Comparison · AI assistants
Curiosity and Vectara
Retrieval as a service, or a graph of records
Curiosity structures your records into a graph; Vectara serves retrieval over documents.
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.
Vectara
A platform for grounded answers and agents over documents, offered as a managed service and in private deployments, with a focus on grounded answers and hallucination detection. Developers build their applications on its API.
How Curiosity compares
Where the boundary falls
Vectara is a strong retrieval service for developers. Curiosity models the entities and relationships in structured records too, and ships the connectors, permissions and interface around them.
Built for the industrial estate
General assistants are tuned for cloud collaboration tools. Curiosity connects engineering systems, data lakes, network drives and proprietary sources.
Structured context, not a chat layer
The graph models entities and relationships, so answers reason over how records connect rather than over retrieved passages.
On your infrastructure
On premises or private cloud, with data residency you control and the model of your choice.
Side by side
Feature comparison
The same five questions, answered for both.
Deployment
Cloud or self-hosted, ready to use
Managed or private deployment
Data model
Managed context layer and knowledge graph
Retrieval over documents
Industrial fit
Built for industrial and enterprise teams
Developer platform, general
Data reach
70+ systems connected, and yours through a connector you write
Documents you send
Residency
EU hosted, or entirely your own infrastructure
Vendor cloud or yours
Customization
What your team can change
Your own code, interface, data model and configuration. Vectara 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
Python lambda tools in a gVisor sandbox
Your own interface
Your own front end in C#, deployed from git
Headless, embeddable chat widget, your own UI
Data model
Typed node and edge schemas you define
Corpora with typed metadata filter attributes
Configuration as code
Every change committed to git, pushed to your remote
Agents and tools defined as JSON via API
APIs and SDKs
REST API, C# and Python library, connector SDK
REST API, Python SDK
AI integration
What AI can build and reach
Whether AI can build on it, who reviews the result, and which models it runs. Vectara as its own documentation described it in October 2026.
AI that builds
Sudo drafts endpoints, tools, schemas and screens
io drafts agent configurations from a description
Review before it applies
Every change a diff a person approves, in a sandbox
io proposal waits for Accept in Console
Model choice
Any major provider, or an OpenAI compatible endpoint
Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini, or bring your own LLM
Models on your servers
Open weights on your servers, or air gapped
On premises and air gapped, with on premises models
Assistant permissions
Built in tools search as the user, per record
Document ACLs enforced per user at retrieval
Agent protocols
MCP server and an OpenAI compatible API
MCP client, A2A, OpenAI compatible chat completions
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
AI assistants
Other comparisons in this group
Glean
Curiosity connects complex industrial data; Glean focuses on cloud applications.
CompareMicrosoft 365 Copilot
Curiosity reaches the whole industrial estate; Microsoft 365 Copilot works across Microsoft’s own suite.
CompareGemini Enterprise
Curiosity connects complex industrial data; Gemini Enterprise is Google’s assistant for cloud work.
CompareYour data. Your infrastructure.