KoldOS vs Profound: software, or a team?
Profound and KoldOS sit on opposite sides of a category line. Profound is an AI visibility platform: a customer buys a plan, connects a brand, and gets tracking of how that brand appears across answer engines, with published plans starting at $99 per month. KoldOS is a generative engine optimisation agency in Australia: measurement is the first deliverable rather than the product, and the engagement continues into the schema, rendering, crawl access and content work that the measurement points at. Both start with the same question, which is where a brand stands in AI answers. Profound answers it as a subscription; KoldOS answers it and then does the fixing.
01Side by side
What each of us actually sells.
Profound claims checked 8 August 2026
| Dimension | Profound | KoldOS |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | A self-serve AI visibility platform, sold as monthly plans with seats, tracked prompts and Agents credits.1 | An agency engagement. Measurement is the opening deliverable, not the product being licensed. |
| Published pricing | Starter at "$99/month" and Growth at "$399/month", both billed yearly. Enterprise is listed as custom.1 | Scoped and quoted per engagement after a diagnostic, because the unit being bought is work rather than seats. |
| Answer engines covered | Starter is "ChatGPT tracking only". Growth covers "3 Answer Engines tracked". Enterprise covers "Up to 9 Answer Engines tracked".1 | Engines are chosen per client, based on where that category's buyers are actually asking, and named in the report alongside the results. |
| Prompt volume | Starter tracks "50 prompts tracked" and Growth tracks "100 prompts tracked". Enterprise is a "Tailored prompt tracking plan".1 | The prompt set is written for the category and published with the results, so the questions behind any figure can be read and argued with. |
| Seats and regions | Starter is listed at 1 seat, 1 language and 1 region. Growth is listed at 3 seats, 1 language and 1 region.1 | No seat model. Reporting goes to whoever in the business needs it, and the constraint is scope of work rather than logins. |
| API access | Listed as included in Enterprise. Not listed for Starter or Growth.1 | Not published. KoldOS is not a data product and does not sell an API. |
| Security and compliance | Enterprise lists "SSO/SAML + SOC2 compliance".1 | Not published. Agency engagements are governed by contract terms rather than by a platform certification. |
| Who does the remediation | Not published as a service. The plans are software plans, priced by seats, prompts and credits.1 | KoldOS. Structured data, server-side rendering, crawl access and the content rewrites are delivered as work rather than handed over as a task list. |
Sources
Every claim about Profound above is quoted from those pages and was checked on 8 August 2026. Products change their pricing and their feature tiers without notice, so treat anything here as of that date and check the source before deciding on it.
02When to pick them
Pick Profound if you have a team and need the instrument
A business with its own developers, its own content people and an existing search function does not need an agency to tell it what to fix. What it needs is a reliable, always-on read of where the brand stands, in a dashboard those people can open themselves. Profound publishes plans from $99 per month and sells exactly that instrument. Buying an agency to produce a number that a subscription would produce continuously is the more expensive way to get the same number.
03Questions
- Is KoldOS a Profound competitor?
- Only partly, and only at the measurement layer. Profound is software a customer operates; KoldOS is an agency that operates on a customer's behalf. Plenty of agencies run platforms like Profound as part of their own delivery, which makes the two more often complementary than rival.
- Does KoldOS have a dashboard like Profound's?
- No, and that is a deliberate line. KoldOS reports share of answer against a published prompt set on an agreed cadence, in a document a human wrote. A business that wants a live dashboard it can open at any hour should buy a platform, and Profound is one that publishes its pricing openly.
- What does Profound cost?
- Profound publishes Starter at "$99/month" and Growth at "$399/month", both billed yearly, with Enterprise quoted as custom. Those figures were read from the Profound pricing page on 8 August 2026 and vendor pricing changes without notice, so check the source before relying on them.
- Which engines does Profound track?
- Profound's published plans list "ChatGPT tracking only" on Starter, "3 Answer Engines tracked" on Growth and "Up to 9 Answer Engines tracked" on Enterprise. The pricing page does not name every engine inside those counts.
- Can I use both?
- Yes, and it is a common arrangement. The platform supplies continuous measurement, and the agency supplies the technical and editorial work the measurement keeps pointing at. The two costs answer different questions, which is why buying both is not duplication.
04Definitions
Before you buy either
Find out what is actually broken first.
A tracking subscription tells you that you are absent. Our free checker tells you why, across twenty-three checks, with every finding traced to a line in your HTML. Costs nothing and needs no account.