Comparison
Silas™ vs SamSearchThe search ends where the bid begins. Silas starts there.
The useful question is not which tool has more sources. It is which half of the problem is costing you contracts: finding the solicitation, or surviving everything after you find it.
One line decides this for a lot of buyers, so it goes here rather than at the bottom: Silas has zero state, local and education coverage. One government, one rulebook, and we like it that way. They cover state, local and Canada. If that matters to you, buy theirs.
Most bids are not lost at the search.
Finding it, or surviving everything after you find it. Choose on which half is costing you contracts.
Silas is built for what happens after the solicitation is found: the bid/no-bid call, the compliance matrix, the pricing basis and the audit record.
That is the half where a federal bid is actually won or lost, and it is the entire point of the product.
SamSearch is built for the half before it, and covers far more ground doing it. Their site shows state and local, defense logistics, GSA eBuy, subcontracting, SBIR and grants, and Canada (checked 2026-09-07), where Silas is federal only with no state, local or education coverage at all.
So choose on which half is costing you contracts, not on breadth.
Pick Silas if
You already know your lanes
You are not short of solicitations. You are short of capacity to respond to them defensibly.
Pick SamSearch if
You do not know where to look yet
Breadth is your bottleneck. Buy the wider net. That is the honest recommendation.
If you are both, a federal incumbent expanding into state and local, these are not competitors. They solve adjacent halves, and we will say so on a call.
Silas will not write what it cannot prove.
In a federal proposal a fabricated number is not a typo. It is a false-statement exposure.
Silas will not, by default, emit a customer-facing proposal that fails its own fact check. Not flag it. Not soften it. It stops, and it tells you which claim it could not stand behind.
- The compliance judgement is deterministic. No language model touches the green, yellow or red call. Run it twice and compare the matrices. That is the one claim here a sceptic can check in thirty seconds.
- Unsupported claims are refused, not softened. A missing past-performance reference surfaces as a blocking question during the bid, while you can still go and get it.
- The refusal is recorded, so “why didn’t we bid this” is answerable a year later.
Framed as what Silas commits to, not as something they lack. An earlier version argued from an absence on their site, and that absence has since been filled. An argument built on what a competitor has not published expires the moment they publish it. See the correction log.
Convinced by the refusal?
Make us prove it.
What does Silas do that a search tool does not?
Everything after the solicitation is found. The first row is theirs and the morning briefing is a tie. Both are inside our own tables on purpose, because the honest version of an argument carries the place it loses.
Through the bid
| Stage | Silas → so that | SamSearch, as published | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|
| Find | Federal only → so that a solicitation arrives knowing who won the last one. | SLED, GSA eBuy, SBIR, grants, Canada (2026-09-07). | SamSearch |
| Qualify | A deterministic compliance matrix → so that the same solicitation gives the same answer every time. | Speed claims (2026-08-06). | Silas |
| Shred | Obligations extracted from the statement of work → so that the missed requirement surfaces during the bid, not at kickoff. | Not published. | Silas |
| Price | A basis-of-estimate document → so that your number survives eighteen months of scrutiny. | Not published. | Silas |
| Draft | Declines rather than guesses → so that nothing unverifiable reaches a contracting officer. | Speed and quality claims (2026-08-06). | Silas |
After the bid
| Stage | Silas → so that | SamSearch, as published | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|
| Defend | A tamper-evident decision record → so that an audit is answered from a record, not from memory. | Not published. | Silas |
| Learn | Recalibrated on your real outcomes → so that it gets better at your lanes, not just at day one. | Not published. | Silas |
| Every morning | A 07:00 Eastern decision briefing. Genuine parity. | A recurring analysis digest (2026-08-06). | Parity |
Eight rows. Silas holds six, SamSearch holds Find outright, the briefing is a tie. Buy the wide net if Find is your problem, and buy us if any of the other six is. Long form on the evidence page.
Ready to start?
Request accessSilas is narrow on purpose. The depth is what you are buying.
And five axes where SamSearch is the better buy, one line each. Four are decisive for the right buyer, and we are not going to argue any of them.
- Source breadth: no SLED or Canada for us, both for them
- Buy it today: ours is an engagement, theirs is purchasable now
- SOC 2 Type II: we publish none, they publish one
- Self-serve onboarding: ours needs a call, theirs does not
- Time to first value: after a profile for us, day one for them
Each of those is set out in full, with what their site says and the date we checked it, on the evidence page, along with the seven things Silas is not, written down so nobody discovers them on a demo call.
Take the last bid you lost, and ask why.
If the answer is “we saw it, and we could not respond in time, or we priced it wrong, or we got picked apart on compliance”, more sources will not help you.
That is the loss Silas is built to stop.
If the answer is “we never saw it”, buy breadth. SamSearch publishes far more of it than we do.
- None of that has to be taken on trust.
- Eighteen glossary entries, twelve citing the governing FAR or DFARS part by number, every one cross-linked to the others.
- Three decision quizzes that name the regulation behind each outcome.
- SamSearch publishes 766 glossary terms, far more than we do, with references in the prose rather than cited as numbered parts, and no cross-linking (checked 2026-09-06).
- Audit both standards for free, before you call either of us.
Also worth reading: Silas vs Deltek GovWin IQ and what GovCon capture tooling actually costs.