Compare options side by side, with sources

You have three tabs open: two vendor pricing pages and a "best tools for small teams" roundup that, you notice on a second read, is published by one of the vendors. Your manager wants a recommendation by Friday, with reasons they can check. This page shows how to get a comparison table where every cell links to the page it came from, how to read an answer of "Depends on your needs", and how to keep a vendor's claims about itself apart from what independent sources say.

Why comparison pages are hard to trust

A lot of what ranks for "X vs Y" is written by X or Y. That's allowed. Pretending otherwise is not: in August 2024 the FTC announced a final rule banning fake reviews, including AI-generated ones, and barring a business from presenting a website it controls as an independent source of reviews for a category that includes its own products.

Buyers are also handing the first pass to chatbots. In a Gartner survey of 645 B2B buyers, 45% said they used generative AI, mainly to gather information on vendors and products, and 69% said they prefer to validate AI-generated insights with a sales rep. That second number is the catch. The person you ask to confirm the chatbot's summary of a product is the person selling it.

A comparison you can defend needs something in between: a table where each fact points to its source, so you can see which cells rest on a vendor's own page and which rest on someone with no stake in the sale.

How a CiteJury comparison works

Choose Compare options, name the options and say what matters: team size, budget, the must-haves and the deal-breakers. CiteJury searches several independent search indexes for evidence on each option, favoring primary sources such as official pricing and documentation pages. It looks for evidence against each option as well as for it. It reads web pages and PDFs, and skips social media and video pages because they have no quotable text.

The best passages are locked into one sealed evidence pack. Claude, ChatGPT and Grok each build the comparison from that same pack, separately, and none of them can search the web at that stage. Every quote they cite is checked word for word against its source, and a final review settles the table. The AIs are told to treat a vendor's own marketing as weaker evidence than independent reviews or tests, and the final review flags findings that lean on it.

You get a side-by-side table where every cell links to a source, a note on what the evidence favors, and "best for" notes on who each option suits. The outcome is one of three: Clear winner, Depends on your needs, or Not enough evidence. Where the sources say nothing about a criterion, the cell is left empty rather than filled from an AI's memory.

Here is a real comparison we ran, as it fills in when it finishes.

“Notion vs Obsidian for a 5-person team”

Depends on your needs

Criterion	Notion	Obsidian
Collaboration for 5 people	An all-in-one workspace with real-time collaboration·	No live co-editing, called a non-starter for teams·
Cost for the team	$10 per member per month on paid plans·	Free app. Sync is $4 per user per month, billed yearly·
Data ownership	Cloud blocks and databases·	Local Markdown files you fully control·

The evidence favours Notion on collaboration, Obsidian on cost and ownership. No single winner for every team.

A real one: Notion or Obsidian for five people

The request was short: "Notion vs Obsidian for a 5-person team." It ran on Standard and took under five minutes. The outcome was Depends on your needs, and the table shows why.

On collaboration, the sources describe Notion as an all-in-one workspace with real-time collaboration. For Obsidian, the cell records no live co-editing, called a non-starter for teams. Those are a source's words, not ours, and the link beside the cell lets you judge whether that reviewer's team works like yours.

On cost, the table gives Notion at $10 per member per month on paid plans, and Obsidian as a free app with Sync at $4 per user per month, billed yearly. At those prices, five Notion seats come to $50 a month. If all five people also use Obsidian Sync, that's $20 a month, paid as one yearly bill. On data ownership, Notion keeps your work as cloud blocks and databases, while Obsidian stores local Markdown files you fully control.

The evidence favors Notion on collaboration and Obsidian on cost and ownership, with no single winner for every team. That isn't a dodge. It tells you which question to settle inside your team before you pick: do five people need to edit the same page at the same time? If they do, the table points one way. If owning plain files and a smaller bill matter more, it points the other.

For the recommendation memo, write it the way the evidence supports it: "Notion if we need live co-editing, Obsidian if cost and owning our files matter more." Then paste the share link so your manager can open the source behind each cell.

Run your own comparison

1. Name the options exactly. Include the plan or edition, such as "Notion Plus" or "Obsidian with Sync", so prices and limits line up.
2. Say who it's for and what matters, in order. "For a 5-person team" shaped the whole Notion and Obsidian table. Add your budget, must-have features and deal-breakers.
3. Pick a tier. Quick uses one AI with no final review, about 2 credits, and suits a first look. Standard uses Claude, ChatGPT and Grok plus a final review, about 8 credits ($0.80), and suits a decision you'll have to defend. Deep searches wider, with the AIs running their own web searches while sources are gathered, about 32 credits. Use it for niche tools with little coverage.
4. Read the table cell by cell. Open the source behind any cell that decides the choice for you.
5. Look at where the AIs disagreed. The result shows what each one said, and that's often where the real trade-off sits.
6. Ask a follow-up if something's missing. Follow-ups answer only from the same sources and cost about 1 to 2 credits. For a new criterion the sources don't cover, run a new comparison.
7. Share or export. Send the share link, or download the sources as Excel or CSV to attach to your recommendation.

A buyer's checklist for the table

• Let a vendor speak for its own price, not its rival's. A vendor's pricing page is the primary source for what it charges. Its comparison page is the weakest source for what the competitor lacks.
• Read the billing terms in each cell. "Per member", "per user" and "billed yearly" change the real cost more than the headline number does.
• Compare like with like. A free tier against a paid tier isn't a comparison. Name the plans in your request.
• Date the prices. Pricing pages change. The check keeps the sources it used, so you can show what a page said on the day you ran it.
• Treat empty cells as questions for the sales call. If no source covers data export or single sign-on, ask the vendor in writing and keep the answer.
• Ask for the document behind a security badge. A web page that says "certified" is a claim. The audit report or certificate is the evidence.

What it won't do

It won't pick a winner the evidence doesn't support. If the sources split along your needs, you'll get Depends on your needs, and if they're thin, Not enough evidence.

It can't read pages behind logins or paywalls, which rules out most paid analyst reports and any pricing hidden behind "contact sales". Some sites block automated access too. Each result lists the pages it couldn't open, so you know where to look yourself.

It doesn't test the software. It checks text, not screenshots, product videos or demo recordings, so claims about speed or ease of use are only as good as the reviews that describe them. A price change from last week may not have any coverage yet. And it isn't legal or financial advice: contract terms, data processing agreements and liability caps still need a person who reads contracts.

A good comparison won't make the decision for you. It lays out the trade-off with a source behind each fact, so the conversation moves from "which one do you like" to "which of these matters more to us". If you're weighing suppliers rather than software, the same approach works for vetting a supplier before you sign. For a wider view of a topic, try a sourced research brief, and if you're building something to compete with these options, start by testing the product idea against real evidence.

Questions people ask