Armature vs Otterly
Otterly is the cheapest way to see what AI answers say about you. Armature measures whether coding agents install your product.
These two are not really alternatives to each other. One costs about thirty dollars a month and one is a service. Putting them side by side is still useful, because a lot of teams start with the first and then have to decide what comes next.
The short answer
Otterly is the cheapest credible way to see what AI answers say about you, from around $29 per month. Armature measures whether a coding agent installs your product, by running Claude Code, Codex and Cursor on real tasks inside realistic repositories.
What Otterly is good for
Learning what the data looks like.
That sounds like faint praise and it is not. Most teams have never seen a chart of their brand's presence in AI answers, and opinions about this whole area are usually formed without looking. Thirty dollars and an afternoon replaces a lot of speculation.
- Cheap enough to buy without a business case.
- Fast to set up.
- Covers the major assistants.
- Shows which links were cited, which is directly actionable.
If somebody in the company is arguing about whether AI visibility matters, buy this and end the argument with data.
Where it runs out
It is a monitoring tool at the entry tier. Small prompt sets, no action layer, and no depth for a technical product. That is what thirty dollars buys, and it is fair value.
The larger gap is the same one the whole category shares: it measures a person reading an answer.
Side by side
| Otterly | Armature | |
|---|---|---|
| Surface | Chat assistants answering people | Coding agents installing software |
| The test | Tracked prompts sent to chat models | A real agent in a real repository on a real task |
| Output | Brand presence, cited links | Install share, and the reason for every loss |
| Includes a codebase | No | Yes |
| Ends in running code | No | Yes |
| Delivery | Self-serve dashboard | Service with a growth engineer, plus self-serve analytics and evals |
| Price | From about $29 per month | From $5,000 per month |
| Right when | You have never looked at this data | Agents are installing products in your category |
The order that makes sense
1. Buy Otterly, or Peec if you want more depth. Look at the data. Form an opinion from evidence rather than from articles.
2. Then run 300 coding agent sessions yourself. This is the step almost nobody takes and it is the one that decides everything else.
Three repositories that look like your users' projects, with real lock files. Ten requests written the way your users describe the problem, not the way you name the category. Five runs each with Claude Code and Codex. That is 300 sessions, a weekend, and a few hundred dollars in tokens.
Record what got installed. Then read the sessions you lost.
3. Decide from what you find. If the losses are in the chat window, upgrade the monitoring tool. If agents are installing your competitors while no human compares anything, no monitoring tool reaches that decision and you need a different measurement.
Why step two matters more than the tool choice
Because the two surfaces come apart, and the gap is large.
The same hosted database request produced one winner in 111 of 111 JavaScript sessions and 48 of 132 TypeScript sessions. A written instruction naming a preferred product lost 2 times out of 3 once a rival library was installed. Claude Code ran a web search in 1.6% of decision runs, so for those sessions no citation could have reached it.
A brand presence chart cannot show any of that. It is not a flaw in Otterly. It is a property of what a chat prompt contains.
Common questions
What is Otterly?
An entry-level AI search monitoring tool, from around $29 per month. It tracks whether your brand appears in AI answers across the major assistants and which links are cited. It is the cheapest credible way to start.
Is Otterly enough for a developer tool company?
It is enough to learn what the data looks like, which is a real thing to do first. It is not enough to run a programme on, and it does not measure coding agents installing software.
How does Armature compare?
It measures a different surface: real coding agents on real tasks inside realistic repositories, recording which product each installs. It is a service from $5,000 per month, not a monitoring subscription.
Which should I buy first?
Otterly, if you have never looked at this data. Thirty dollars and an afternoon will teach you more than reading about it. Then run your own coding agent test before spending anything larger.
Where this comes from
Armature ran 5,292 judged sessions with Claude Code, Codex and Cursor inside 51 realistic codebases, and published every run. The numbers on this page come from that work.