Sourceframe

Workflow pattern / Research

Create a vendor-comparison assistant

Compare vendors on declared criteria using each vendor's own public pages, with disagreement preserved.

Advanced / Answer + citations / On demand

The problem

Comparison content on the open web is mostly marketing, and internal comparisons go stale the week they are written.

Who it is for

Teams evaluating tools where public documentation is the primary evidence.

Teams: Procurement / Engineering / Operations

Inputs

  • Vendor list
  • Comparison criteria defined as questions
  • Evidence rules
  • A not-established policy

Conceptual process

  1. 01Define criteria

    Write each criterion as a question a documentation page could answer.

  2. 02Locate evidence

    Find the specific page per vendor per criterion.

  3. 03Extract

    Capture the answer and the excerpt, or mark not established.

  4. 04Normalize

    Map different vocabularies onto the same criterion.

  5. 05Present

    Build a matrix where every cell links to its source.

Flow diagram

  1. 01Criteria
  2. 02Per-vendor discovery
  3. 03Evidence extraction
  4. 04Normalize terms
  5. 05Comparison matrix

Example output

Illustrative output
{  "criterion": "Does the product document SSO support?",  "vendors": [    { "name": "Vendor A", "answer": "yes", "source_url": "https://example.com/docs/sso" },    { "name": "Vendor B", "answer": "not established", "note": "No SSO page found in public docs" }  ]}

Data-quality considerations

  • A vendor's marketing page and its documentation can disagree; prefer documentation and record both.
  • 'Not established' is a valid, useful cell value.
  • Re-check criteria before the comparison is used in a decision.

Failure modes

  • Absence of a page read as absence of a feature.
  • Different vendor vocabularies mapped onto the same criterion incorrectly.
  • Comparison presented as objective when criteria selection was subjective.

Suggested architecture

  • Criteria registry
  • Per-vendor discovery
  • Evidence extractor
  • Vocabulary mapper
  • Matrix renderer with citations

What to test first

  1. 01Run one criterion across all vendors and check every cell by hand.
  2. 02Confirm the system marks not established rather than guessing.

Related reading