Documenta11y vs. Ockem Proof: an honest comparison
Both get your PDFs to WCAG 2.1 AA. The differences are who does the work, how you’re charged, how long it takes — and what you’re holding when it’s done.
Documenta11y (a division of Apex CoVantage) is a full-service manual remediation vendor: you upload, their experts assess and quote, you pay, their team remediates. Ockem Proof is an automated remediation platform: the machine does the mechanical work and re-verifies every fix, you make the judgment calls — or opt into Assured and our experts make them — and every document leaves with a criterion-by-criterion certificate and named attestations.
Side by side
| Documenta11y | Ockem Proof | |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing | “Starting at $4 per page” — the actual price is quoted per document after an expert review. | One flat price per document, published. You see the total before you commit. |
| Time to a price | Upload → expert assessment → personalized quote. | Instant — the free assessment prices your whole library up front. |
| Turnaround | A few hours for simple PDFs to several days for complex ones, by their own description. | Hours — an automated pipeline, with decision queues you work at your own pace. |
| Who does the work | Their remediation team (100+ experts, global delivery model). | The machine, plus your judgment calls — or Assured, where experts finish every human lane. |
| Deliverable | A remediated PDF, “expert verified.” | A remediated PDF plus a certificate: per-criterion outcomes, named attestations, immutable version history. |
| Data handling | Documents are processed by vendor staff. | Processed on Ockem-owned hardware — never sent to a third-party AI API by default. |
| Ongoing compliance | Transactional, per project. | Library monitoring and managed-compliance tiers for corpora that keep growing. |
Choose Documenta11y if…
- You want zero involvement of any kind — including judgment calls — and the certificate isn’t worth a premium to you.
- You have heavily scanned, multilingual, or EPUB/InDesign source work that goes beyond PDF remediation.
- You’re already an Apex CoVantage customer with negotiated rates.
Choose Ockem Proof if…
- You need to budget the whole corpus today — flat per-document pricing, no quote cycle.
- Deadline pressure means days-per-document doesn’t scale across hundreds of files.
- You need to prove compliance later: a certificate and attestation trail, not just a returned file.
- Your documents can’t leave a controlled environment — healthcare, government, legal.
Fair questions
Is Documenta11y cheaper?
Sometimes, for very short simple documents — if they quote at their advertised floor. At $4 per page, a 20-page document is $80 or more, and complex documents quote higher after expert review. Ockem Proof is one flat price per document regardless of page count, known before you upload. For a typical library, the difference isn’t just the rate — it’s that you can compute your total cost today.
Doesn’t full service mean less work for me?
Less than you’d think. With a manual vendor you still wait for a quote, answer their questions about your content, and check their output — and when it’s done, you’re the only name attached to the compliance claim. Proof’s machine does the remediation and re-verification; what’s left for you is a short queue of judgment calls — the decisions that require knowing your own content — each recorded in the attestation trail behind your certificate. If you’d rather not touch even that, Assured completes every human lane for you, per document.
Can Proof handle everything their experts handle?
Not everything, and we’d rather say so here: exotic source formats and re-authoring-grade problems can exceed what automation plus a decision queue should decide. Proof flags those documents as “needs re-authoring” instead of pretending, and the Assured lane exists for work that genuinely needs expert hands — with the same certificate at the end.
Competitor details are taken from documenta11y.com public pages and published FAQ as of July 2026 and may change. If we’ve got something wrong, tell us and we’ll fix it.