Suggest edit — comparison engine

Title

Name

Note

---
first_captured: 2026-04-10
sources:
- sources/google-sheets-ideas.md
status: raw
tags:
- software
- decision-making
- productivity
title: comparison engine
type: idea
updated: 2026-04-11
visibility: public
---

# comparison engine

a side-by-side decision tool that accepts any media — text, images, URLs, PDFs, audio — and structures it for comparison. the core use case: you are choosing between two things (laptops, job offers, apartments, frameworks, people) and you want to understand the tradeoffs clearly rather than going back and forth between tabs. the tool would ingest both items, extract the relevant dimensions, and render a clean side-by-side with the key differences highlighted.

what makes this more interesting than a spreadsheet is the media-flexibility and the automatic dimension extraction. if you paste two LinkedIn profiles, it extracts relevant comparison dimensions. if you paste two research papers, it finds where they agree and disagree. if you upload two product spec sheets, it builds a feature comparison matrix. the LLM does the structuring work, you do the deciding. this is adjacent to [[decision-helper|decision helper]] (which is more therapist-style, helping you understand what you actually want) and [[choice-visualizer|choice visualizer]] (which maps the full possibility space). comparison engine is the most focused: two specific options, side by side, right now.

related: [[cluster-hiring-work|hiring and work tools]], [[b2b-competitive-analysis|B2B competitive analysis]]