Compare
Arrio vs a consultancy review
When leadership needs to know what its software organisation is really producing, the established answer is to commission a review. It works, and it is slow and expensive, and the picture it produces starts ageing the day it is delivered. Arrio answers the same question differently. Here is how the two compare, and why most organisations end up wanting both.
A consultancy review
The commissioned review.
A team of consultants spends weeks inside the organisation: interviewing engineers and managers, reading documentation, sampling code and assembling a report. The output is considered, contextual and valuable. It is also expensive, dependent on who happened to be interviewed, and fixed at the moment it was written.
Arrio
Independent measurement, from the outside.
An independent read of what the software investment produces, for the people who fund it. It reads the work itself from the codebases, grounds it in cost, and reports to the CEO, CFO and CIO in business terms, including whether the AI investment is paying off. Built to govern the spend.
Side by side
Where they differ
| A consultancy review | Arrio | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is based on | Interviews, documentation, workshops and sampled code. What people say about the work, plus a slice of the work. | The work itself, read across the whole estate rather than sampled, plus cost. |
| Time to an answer | Typically weeks to months, depending on scope and access to people. | Days. The first reading includes history, so it arrives with a trend already in it. |
| Cost profile | A significant fixed fee, driven by consultant days. Repeating the exercise costs roughly the same again. | Not published. Speak to us about pricing and services. |
| Consistency | Depends on the team assigned and who was available to interview. Two reviews of the same organisation can differ. | The same measure applied the same way every time, so readings are comparable across divisions and across years. |
| Shelf life | A point-in-time snapshot. It begins ageing on delivery and is rarely repeated often enough to show a trend. | Continuous if you want it. The baseline updates, so you see direction rather than a single frame. |
| Load on your teams | Substantial. Interviews, workshops and document requests take real time from the people delivering. | Minimal. A point of contact, an agreed scope and read access. No workshops, no interviews. |
| Who delivers the change | Often the same firm that produced the assessment, which is efficient and can blur the line between finding a problem and being paid to fix it. | Not Arrio. We measure and report; the work that follows is done by your teams or by a partner, including consultancies. |
Comparison by design and audience, based on each company’s publicly stated purpose. Not a feature-by-feature ranking.
Would you like to know more about our pricing and services? Speak to our founders.
Not a rivalry
We measure. They change things. Those are different jobs.
This is a comparison of methods, not a criticism of firms. Consultancies do something Arrio deliberately does not: they go into an organisation and change how it works, which is difficult, human work that no measurement replaces. What has changed is that the assessment phase no longer needs weeks of interviews to produce a partial view. Several consultancies and integrators work with Arrio for exactly this reason: the reading arrives in days, it is independent of the firm delivering the change, and both sides are better off for the separation. Understand the wider picture in measuring software development.
Is Arrio a replacement for a consultancy review?
For the assessment part, often yes, and faster and more consistently. For everything that comes after, no. A review usually ends with recommendations and a change programme, and delivering that change is human work involving persuasion, restructuring and rebuilding. Arrio does not do that and does not intend to. It replaces the weeks of interviewing needed to find out where you stand, not the expertise needed to move you somewhere better.
Why is reading the work better than asking the people doing it?
It is not better in every respect. People explain context, history and intent that no codebase reveals. What interviews cannot do is give you a consistent, comparable measure across an organisation, because the answer depends on who was asked and how the question landed. Reading the work covers everything rather than a sample, applies the same standard everywhere, and cannot be shaped by whoever is most persuasive in the room.
What about the independence of the firm delivering the change?
This is the structural point rather than a comment on anyone’s conduct. When the party assessing the problem is also the party paid to fix it, the assessment carries an interest, however professional the team. Keeping the measurement with an independent party and the delivery with a consultancy removes that tension entirely, which is better for the client and, in our experience, easier for the consultancy to sell.
Do consultancies see Arrio as competition?
The good ones see it as leverage. It removes the least profitable and most disputed part of an engagement, gives them an evidence base their client already trusts because it did not come from them, and lets them prove at the end that the work delivered value. Several already work with us this way.
Sources
- Method comparison, 2026 This page compares two approaches to answering the same question, not two named companies. Characteristics of commissioned reviews describe the general model of interview-led, consultant-day-priced assessment. Individual firms and engagements vary widely.
Get the reading in days. Spend the weeks on the change instead.