Compare

Marqo vs Vellum

Vellum scores higher on the AgentReady, 88/100 against 38/100. They differ on 20 of the 41 signals. Which ones decides whether an agent can adopt them without a person watching.

What each one is

Marqo. Marqo is a search and product discovery platform built for ecommerce that uses LLM-based retrieval to continuously learn from shopper behavior and surface relevant, high-converting products.

Vellum. A personal AI assistant that lives in the secure Vellum Cloud, has its own identity, and actually does things in the world.

Where Vellum is ahead

Vellum passes clear canonical domain, clear product positioning, llms.txt published, llms-full.txt / full agent docs and mcp discoverable, and Marqo does not. That is discover, whether an agent can find the product at all without being told it exists.

It also holds understand: openapi / spec quality, request examples provided, response examples provided and errors and status codes documented. Marqo misses those.

And on adopt, self-service signup, no mandatory sales call, agent-compatible signup flow, programmatic credential creation, fast time to first request, copyable quickstart, cli available and mcp integration available. Marqo misses those.

Finally, on operate, structured, predictable output, machine-readable errors and retry behavior documented. Marqo misses those.

What neither does

Both fail authentication documented, limits / constraints documented, idempotency support, rate-limit behavior predictable, agent compatibility verified. If your agent needs any of those, you will be building it yourself either way.

Score, pillar by pillar

The AgentReady splits into four pillars, scored separately, because a product can be easy to find and still impossible to adopt.

Discover. Vellum leads 100 to 53. Marqo misses clear canonical domain, clear product positioning, llms.txt published, llms-full.txt / full agent docs, mcp discoverable; Vellum misses nothing.

Understand. Vellum leads 85 to 38. Marqo misses openapi / spec quality, authentication documented, request examples provided, response examples provided, errors and status codes documented, limits / constraints documented; Vellum misses authentication documented, limits / constraints documented.

Adopt is whether an agent can get a key and make its first successful call without a human in the loop. Vellum leads 100 to 25. Marqo misses self-service signup, no mandatory sales call, agent-compatible signup flow, programmatic credential creation, fast time to first request, copyable quickstart, cli available, mcp integration available; Vellum misses nothing.

Operate. Vellum leads 67 to 35. Marqo misses structured, predictable output, machine-readable errors, retry behavior documented, idempotency support, rate-limit behavior predictable, agent compatibility verified; Vellum misses idempotency support, rate-limit behavior predictable, agent compatibility verified.

Pricing

Marqo does not publish a machine-readable starting price with no free tier. Vellum starts at $30/mo and has a free tier.

Signal by signal

Which to pick

Vellum clears more of the signals an agent needs, so it is the safer default for unattended use. Full profiles: Marqo and Vellum. Alternatives to each: Marqo, Vellum.

An agent can fetch this as data: POST /v1/compare {"slugs": ["marqo", "vellum"]}