Equidox vs. Ockem Proof: tool or outcome?
Equidox sells software your team uses to remediate PDFs in-house, plus fully automated processing for templated documents. Proof sells the finished, certified document. Which is right depends on whether you want to build a remediation function — or retire the backlog.
The short version
Equidox is respected software for in-house teams: an annual concurrent-user license with training included, your staff’s time on every document, and an on-prem option for confidential content. It also sells done-for-you remediation services, and Equidox AI for high-volume templated documents. Ockem Proof inverts the model — automated remediation with automatic re-verification of every fix, only judgment calls left to a person, published per-document pricing, certificate included. The real comparison isn’t a feature list; it’s total cost of ownership and time to your first certified document.
Side by side
Compared as of . Vendors change their offers; our sources are listed at the end of this page.
| Equidox | Ockem Proof | |
|---|---|---|
| What you buy | An annual, concurrent-user software license, quote-only, positioned as “predictable licensing with unlimited remediation.” Remediation services are quoted separately, with a minimum order. | Certified documents at a published price per document. |
| Who does the work | Your trained staff, document by document — or Equidox’s own team through its quoted services. | The machine — you make the judgment calls only, or Assured makes them for you, quoted per document. |
| Ramp-up | Instructor-led training included; Equidox says most users learn the basics in less than an hour. Then staff time on every document. | Start the day you sign up; most documents are usually done within the hour. |
| True cost per document | License ÷ volume, plus staff hours on every document. | The sticker price, plus your team’s time on the judgment calls; our pricing calculator budgets 15 minutes a document. |
| Verification | Your staff checks the output: an in-app HTML Preview and export warnings, plus screen-reader review, which Equidox recommends. | Automatic re-verification by the rule engine after every fix, and a strict gate: no certificate while any check is unresolved. |
| Evidence artifact | The remediated file. Services come with a fix-it-free guarantee. | A certificate with per-criterion outcomes and the attester of record, and a version history in which every saved version is kept by default and can’t be altered. |
| Confidential data | On-prem deployment for the software, and Equidox AI can be deployed on-prem too — a genuine strength. | Inference runs on hardware Ockem operates, with self-hosted open models; no customer document content goes to a third-party model. |
| High-volume templated docs | Equidox AI: custom-trained models that tag templated documents such as statements with no human intervention — through a customer interface, an API or a managed service. | Runs across a folder or your whole library; AI drafts alt text and contrast fixes for a person to review. |
Choose Equidox if…
- You’re committed to a permanent in-house remediation team and want them well tooled.
- You have a hard on-prem mandate — the software itself may not leave your network.
- You process very high volumes of near-identical templated documents, and custom model training for them is worth it to you.
Choose Ockem Proof if…
- You don’t want to hire, train, and retain remediation staff — compare license + FTE hours against a published per-document price.
- You have a deadline and no staff time to spend learning and running a tool.
- You need a per-document record of what was checked and who decided, not just remediated files.
- Your volume is bursty — a backlog now, a trickle later — where per-document beats an annual license.
Fair questions
Equidox is “unlimited” — isn’t that cheaper at volume?
An unlimited license is not unlimited throughput — throughput is your staff, and how many of them can work at once is set by your concurrent seats. Every document still costs the hours a trained person spends in the tool, so the real per-document cost is license ÷ volume plus loaded labor. If you already employ a remediation team with spare capacity, that math can favor Equidox. If you’d be hiring or reassigning people to feed the license, it usually doesn’t.
We have an on-prem requirement. Doesn’t that decide it?
If your mandate is that software may not leave your network at all, Equidox’s on-prem option genuinely fits and we’ll say so. But many “on-prem” requirements are really data-control requirements. Proof runs inference on hardware Ockem operates, with self-hosted open models — no customer document content goes to a third-party model — and tenant isolation is enforced by row-level security in the database. Bring us the actual language of your security review; it’s often satisfiable.
Our content creators make the PDFs — shouldn’t they fix them too?
Born-accessible authoring upstream is the right long-term goal, and a creation-side tool can help there. But the backlog you’re facing now wasn’t born accessible, and training every content creator to remediate is the slowest path through it. A common split: use Proof to retire the existing corpus with certificates, and fix your authoring templates so tomorrow’s documents start cleaner.
Comparison written by Ockem. Competitor details are taken from equidox.co public pages (home, FAQ, remediation services, Equidox AI and the PDF remediation software buyer’s guide) as of October 2026 and may change. If we’ve got something wrong, tell us and we’ll fix it.
See the difference on one of your own PDFs.
Free, no account. You get the remediated file and a verification record; certify it for $59 when you’re ready.