Different in kind, not just in degree
Hebbia is a genuinely capable document-reasoning tool. Its logo list includes KKR, Morgan Stanley, Centerview, Oak Hill and Latham & Watkins. None of that is in question.
What's different is the shape of the product. Matrix works session by session: you load a set of documents, ask questions across them, and get answers in a grid. That's a real and useful capability, and it's the whole point of the tool. But it doesn't leave behind a persistent, structured record. There's no standing model of "this deal, this contact, this organisation" that accumulates context over time and links back to where every fact came from. Each session starts fresh against whatever you've fed it.
DealSage starts from the opposite end. Before any question gets asked, your firm's deals, contacts, organisations and documents are structured into a configurable ontology, with every field carrying source lineage back to the page or line it came from. That's the platform: not a smarter way to query a folder, but a standing model of your firm that any question, and any future question, can draw on.
Where Hebbia is the better fit
Hebbia has leaned into legal and professional-services review, and that is where its document-reasoning engine is a natural fit. Reading a data room clause by clause, comparing contract language across a set, triaging a large document review, the kind of work a legal team does, plays directly to Matrix's strengths, and its client list (which includes Latham & Watkins) reflects that positioning. If a fast, capable document-review layer is the specific job, Matrix is built for it and does it well. It carries SOC 2 Type II and ISO 42001 certification and says it never trains on customer data, which covers the security basics a firm would ask about.
It's worth being honest about the trade-offs too. Hebbia is sales-led with no published pricing and no self-serve trial, so you won't get a number without a conversation. Users on G2 report the Excel and Drive integrations are still early, and that the tool gets expensive outside large-enterprise budgets. None of that rules Hebbia out for the job it's built for. It just means the job needs to actually be document reasoning, not firm-wide operations.
Where DealSage is the better fit
If what you actually want is for your firm's knowledge to compound, so that an answer from a deal three months ago is still linked to the one you're working today, without you re-uploading anything, that's a different requirement, and it's the one DealSage is built around. The ontology holds Deal, Contact, Organisation and any custom objects your firm needs, with field-level lineage so every number traces back to its source document.
It also reaches you differently. CC the DealSage agent on an email thread and get a cited answer back. Pull a sourced figure straight into a live-linked Excel cell. Connect over MCP so Claude, ChatGPT or whichever model you prefer can query the same knowledge base. And because deployment isn't cloud-only, firms with stricter data residency or security requirements can run DealSage in their own VPC or fully on-premise, an option Hebbia doesn't publish anywhere. Implementation runs through an embedded team, consultant, technologist and builder, so the ontology is live in weeks rather than configured by you alone against a generic template.