Comparison · App and agent builders
Curiosity and Microsoft Foundry
A workbench, or a layer to build on
Curiosity builds tools on your connected records; Microsoft Foundry is Azure’s workbench for building agents.
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.
Microsoft Foundry
Microsoft’s platform on Azure, formerly Azure AI Foundry, for developers to build, evaluate and run AI agents and applications, with a large model catalog, Foundry Agent Service and Azure AI Search. It suits engineering teams building on Azure.
How Curiosity compares
Where the boundary falls
Foundry gives a development team the models and services to assemble an agent. Studio starts with the part they would assemble: records already connected, typed and filtered by permission, so a tool is grounded before anyone writes the retrieval.
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
Azure
Data model
Managed context layer and knowledge graph
Agents on models and Azure services
Industrial fit
Built for industrial and enterprise teams
Developers on Azure
Data reach
70+ systems connected, and yours through a connector you write
Azure services and connectors
Residency
EU hosted, or entirely your own infrastructure
Azure regions
Customization
What your team can change
Your own code, interface, data model and configuration. Microsoft Foundry 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
Hosted agents in Python or C# containers
Your own interface
Your own front end in C#, deployed from git
No app builder, publish agents to Teams, Copilot
Data model
Typed node and edge schemas you define
Not available
Configuration as code
Every change committed to git, pushed to your remote
azd projects in azure.yaml, immutable agent versions
APIs and SDKs
REST API, C# and Python library, connector SDK
REST API, Python, C#, JavaScript, Java SDKs
AI integration
What AI can build and reach
Whether AI can build on it, who reviews the result, and which models it runs. Microsoft Foundry as its own documentation described it in October 2026.
AI that builds
Sudo drafts endpoints, tools, schemas and screens
Foundry Skill lets coding agents scaffold, deploy agents
Review before it applies
Every change a diff a person approves, in a sandbox
Coding agent plans, you approve changes and commands
Model choice
Any major provider, or an OpenAI compatible endpoint
10,000+ catalog models: OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, others
Models on your servers
Open weights on your servers, or air gapped
Foundry Local on Azure Local, disconnected, preview
Assistant permissions
Built in tools search as the user, per record
Per user OAuth passthrough or OBO, or agent identity
Agent protocols
MCP server and an OpenAI compatible API
MCP tools and server, A2A, OpenAI compatible Responses
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.
CompareIBM watsonx
Curiosity builds tools on a context graph; watsonx gives you IBM’s parts to search documents and orchestrate agents.
CompareRetool
Curiosity builds tools on a context graph; Retool builds interfaces on the databases and APIs you point it at.
CompareYour data. Your infrastructure.