---
title: "Clearly AI vs Claude & ChatGPT: build vs buy"
description: "Compare building security review automation with Claude or ChatGPT to buying Clearly AI, including evaluation, integrations, maintenance, and total cost."
canonical: https://clearly-ai.com/compare/claude-chatgpt
---

_Clearly AI vs. build-your-own AI_

# Build vs. buy for security review automation

A security engineer can already lean on a chat agent to produce a threat model quickly. Teams with a managed agents platform can go further and trigger LLM reviews on every new ticket or PR. We build on coding agents ourselves, so we know that generating a review is not the hard part.

What's hard is everything around it: A review system has to work across many services and teams, track findings, and stay current as applications and policies change. It also has to keep pace with an evolving threat landscape and adopt new AI models and techniques. This doc is about deciding whether to build your own review system or delegate to a service.

- [Contact Enterprise Sales](https://clearly-ai.com/demo)
- [Compare the total cost](https://clearly-ai.com/compare/claude-chatgpt#total-cost-of-ownership)

## More than a generated threat model

A prompt or coding agent can analyze a design and draft findings. To turn those findings into a repeatable security process, a tool also needs to gather the right context, check the analysis, and help engineers act on it. As usage grows, teams need consistent reviews and a way to see what they have reviewed and what remains uncovered.

| Requirement | Work to include in the comparison |
| --- | --- |
| Dependable analysis | Evaluate results against trusted reviews, trace findings to source evidence, and test for missed risks and unsupported claims. |
| Reviews in the SDLC | Connect source systems, deliver findings where engineers work, and support discussion and follow-through. |
| A shared review record | Keep outputs consistent, preserve review history, and track coverage across systems and teams. |
| Ongoing operation | Maintain integrations and access controls, investigate failures, and validate changes to the AI workflow. |

## What you get with Clearly AI

Clearly AI brings context gathering, structured analysis, and evidence-backed findings into a shared review platform. One engineer may have a great coding agent skill that they use to aid threat modeling on their local machine, but Clearly AI helps the team conduct consistently high quality reviews. Your team can adapt review templates and prompts to your company’s standards and integrate them with existing development processes.

You also have a product team that investigates feedback and improves the system when results fall short. That ongoing responsibility belongs in the evaluation alongside output quality, deployment requirements, and the integrations your team needs.

## AI changes quickly, and your tooling needs to change with it

Two years ago, our threat-modeling workflow relied heavily on a sequence of LLM calls and a shared document-search index to stay within token limits. As models gained larger context windows, we improved results by supplying more context directly. Today, our approach builds on coding agents with a file system, tools, and defined analysis tasks.

Each shift required changes to the workflow itself. An internal team can make those changes, but it needs time to evaluate new approaches, implement them, and confirm that quality holds. With Clearly AI, that continuing development is part of the product you buy.

## How we stay on the cutting edge

Our development team has decades of experience building AI systems at Amazon, Apple, Nuance Labs, Meta, Microsoft, Google, and other technology companies. We are also active in AI engineering communities, including through a close partnership with OpenAI. We won the Amazon Bedrock Builders Challenge for innovating on AWS Bedrock.

## When building makes sense

Building can be a good fit for a narrow set of tasks that support a small team of one to three people. Consider building when:

- The level of AI engineering is equivalent to making a skill (no complex prompt engineering or context engineering required).
- You do not expect heavy collaboration or the need to share generated artifacts across teams.
- You do not anticipate changes to your security workflow or requirements, such as new regulatory requirements or changes in the threat landscape.
- You have enough subject-matter expertise to evaluate accuracy without a robust evaluation system, or you are willing to build one.

Buying becomes more attractive when you need scalable review workflows, broader adoption, or high accuracy without a dedicated internal product team to support shared infrastructure. You can still customize your standards and review process with Clearly AI. The scope of that customization should be part of your evaluation.

