RiskSonnar vs ComplyAdvantage
Screening-and-monitoring specialist with a strong proprietary watchlist and adverse-media dataset.
Side-by-side feature matrix
Sixteen dimensions, one row each. Where ComplyAdvantage has the stronger story we mark the row as their advantage; where we win we mark ours; where the products are equivalent we mark parity.
| Dimension | ComplyAdvantage | RiskSonnar |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing transparency | Volume-tiered pricing on enquiry; brackets not publicly listed. | Public pricing at /pricing — Starter / Pro / Enterprise with EUR amounts in plain view. |
| Deployment time | API-led, fast for screening integration; slower if expanding into TM + cases. | Sandbox spins up in minutes at /sandbox; production tenant onboarded in days, not quarters. |
| Audit verifiability | Per-screen result records with vendor-controlled audit log. | Hash-chained per-event receipts; manifest SHA-256 verifiable at /v1/compliance/evidence-pack. |
| No-code scenarios | Transaction-monitoring rule library; less of a no-code authoring story than the workflow-led peers. | No-code scenario studio at /scenarios/new (csn_* IDs) with JSON export + version history. |
| Hash-chained receipts | Not part of the platform. | Every state-changing action emits a hash-linked receipt — tamper-evident by construction. |
| Sandbox availability | Trial API keys via sales; no public self-serve session. | Public synthetic-tenant sandbox at /sandbox, 60-minute sessions, no signup. |
| Public trust dashboard | Not offered. | Opt-in public trust dashboard at /trust/<slug> — integrity status visible to anyone. |
| Federated-learning support | Vendor-internal ML on aggregated screening signals; not customer-federated. | Federated-learning support on the roadmap (rev-54); cross-tenant typology sharing without raw data movement. |
| Perpetual KYC | Ongoing monitoring against the proprietary watchlist is a flagship use case — strong here. | Perpetual KYC included in Pro+: continuous re-screen on watchlist deltas and PEP/adverse-media changes. |
| LLM SAR drafting | Not the primary product surface; SAR drafting is downstream. | LLM SAR drafting in-product (MLRO signs) with the model output appended to the audit chain. |
| Crypto screening | Crypto-screening module available; partnership-augmented. | Crypto screening at /watch/crypto — chain-analytics signals fused with off-chain identity. |
| Open API | Public REST API; well-documented, widely integrated. | OpenAPI 3.1 spec public; cockpit and SDKs build against the same surface a customer integrates with. |
| Regulator-replay (byte-exact) | Not offered. | Regulator-replay endpoint reproduces any decision byte-exactly from the chained inputs. |
| Self-hosting option | SaaS only. | Self-hosted tenancy available on Enterprise (BYO KMS + PrivateLink). |
| Source available | Proprietary closed-source. | Source-available components published under the RiskSonnar evaluation license. |
| License model | Annual subscription with volume-based screening bands. | Annual subscription with public list-price brackets; no per-feature lock behind quotes. |
When to pick ComplyAdvantage
Pick ComplyAdvantage if your single biggest pain is screening match quality — false positives on noisy names, adverse-media coverage gaps, or PEP currency. Their data product is genuinely a differentiator and you can integrate it without reworking your detection stack.
When to pick RiskSonnar
Pick RiskSonnar if you want screening, transaction monitoring, link-analysis, cases, SAR, and DSAR on a single chained-evidence platform — and you would rather pay one transparent annual price than stitch three vendors together. We integrate with ComplyAdvantage-style data sources too; we just refuse to be only that.
“ComplyAdvantage screening was great. The problem was that everything downstream — alerts, cases, SARs — lived in three other tools. RiskSonnar collapsed that into one chain.”
Next steps
The fastest way to evaluate RiskSonnar against ComplyAdvantage is to spin up a synthetic-data sandbox and verify the claims yourself — audit chain, scenario authoring, screening, cases, SAR drafting. Sixty minutes, no signup.