Alternatives/Kapa.ai
COMPARISON

BeforeQuery vs Kapa.ai

Both platforms turn your documentation into an AI-powered assistant for developers. This comparison covers retrieval architecture, integration breadth, SDK access, and pricing model — based on publicly available information.

Feature comparison

Information about Kapa.ai is based on their public website and documentation.

Feature
BeforeQuery
Kapa.ai
Retrieval method
Hybrid: pgvector semantic + BM25 full-text, RRF fusion, LLM query rewrite, cross-encoder re-ranking
Semantic vector search
Website / docs crawling
Yes — sitemap and link discovery, incremental sync
Yes
GitHub & GitLab repo indexing
Yes — READMEs, docs/, ADRs, changelogs. Git-push webhook for incremental sync. Self-hosted GitLab supported.
Yes
Slack bot
Yes — /askai slash command and @mention. Included on Pro and Enterprise.
Yes
Discord bot
Yes — slash command and @mention. Included on Pro and Enterprise.
Yes
Web widget
Yes — hosted at widget.beforequery.com. reCAPTCHA bot protection. Full CSS override.
Yes
React component
Yes — @beforequery/react. <BeforeQueryChat /> and useBeforeQuery headless hook.
Available
JavaScript / Node SDK
Yes — @beforequery/sdk. Framework-agnostic. Targets web, React Native, Node.js.
Available
Open REST API
Yes — fully documented. WebSocket streaming. No gating on API access.
Available on higher tiers
Collections & per-collection permissions
Yes — group sources, scope client keys per collection
Project-level scoping
Versioned documentation
Yes — v1, v2, latest tags on sources. Per-version client keys.
Not documented
Suggested questions & related articles
Yes — included in every chat response
Varies by plan
Analytics & daily trends
Yes — conversations, feedback ratio, gaps, daily trends on all plans
Yes — analytics dashboard
AI evals (groundedness, citation quality)
Yes — automated LLM-as-judge evals, scores exportable via API
Feedback tracking
Pricing transparency
Public pricing page. Free plan included. No per-seat fees.
Contact for pricing

Where BeforeQuery focuses differently

Hybrid retrieval with LLM query intelligence

BeforeQuery combines pgvector cosine similarity, BM25 full-text, and reciprocal rank fusion. Before retrieval, an LLM rewrites and expands the user query to improve recall. A cross-encoder re-ranker then sorts the top candidates by relevance to the rewritten query.

Full API and SDK openness

Every feature available in the widget is accessible via the REST API and SDKs with no tier gating on API access. This means you can build custom mobile experiences, server-side integrations, and automated pipelines from the start.

Collections and versioned docs

When your product has multiple versions or your team serves different audiences, collections let you partition knowledge and issue scoped client keys. Users querying v1 docs never receive answers from v2 content.

Transparent public pricing

BeforeQuery publishes its pricing openly. There is no requirement to contact sales before you can evaluate the product cost. A free tier is included without a credit card.

See for yourself

Connect your docs and get your first AI-powered answer in under 5 minutes. No credit card required.