Compare
Three comparisons, written as prose
Three systems, each doing something coherent. For each: what its model is, where it stops, and the one axis we actually differ on. Prose rather than a grid, because the differences here are about what a system is for, and a row of checkmarks cannot carry that.
Inrupt PodSpaces
Their model
Inrupt is the company Tim Berners-Lee co-founded, and PodSpaces is its hosted pod service — a Developer Preview, explicitly not for production or sensitive personal data, offered free in two regions as somewhere to test applications against the current server.
Where it stops
That preview is a shop window for a commercial product: an enterprise Solid server with versioned releases, sold and deployed. So "two free previews" is the wrong frame. Behind theirs is a business with customers. Behind ours is us, and a buyer choosing on maturity should not be reading this page for permission to choose us.
The axis we differ on
Their bet is that pods become enterprise infrastructure — an organisation runs pods for its users, and the value is in operating that reliably at scale. Ours is that the identifier layer underneath the pod matters: that a pod addressed by an identifier its owner controls, with a record whose changes are visible, is worth more than one addressed by a domain somebody else rents. Both bets can be right. One of them is much further along.
Read the full comparisonBoth are development-stage offerings, and only one of them has a production product behind it. It is not ours.
Vana
Their model
People contribute personal data into collectively governed pools so it can be licensed — to model builders among others — and contributors are rewarded.
Where it stops
It does not stop anywhere we can point at. They have raised roughly twenty-five million dollars across three rounds, shipped a live mechanism, and have users; we have a design position and no paying customers. Their move toward personal servers narrows the very distinction this section is built on.
The axis we differ on
Their model is monetization. A pod's model is custody: data stays in storage its owner controls and applications read what they are permitted to read. There is no pool, no market and no payment path in what we have built — checked against the repository rather than asserted. Those two designs pull in opposite directions, so the choice between them is a choice about intent, not features.
Read the full comparisonYou probably want one of these, not both. Pooling data for sale and keeping it where nobody else can read it are opposite designs.
The wider landscape
Their model
Personal-data products sort into four categories that are routinely discussed as one market: custody stores, data marketplaces, durable storage substrates, and edge or AI data infrastructure.
Where it stops
Solidus Pod is in the first category and only the first — no marketplace, no escrow, no attribution mechanism, no payment path, verified against our own repository with a control. Inside that category the ranking does not favour us: an established commercial offering has a production server and enterprise deployments, and an independent open-source store has sector pilots and a consortium behind it.
The axis we differ on
What is genuinely ours is a bet about the identifier layer, and knowing which of the four categories a product is in tells you more than any feature list. If you want your data not pooled, in production, today, an established custody offering will serve you — or run the server yourself, which needs nothing from us.
Read the full comparisonMost confusion in this field comes from treating four categories as one market.
Why three, and not twenty
The competitor set behind these pages holds twenty products in the same neighbourhood, and most of them are doing one of the other three jobs — selling data, storing it cheaply for a long time, processing it near where it is produced. Comparing against those would put four different jobs in one table and let the rows imply they mean the same thing. The third section is the category map that sorts them, and it is the reason the other two are the only ones worth a page.