Comparison · App and agent builders
Curiosity and Appian
Orchestrating a process, or grounding a decision
Curiosity builds tools on your connected records; Appian automates processes.
Your data · your environment
Who each tool is for
Different problems, honestly stated
Curiosity
For industrial and regulated teams whose knowledge sits in engineering systems and structured records, where the answer depends on how those records connect, and where the deployment has to run on their own infrastructure.
Appian
A process automation platform with low code development, case management and AI agents, used heavily in financial services and the public sector for regulated workflows. Its strength is orchestrating the steps of a process.
How Curiosity compares
Where the boundary falls
Appian runs the steps of a regulated process well. Studio supplies what a step needs to be decided correctly: the records behind it, connected across systems and filtered by who is asking.
Grounded, not guessed
A tool Studio builds runs on the graph, so every figure it shows traces back to a record in a source system.
Your permissions, inherited
A generated tool cannot show a user anything the source system would not already show them, down to the individual record.
From prompt to production
The tool ships to real users with an audit trail, not as a prototype someone has to rebuild before it goes live.
Runs on your infrastructure
On premises or in your private cloud, with the language model you choose.
Side by side
Feature comparison
The same five questions, answered for both.
Deployment
Cloud or self-hosted, ready to use
Vendor cloud or self-managed
Data model
Managed context layer and knowledge graph
Process and case data
Industrial fit
Built for industrial and enterprise teams
Financial services, public sector
Data reach
70+ systems connected, and yours through a connector you write
Integrations per process
Residency
EU hosted, or entirely your own infrastructure
Vendor regions
Customization
What your team can change
Your own code, interface, data model and configuration. Appian as its own documentation described it in October 2026. Where it says Not available, the vendor documents no such capability.
Your own code
C# endpoints, AI tools and tasks, compiled in Studio
Java plugins, expression rules, runs on Appian
Your own interface
Your own front end in C#, deployed from git
SAIL interfaces, sites and portals
Data model
Typed node and edge schemas you define
Record types with relationships, data fabric
Configuration as code
Every change committed to git, pushed to your remote
Deployment REST API for external CI/CD pipelines
APIs and SDKs
REST API, C# and Python library, connector SDK
REST APIs, Web APIs, MCP Server, Java SDK
AI integration
What AI can build and reach
Whether AI can build on it, who reviews the result, and which models it runs. Appian as its own documentation described it in October 2026.
AI that builds
Sudo drafts endpoints, tools, schemas and screens
Composer and dev agent build objects from prompts
Review before it applies
Every change a diff a person approves, in a sandbox
Plan approval first, object versions to compare, roll back
Model choice
Any major provider, or an OpenAI compatible endpoint
Appian provider, Azure OpenAI, Google Cloud, preferred providers
Models on your servers
Open weights on your servers, or air gapped
Your own LLM on self managed Kubernetes, offline possible
Assistant permissions
Built in tools search as the user, per record
Agents query with the user's record level security
Agent protocols
MCP server and an OpenAI compatible API
MCP server and MCP client for agents
At Airbus, we developed the next generation of customer support AI assistance tools with Curiosity, enhancing our technical support’s ability to access and navigate vast data from multiple sources, including millions of documents.
Services Innovation Team
Airline Services at Airbus
App and agent builders
Other comparisons in this group
Microsoft Copilot Studio and Power Apps
Curiosity builds tools on your whole industrial estate; Copilot Studio and Power Apps build agents and apps inside Microsoft 365.
CompareMicrosoft Foundry
Curiosity builds tools on your connected records; Microsoft Foundry is Azure’s workbench for building agents.
CompareIBM watsonx
Curiosity builds tools on a context graph; watsonx gives you IBM’s parts to search documents and orchestrate agents.
CompareYour data. Your infrastructure.