Highlighter vs Others
How we compare with other approaches
Consultancy with a “Build Your Own” Stack approach
Several consultancies (e.g., Deloitte, Accenture) typically stand up an ad-hoc MLOps tool-chain (eg., CVAT for labelling, Kubeflow for training) and staff the project with rotating consultants. Given that model, here’s how Highlighterʼs off-the-shelf, end-to-end platform compares in terms of total delivery time, cost predictability, and long-term ownership for your organisation:
| What Matters | Highlighter | Typical Big-Four Open-Source Stack |
|---|---|---|
| Speed | Ready to label data in Week 2, first model training Week 5- all workflows already integrated. | 3 + months to wire CVAT, Kubeflow, MLflow, Grafana, etc. before the first model can run. |
| Cost Certainty | Fixed-price milestones. No day-rate overruns or surprise integration effort. | Day-rate billing and frequent change-requests as new glue code is discovered. |
| Ownership & Control | The entire platform (database, file store, pipelines) can live on your servers | Also on your servers, but built from 6-10 separate tools; documentation and config live in consultantsʼ private repos unless explicitly handed over. |
| Ease of Upkeep | One supported product designed for perception work; your team is trained to operate it. | A collection of open-source Components, each with its own upgrade cycle, and requiring ongoing specialist maintenance. |
Highlighter arrives as a cohesive, production-ready platform in weeks, with predictable cost and a clear support path. A consultancy-built stack may require months of integration and leave your organisation responsible for coordinating and maintaining multiple independent tools.
Black-Box Edge Appliance Vendors
Some suppliers deliver proprietary “no model training required” solutions. In contrast, Highlighter offers a transparent, retrainable approach that enables better accuracy assurance and control over your data.
| What Matters | Highlighter | Black-Box Appliance Vendors |
|---|---|---|
| Accuracy Assurance | Precision/recall reported on every model update. Council can see why the model has made decisions. | “Aggregate Accuracyˮ only-no transparency into false positives/negatives or edge cases. |
| Model Adaptability | Your staff can re-label and retrain directly to handle new use cases and situations. | Waiting for the vendor to push firmware updates-on their schedule, not yours. |
| Data Sovereignty | All your imagery, annotated data, and logs stay entirely in your control. Your organisation owns the model and the data. | Often requires sending data to the vendor cloud or support team for diagnostics or tuning. |
| Operational Control | Full access to agent code, annotations, model weights. Easily audit, explain, and retrain. | No access to inner workings-opaque inference, limited to vendor-defined capabilities. |
| Long-Term Flexibility | Built for evolution-your organisation can later add other use cases as required. | Fixed capabilities. Any changes require vendor development or product upgrades. |
While black-box appliances can be convenient, they often limit transparency and flexibility. Highlighter provides full ownership and adaptability, helping you respond quickly to changing needs.
University / Research-Lab Consortia / Data Scientist Freelancer
| What Matters | Highlighter | University / Academic Prototypes |
|---|---|---|
| Production Readiness | Purpose-built for operational use: monitoring, logging, retraining, rollback all included. | Often ends at proof-of-concept; may require major rework to run reliably day-to-day. |
| Reliability | Proven enterprise architecture used in real-world deployments with uptime and performance guarantees. | Limited testing beyond the demo environment; no formal performance guarantees. |
| Support | Dedicated help-desk, commercial SLAs, patches, updates, and continuity of personnel. | “Best effortˮ from rotating research staff or students, often with limited availability. |
| Maintainability | Full documentation, version control, and structured model lifecycle management. | Code may be undocumented, unversioned, and tied to discontinued tools or dependencies. |
| Roadmap | Ongoing product development and features shaped by customer needs. | Academic priorities change; feature support may end after paper publication. |
In summary: Academic teams can produce innovative prototypes, but many organisations require solutions that operate reliably in day-to-day use, are supported over time, and integrate seamlessly into existing operations. Highlighter is designed to meet these needs, providing stability, dedicated support, and maintainability for long-term success. Developed by Silverpond, it offers enterprise-grade performance with robust tools and ongoing product development to ensure scalability and adaptability into the future.