## Compare the total cost of ownership across both options

| Responsibility | Build internally | Buy Clearly AI |
| --- | --- | --- |
| AI development | You build the workflow and test new models and harnesses. | Clearly AI incorporates the best tools in AI into the product to improve your reviews. |
| AI tuning | You own guardrails, hallucination controls, security expertise, and context. | Your organization can tune based on your security & privacy expertise. Clearly AI's security and AI experts handle the rest. |
| Quality maintenance | You maintain evaluations and investigate regressions. | Clearly AI maintains product evaluations and investigates reported issues. |
| Platform operation | You own hosting, maintenance, and connector upkeep. | Clearly AI maintains the platform and integrations. |
| Security decisions | You define standards, how those standards are applied, and accept risk. If the tool is incorrect, you must modify it. | You define standards, how those standards are applied, and accept risk. If the tool is incorrect, Clearly AI owns improvement. |
| Securing the tool itself | You own protecting sensitive data in the tool with access controls, isolation, and auditability. | Clearly AI maintains tool security, access controls, isolation, and auditability. |
| Token spend | Variable usage costs, which can be hard to predict. | Budget against an agreed contract price. |
| Opportunity cost | Engineers build the review tool instead of the product customers pay for. | Engineers stay focused on your product and you stay focused on your organization’s security and privacy. |

## Test the difference on your data

Run Clearly AI and your existing AI approach on the same representative inputs. Include a system your team has already reviewed, a case with incomplete documentation, and a change to an existing application. Have your security team assess both outputs against criteria agreed on in advance.

Ask:

- Which material risks did each approach identify or miss?
- Are findings supported by the supplied evidence, and how much time does verification take?
- How much correction is needed before engineers can act on the results?
- Do repeated runs produce consistent results?
- How easy is it to adapt each approach to changing regulations or new threat intelligence?

The purchase should earn its place through useful findings, less review effort, and a process your team can sustain.

- [Contact Enterprise Sales](https://clearly-ai.com/demo)

