KleioBase vs Evidentia: Proof Arguments or Surfaced Conflicts

Evidentia is the most methodologically serious product in this comparison set, and it is aimed at a researcher who has decided to do genealogy properly rather than quickly. That deserves saying before any comparison, because the differences below are mostly about depth against breadth, not about quality.

The short answer. Evidentia takes one research question and walks you through it rigorously: record the source, extract each claim it makes, evaluate the quality of the evidence behind each claim, resolve the conflicts, write the conclusion. Its output is a documented proof argument. KleioBase takes a whole archive and tells you where the problems are: which people are probably duplicates, which dates contradict each other, which generations are missing. Its output is a map of what needs attention. One goes deep on a question you have already chosen. The other tells you which questions you should have chosen.

They automate opposite ends of the same method

The professional research process runs roughly: gather sources, extract what each one claims, weigh the evidence, resolve conflicts, state a conclusion you can defend.

Evidentia automates the back half. It gives structure to claim extraction and evidence evaluation, and produces the written output. One reviewer put it well: it takes much of the effort out of documenting and formatting analysis and essentially forces you to follow the process. Forcing is the feature. Left alone, most researchers skip the evaluation step and jump to the conclusion, which is how confident wrong trees get built.

KleioBase automates the front half and the triage. It ingests everything you have, from a GEDCOM or from documents, reconciles people across sources, and then scans the whole body of evidence for the places where it disagrees with itself. Three sources give three birth years. Two profiles share a spouse and a parish and are probably one man. A woman has children but no recorded parents.

Neither covers the other's half well. Evidentia will not tell you which of your four hundred people has a problem, because it operates on the question you bring it. We will not write your proof argument, because that is a piece of reasoned prose and we surface inputs rather than compose the argument.

Conflict detection means something different in each

Both products talk about conflicts, and they mean genuinely different things. This is the most important distinction on the page.

Evidentia's conflicts are within a question you are actively working. You have gathered sources about one person's birth, they disagree, and the software helps you lay out the disagreement and reason to a resolution you can document. It is depth on a chosen problem.

Our conflicts are archive-wide and unsolicited. Nobody asked; a scan across everything found that these two records cannot both be right. The value is that it catches the contradictions you did not know you had, including in parts of the tree you have not looked at for two years.

The failure modes match the design. Evidentia's is that you never examine the thing you never thought to question. Ours is volume: an archive-wide scan produces findings that are sometimes trivial, and triaging them is a skill.

Rigour and reach are the axes

On price: Evidentia sells one-time rather than by subscription, with bundles including a companion book, and a 14-day trial. Individual tier prices move and their store pages vary, so get the current figure from them.

When Evidentia is the better answer

You need a defensible written conclusion. Client reports, certification portfolios, publication, or any case where the argument itself is the deliverable. This is what it is for and we do not do it.

You are working toward professional standards. Evidentia encodes the method and holds you to it. That discipline is worth more than automation to anyone pursuing accreditation.

Your problem is one hard question, not four hundred people. A single contested identity examined properly needs depth, and archive-wide scanning adds nothing.

You want evidence evaluation modelled explicitly. Weighing whether a source is original or derivative, whether the information in it is primary or secondary, and whether the evidence it gives is direct or indirect, is a formal step in Evidentia. We do not model it that way.

You prefer a one-time purchase and desktop software. Different commercial shape, and for many researchers a better one.

What KleioBase does instead, and what it does not

We are a tool in this space, so read this as disclosure.

KleioBase is built for reach. Import a GEDCOM and the whole tree is analysed immediately without a single document uploaded: people reconciled across sources, likely duplicates flagged, contradictory evidence raised as conflicts, missing generations named as gaps, and a companion that will answer questions about the entire archive in plain language. Documents, when you add them, are read and translated on the way in and join the same analysis. For professionals, workspaces keep client research separate.

The point is triage. You cannot examine four hundred people rigorously, so the question is which ten deserve it.

Now the honest limits.

No proof argument, and no plan to fake one. We surface evidence and contradictions. Composing a reasoned, citable argument is your work, and a tool that generated one would be producing confident prose about things it cannot actually weigh.

No formal evidence-quality model. We do not classify sources as original or derivative, or evidence as direct or indirect, in the way the standard requires. Evidentia does, and for anyone working to that standard it is a real gap.

Automated findings need triage. An archive-wide scan surfaces things that do not matter alongside things that do.

Subscription and hosted. GEDCOM export is available and unrestricted, but the shape is different from owning desktop software.

Where to start

If you are pursuing certification or writing for clients, start with Evidentia. The method is the product and nothing here substitutes for it.

If you have a large tree inherited or built over years and a quiet suspicion that parts of it are wrong, start at the other end. Import the GEDCOM, let the archive-wide scan run, and look at what comes back. Then take the two or three findings that genuinely matter into a proper proof argument, which is exactly what Evidentia is for. The two halves fit together, and neither vendor loses anything by admitting it.