Differentiation
Above you sit the vendors selling a model. Below you sit the ones selling a channel. Both have built serious controls. And both help decide something they earn money on.
Research as of August 2026. We re-check quarterly.
Where things stand
Model vendors and MarTech suites have built a lot of governance since 2025. Four things are standard today. We list them because a comparison that misrepresents the field collapses at the first follow-up question.
Looking up
A model vendor with enterprise features: roles, permissions down to tool level, logs and spend limits. For a capable individual user that is strong.
Whoever acts approves. There is no instance where somebody else has to agree, and no threshold by amount or risk. That is the design: the harness models a user. A marketing team is an organisation. The plan goes to the campaign lead, the budget overrun to the CMO, the EU segment to legal. And the spend limit caps what the model costs, not what it spends.
Looking down
Your CRM, your email platform, your content suite: each of these now has agents, often with carefully built governance at the platform layer.
Look at which third-party systems are actually connected. They are productivity and sales tools. The competitor's delivery channel is not among them and will not be. On top of that, the governance belongs to the platform. One vendor writes in its own documentation that every application and every agent inherits the platform's rules rather than enforcing its own. That is meant as a strength and it is one. It also means that leaving the platform means losing it.
What remains
Whoever enforces the rules also sells the systems being decided between. And benefits from how a budget conflict between two channels turns out. That cannot be fixed. It is the business position.
Connecting third-party tools is normal by now. Making a competitor's delivery channel a first-class governed path inside your own product is not. Coordinating across CRM, email, ads, CMS and the call centre needs someone who sells none of those channels.
A holdout in the email platform excludes those held back from the email. The call centre rings them anyway. Nobody who cannot see the other channels can make that promise.
Token allowances and credits cap AI consumption. They do not cap the €25k of media budget distributed across Meta, Google, email and the call centre. The CMO answers for that.
Where batoon stands
The vendors above and below us are further along on governance mechanics than comparison pages usually admit. Our difference is the position, not the feature count. So here is where batoon itself stands.
Proof on a real stack is still outstanding. That is what we are looking for design partners for.
The full status