## Learn more

- [Secure everything that ships](https://clearly-ai.com)
- [We built the tool we wished we had](https://clearly-ai.com/about-us)
- [One platform. From intake to remediation.](https://clearly-ai.com/platform)
- [Know everything that needs a review. Skip the 300-question form.](https://clearly-ai.com/platform/security-intake)
- [Ask only what matters. Get it right the first time.](https://clearly-ai.com/platform/conversational-intake)
- [Every finding, tracked to a decision](https://clearly-ai.com/platform/resolve/risk-registry)
- [Show leadership and auditors exactly what security reviewed](https://clearly-ai.com/platform/resolve/reporting)
- [Security reviews you can stand behind, every time](https://clearly-ai.com/platform/quality)
- [Threat models built from the tools you already use](https://clearly-ai.com/integrations)
- [Threat models that know about today's attacks](https://clearly-ai.com/platform/threat-intelligence)
- [Automate every step around the review](https://clearly-ai.com/platform/workflows)
- [Threat models your teams can work on together](https://clearly-ai.com/platform/collaboration)
- [Understand the system before the review starts](https://clearly-ai.com/platform/enterprise-context-graph)
- [Trust, security, and deployment](https://clearly-ai.com/platform/trust-security-and-deployment)
- [Every plan reviewed. Every risky change threat modeled.](https://clearly-ai.com/platform/ide-and-mcp)
- [Verify what actually shipped](https://clearly-ai.com/platform/control-and-remediation-verification)
- [A current threat model for everything that ships](https://clearly-ai.com/solutions/continuous-threat-modeling)
- [Prove every product that ships meets your security bar](https://clearly-ai.com/solutions/product-security-assurance)
- [Privacy reviews your team can stake decisions on](https://clearly-ai.com/solutions/privacy)
- [Every vendor reviewed against your standards](https://clearly-ai.com/solutions/third-party-risk)
- [Review every design before it's built](https://clearly-ai.com/solutions/design-and-architecture-reviews)
- [Secure the AI you build, buy, and code with](https://clearly-ai.com/solutions/ai-agentic-security)
- [Every regulation you answer to. One review process.](https://clearly-ai.com/solutions/compliance)
- [Every product ready for the Cyber Resilience Act without growing your team](https://clearly-ai.com/solutions/compliance/cyber-resilience-act)
- [Build vs. buy for security review automation](https://clearly-ai.com/compare/claude-chatgpt)
- [The ThreatModeler alternative built from your own docs, code, and policies](https://clearly-ai.com/compare/threatmodeler)
- [The Clover Security alternative with findings your team can trust](https://clearly-ai.com/compare/clover)
- [The Prime Security alternative for every review your team runs](https://clearly-ai.com/compare/prime)
- [Security and Privacy](https://clearly-ai.com/trust/security-privacy)
- [Clearly AI Privacy Policy](https://clearly-ai.com/trust/privacy-policy)
- [Clearly AI Subprocessors](https://clearly-ai.com/trust/subprocessors)
- [AI Risk Reviews](https://clearly-ai.com/use-cases/ai-risk-reviews)
- [Automate Triage](https://clearly-ai.com/use-cases/automate-triage)
- [Privacy Impact Assessments](https://clearly-ai.com/use-cases/privacy-impact)
- [Vendor Risk Assessments](https://clearly-ai.com/use-cases/vendor-risk)
- [Threat Modeling](https://clearly-ai.com/use-cases/threat-modeling)
- [Contact](https://clearly-ai.com/contact)
- [Contact Enterprise Sales](https://clearly-ai.com/demo)
- [Latest from the Clearly AI blog](https://clearly-ai.com/blog)
- [In the news](https://clearly-ai.com/press)
- [How Ericsson Enterprise Wireless Solutions cut review times by up to 80%](https://clearly-ai.com/customer-stories/ericsson)
- [How HID Global reviews 300+ products for the Radio Equipment Directive with the team it already has](https://clearly-ai.com/customer-stories/hid-global)
- [How Rivian scaled privacy and AI governance reviews 4x without adding headcount](https://clearly-ai.com/customer-stories/rivian)
- [Part 2! Okay, privacy is different from security. Now what?](https://clearly-ai.com/blog/part-2-okay-privacy-is-different-from-security-now-what)
- [How AI is rewiring our product engineering workflow](https://clearly-ai.com/blog/how-ai-is-rewiring-our-product-engineering-workflow)
- [Good Data Scientists and Bad Outcomes, Part 1: What's the difference between security and privacy work?](https://clearly-ai.com/blog/good-data-scientists-and-bad-outcomes-what-s-the-difference-between-security-and-privacy-work)
- [Why I Joined Clearly AI](https://clearly-ai.com/blog/why-vp-marketing-joined-clearly-ai)
- [Skip the Marketing: Clearly AI for Technical People](https://clearly-ai.com/blog/clearly-ai-technical-explanation)
- [Clearly AI Raises $8.4M Seed Round to Scale Product Security](https://clearly-ai.com/blog/seed-round)
- [Why We Started Clearly AI](https://clearly-ai.com/blog/why-we-started-clearly-ai)
- [Applying AI to Threat Modeling - Where AI Thrives, Survives, and Dies](https://clearly-ai.com/blog/applying-ai-to-threat-modeling)
- [Why We Build in Public](https://clearly-ai.com/blog/why-we-build-in-public)
- [Solving the Threat Modeling Bottleneck with AI Workflows](https://clearly-ai.com/blog/solving-the-threat-modeling-bottleneck-with-ai-workflows)
- [Clearly AI Named Finalist in the 2025 Okta Startup Challenge](https://clearly-ai.com/blog/clearly-ai-named-finalist-in-the-2025-okta-startup-challenge)
- [Security, SOC 2, & Startups](https://clearly-ai.com/blog/security-soc-2-startups)
- [Building Reliable AI Systems for Security and Privacy Reviews](https://clearly-ai.com/blog/building-reliable-ai-systems-for-security-and-privacy-reviews)
- [How to Automate Security and Privacy Reviews with Clearly AI](https://clearly-ai.com/blog/how-to-automate-security-and-privacy-reviews-with-clearly-ai)
- [One Year of Clearly AI](https://clearly-ai.com/blog/one-year-of-clearly-ai)
- [Navigating EU RED Compliance: Meeting the August 2025 Deadline](https://clearly-ai.com/blog/navigating-eu-red-compliance-meeting-the-august-2025-deadline)
- [The AI Engineer Cheat Sheet](https://clearly-ai.com/blog/the-ai-engineer-cheat-sheet)
- [Intelligent Vendor Risk Assessments](https://clearly-ai.com/blog/intelligent-vendor-risk-assessments)
- [Clearly AI wins the AWS Bedrock Builder's Challenge](https://clearly-ai.com/blog/clearly-ai-wins-the-aws-bedrock-builder-s-challenge)
- [Reviews, reviews, reviews!](https://clearly-ai.com/blog/reviews-reviews-reviews)
- [Halfway through YC](https://clearly-ai.com/blog/halfway-through-yc)
- [llms.txt — site overview for LLMs](https://clearly-ai.com/llms.txt)
- [llms-full.txt — full site content for LLMs](https://clearly-ai.com/llms-full.txt)
- [sitemap.xml — all public routes](https://clearly-ai.com/sitemap.xml)
- [Documentation](https://docs.clearly-ai.com/docs)

[Canonical page](https://clearly-ai.com/compare/claude-chatgpt)