What Braintrust is genuinely good at
Developer-loop evaluation. Fast iteration on prompts and scorers, experiment tracking across versions, and a workflow that fits how an engineering team actually builds an LLM feature. If your problem is “did this prompt change make things better or worse”, a platform like Braintrust answers it in minutes and we do not, at any price.
The structural difference
On a platform, you author the test, you pick the threshold, and you decide what counts as a pass. That is exactly right for development. It also means the result cannot be independent evidence: it inherits every assumption the team that built the agent already held. The failure mode is not dishonesty, it is that you cannot write the adversarial case you did not think of.
EvalQA contributes what an internal loop structurally cannot: a mandatory floor of adversarial cases we author, invariants compiled from your dbt manifest and INFORMATION_SCHEMA rather than from anyone’s expectations, and a signed bundle a third party can verify.
| Braintrust | EvalQA | |
|---|---|---|
| Who writes the tests | Your team | Us, with a published floor of independent cases |
| Who sets the threshold | Your team | Nobody yet — we report severity-classified findings, not a verdict (why) |
| Speed | Minutes | A sprint |
| Scope | Any LLM application | Warehouse SQL agents only |
| Output | Dashboards and experiment history | A signed assurance case for an audit committee |
| Pricing transparency | Published unit economics | Fixed fee, no success fee (pricing) |
Pick Braintrust if
- You are iterating on the agent and need the loop to be fast.
- Your application is not a warehouse SQL agent.
- You want one system covering every LLM feature you ship.
Add EvalQA if
- Someone outside the building — an auditor, a regulator, a board risk committee — has to accept the result.
- The agent writes SQL that people make decisions on without reading it.
- You want to know what your own test suite does not cover, which by construction it cannot tell you.
Using both
Braintrust in CI for regression speed; EvalQA at the release gate where being wrong has consequences. Our findings are exportable in a documented non-proprietary schema, so confirmed defects can become permanent regression cases in your own platform. That is the intended workflow, not a concession.