella?
They do different jobs. Copilot is broad workplace assistance inside Microsoft 365. Marella is a governed document-intelligence platform: a curated corpus, passage-level citations on every answer, a knowledge network you own, and deployment options down to your own estate. Organisations run both — Copilot for drafting emails, Marella for questions where the answer has to be right and evidenced.
Why not just build this in-house?
You can — retrieval, parsing, permissions, citations, evaluation and UI are all buildable. But it's a serious multi-quarter engineering effort before the first user asks a question, and the messy-document 20% consumes most of it. Marella exists so that effort is already spent; your team starts at the pilot, not the architecture diagram.
Isn't enterprise search enough?
Search finds documents; someone still has to read them. Marella answers the question, cites the passage, and remembers what it learned in a knowledge network your team curates. Where search ends, the actual work begins — that's the part Marella does.
Compare it on your documents
Bring the tool you're considering — or the one you built — and run the same questions through Marella, side by side.
Private by design · ISO 27001 · Built in the UK