Equidox vs. Ockem Proof: tool or outcome?
Equidox sells software your team uses to remediate PDFs in-house. Proof sells the finished, certified document. Which is right depends on whether you want to build a remediation function — or retire the backlog.
Equidox is respected software for in-house teams: an annual license, a learning curve, your staff’s hours on every document, and an on-prem option for confidential content. Ockem Proof inverts the model — automated remediation with independent re-verification, only judgment calls left to a human, flat 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
| Equidox | Ockem Proof | |
|---|---|---|
| What you buy | A software license — quote-only pricing, positioned as predictable licensing with unlimited remediation. | Certified documents, one flat published price each. |
| Who does the work | Your trained staff, document by document. | The machine — you make the judgment calls only, or Assured makes them for you. |
| Ramp-up | Training and a learning curve before document #1 ships. | First certified document the day you sign up. |
| True cost per document | License ÷ volume, plus staff hours on every document. | The sticker price, all-in. |
| Verification | Your staff validates the output against checkers and manual review. | Independent re-verification after every fix, and a pessimistic gate: no certificate while any check is unresolved. |
| Evidence artifact | The remediated file. | A certificate with per-criterion outcomes, named attestations, and immutable version history. |
| Confidential data | On-prem deployment available — a genuine strength. | Ockem-owned inference hardware; documents are never sent to a third-party AI API by default. |
| High-volume templated docs | Equidox AI: ML-based batch processing for repetitive templated documents. | Batch programs across folders; the AI lane drafts human-review work at volume. |
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 that fit their batch AI model.
Choose Ockem Proof if…
- You don’t want to hire, train, and retain remediation specialists — compare license + FTE hours against a flat per-document price.
- You have a deadline and no ramp time to spend on a learning curve.
- You need defensible evidence per document, 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. 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 processes documents on Ockem-owned inference hardware with self-hosted open models — a third-party AI API is reached only when every local backend is unavailable, and that fallback is off entirely when no external key is configured — with tenant isolation enforced in the database itself. 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.
Competitor details are taken from equidox.co public pages and third-party listings as of July 2026 and may change. If we’ve got something wrong, tell us and we’ll fix it.