Compare
Against what you are using now
This page compares capabilities, not adjectives, and it names categories rather than companies. It is deliberately unfinished: a comparison written from memory of somebody else's product is how a marketing site earns a correction.
The honest starting point
Most people doing this work are not using a competing product. They are using four or five tools that do not know about each other — a manuscript editor, a spreadsheet for continuity, a DAW, a video editor, and a browser tab full of one-off prompts. The first comparison worth making is against that.
Against a pile of general-purpose tools
Not written yet
A capability table with rows like "an answer that cites the sentence it came from", "a rejected image provably never reaches the cut", and "one reading of the book shared by every downstream job" — each marked against the general-purpose stack and against Aardvark Studio.
Needs: Erik to confirm which tools to name as the realistic status quo, and to sign off on the claims about what they cannot do.
Against a general AI assistant with the book pasted in
Not written yet
The honest axis here is provenance and repeatability, not intelligence: what the answer cites, whether the same question gives the same answer next month, and whether an approval means anything afterwards.
Needs: A decision on how specific to be about context limits and citation behaviour without naming a provider or quoting a figure we have not measured.
Against a hosted AI video or podcast service
Not written yet
The real trade is stated plainly on both sides: they run the hardware and you accept their model and their terms; here you run the hardware and the material never leaves it except to the AI provider you chose.
Needs: Erik to decide whether we compare on cost at all, given that our GPU cost is the customer's and theirs is bundled.
What this page will never do
Name a competitor in a headline, quote a benchmark measured on our hardware as though it predicted yours, or claim a capability that is not already true in the shipped release.
What is comparable today: our own products
Until the outward comparison is properly sourced, the table that is fully honest is the internal one — what is free, and what each product adds.
| Capability | CoreFree | Loomwright | VisualBook | LitCaster | LookBook |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Getting a book in | |||||
| Ingest an ePub and its narrated audiobook | Included in Core | Not in Loomwright | Not in VisualBook | Not in LitCaster | Not in LookBook |
| Split, transcribe and align narration to the prose | Included in Core | Not in Loomwright | Not in VisualBook | Not in LitCaster | Not in LookBook |
| Scene and beat breakdown | Included in Core | Not in Loomwright | Not in VisualBook | Not in LitCaster | Not in LookBook |
| Cast, prop and location extraction | Included in Core | Not in Loomwright | Not in VisualBook | Not in LitCaster | Not in LookBook |
| Write the book here insteadPublishing compiles an EPUB3 and pre-seeds the breakdown. | Not in Core | Included in Loomwright | Not in VisualBook | Not in LitCaster | Not in LookBook |
| Reading and asking | |||||
| Book Text with the narration following along | Included in Core | Not in Loomwright | Not in VisualBook | Not in LitCaster | Not in LookBook |
| Annotation and the ePub’s own images | Included in Core | Not in Loomwright | Not in VisualBook | Not in LitCaster | Not in LookBook |
| Book Assistant — cited answers over one book or the whole portfolio | Included in Core | Not in Loomwright | Not in VisualBook | Not in LitCaster | Not in LookBook |
| Semantic search | Included in Core | Not in Loomwright | Not in VisualBook | Not in LitCaster | Not in LookBook |
| Reference Library — approved outside sources, cited separately | Included in Core | Not in Loomwright | Not in VisualBook | Not in LitCaster | Not in LookBook |
| Arcs, threads and chapter summaries | Included in Core | Not in Loomwright | Not in VisualBook | Not in LitCaster | Not in LookBook |
| The world behind the book | |||||
| World codex — entities, timeline, maps, boards | Not in Core | Included in Loomwright | Not in VisualBook | Not in LitCaster | Not in LookBook |
| Continuity findings against the reveal and knowledge ledgers | Not in Core | Included in Loomwright | Not in VisualBook | Not in LitCaster | Not in LookBook |
| Series bible, spoiler-bounded companion, JSON dump | Not in Core | Included in Loomwright | Not in VisualBook | Not in LitCaster | Not in LookBook |
| Manuscript editor, import and snapshots | Not in Core | Included in Loomwright | Not in VisualBook | Not in LitCaster | Not in LookBook |
| Audio out | |||||
| Narrate chapters and bind a chaptered m4bNeeds a TTS endpoint you point the server at. | Included in Core | Not in Loomwright | Not in VisualBook | Not in LitCaster | Not in LookBook |
| Per-scene narration coverage for an authored manuscript | Not in Core | Included in Loomwright | Not in VisualBook | Not in LitCaster | Not in LookBook |
| Podcast topics, script and personas | Not in Core | Not in Loomwright | Not in VisualBook | Included in LitCaster | Not in LookBook |
| Voice library with consent gating | Not in Core | Not in Loomwright | Not in VisualBook | Included in LitCaster | Not in LookBook |
| Render, master and QC an episode | Not in Core | Not in Loomwright | Not in VisualBook | Included in LitCaster | Not in LookBook |
| Two-phase publish to distribution targets and a feed | Not in Core | Not in Loomwright | Not in VisualBook | Included in LitCaster | Not in LookBook |
| Pictures out | |||||
| Casting to a consistent visual identity | Not in Core | Not in Loomwright | Included in VisualBook | Not in LitCaster | Not in LookBook |
| LoRA training where identity has to hold | Not in Core | Not in Loomwright | Included in VisualBook | Not in LitCaster | Not in LookBook |
| Props, sets and the art department | Not in Core | Not in Loomwright | Included in VisualBook | Not in LitCaster | Not in LookBook |
| Storyboard by beat, with coverage and readiness | Not in Core | Not in Loomwright | Included in VisualBook | Not in LitCaster | Not in LookBook |
| Assembly — the finished video, timed to the audiobook | Not in Core | Not in Loomwright | Included in VisualBook | Not in LitCaster | Not in LookBook |
| Build a casting style from reference material | Not in Core | Not in Loomwright | Not in VisualBook | Not in LitCaster | Included in LookBook |
| Publish a style, verified against the render host | Not in Core | Not in Loomwright | Not in VisualBook | Not in LitCaster | Included in LookBook |
| Cast a book in a published styleThe choice is a VisualBook surface; the styles come from LookBook. | Not in Core | Not in Loomwright | Included in VisualBook | Not in LitCaster | Included in LookBook |
| Running it | |||||
| Review inbox, review queue and run dashboard | Included in Core | Not in Loomwright | Not in VisualBook | Not in LitCaster | Not in LookBook |
| Cost dashboard at rates you set | Included in Core | Not in Loomwright | Not in VisualBook | Not in LitCaster | Not in LookBook |
| Organisations, users and roles | Included in Core | Not in Loomwright | Not in VisualBook | Not in LitCaster | Not in LookBook |
| Per-user seat enforcementThe only product that enforces seats today. | Not in Core | Not in Loomwright | Not in VisualBook | Included in LitCaster | Not in LookBook |
| Rights holds, disclosure and retention | Not in Core | Not in Loomwright | Not in VisualBook | Included in LitCaster | Not in LookBook |