Regonance vs. hiring a compliance consultant: what's the real difference?

People search "compliance consultant cost" and "compliance platform vs consultant" because they are trying to answer one question: who should do this work? The honest answer is that consultants and platforms are different tools, they are strongest at different stages, and a lot of companies end up using both. This article is our attempt to say where each one actually wins, including where we do not.

What a consultant is genuinely good at

A good EU product compliance consultant is a specialist brain you rent. That brain is worth paying for in four situations.

Novel or borderline product types. A device that is arguably a medical product, arguably a toy and arguably a machine. A material with no obvious harmonised standard. A cosmetic-adjacent product where category determines the whole regulatory stack. Software cannot classify what the regulator has not yet classified. A person who has argued the point with a notified body before can.

Regulatory grey areas. Where the law says one thing, guidance says another, and national practice says a third. The Battery Regulation's provisional areas are a live example: several duties depend on delegated and implementing acts that are not final. A platform should flag that honestly and stop. A consultant can tell you what the authority in your main market is currently accepting.

Negotiating with authorities. Market surveillance correspondence, a customs hold, a formal information request, a recall decision. These are conversations, and you want someone who has had them before speaking for you.

Physical testing strategy. Choosing standards, choosing a laboratory, deciding what to test and what to justify by similarity. Getting this wrong costs thousands in unnecessary tests or one failed audit.

If your situation is on that list, hire the consultant. Nothing below changes that.

What a platform is genuinely good at

A platform's advantage is not intelligence. It is consistency, breadth and memory.

Breadth across regulations. Most consultants specialise. You will find excellent GPSR people, excellent CE people and excellent EPR people, and they are rarely the same person. Regonance assesses 431 obligations across nine EU regulations against the same product record, so the interactions surface automatically: the battery in your device pulling in Battery Regulation duties, the poly bag around it pulling in PPWR, the phrase "eco-friendly" on your listing pulling in EmpCo.

Consistency at scale. Fifty products assessed by the same logic produce fifty comparable outputs. Fifty products assessed across three consultants over eighteen months produce fifty documents in five formats, and no way to answer "which of my products are missing a declaration of conformity?" in under a week.

Memory and monitoring. Compliance decays. Standards get superseded, tariffs change, deadlines arrive, a marketplace tightens a listing requirement. A retainer buys you someone who might notice. A platform re-checks every product against the current rule set and tells you what moved. That is the part sellers most consistently fail at on their own.

Documentation you can hand over. An auditor, a marketplace appeal team or a business customer wants evidence in a consistent structure with dates and sources on it. Generated documentation does that by construction.

The comparison, dimension by dimension

The row that matters most is the last-but-one. Documentation consistency is what turns compliance from a series of projects into a state you can prove.

Where we lose

Being straight about this is more useful than a pitch.

We do not certify anything. We do not sign your declaration of conformity, we do not act as your responsible person, we do not file with national registers on your behalf, and we do not issue test reports. Those are your obligations and your suppliers' services.

We stop where the law is unfinished. Where a duty depends on a delegated act that has not been adopted, we mark it provisional and tell you what is expected rather than inventing a requirement. Some buyers want a confident answer there. A consultant can give you a considered opinion; we would rather show you the gap.

And for a genuinely unusual product, the first assessment benefits from a human reading it. That is exactly why managed services exist rather than being an upsell.

The middle ground most people actually want

Platform depth with human attention. In practice that looks like this: our team does the first pass on your catalogue, resolves the classification questions, builds the documentation and hands you a workspace where every product's status is visible. Then the platform keeps it current and you only involve people when something changes materially. Managed setup starts at €3,500; ongoing management is a retainer.

Compared with a pure consultant engagement, you keep the artefacts. Compared with pure self-serve, you do not have to become an expert in nine regulations to get started.

How to choose, in three questions

How many products? Under three, and a consultant's fee is survivable. Over ten, and per-product professional fees stop making sense.

How stable is your catalogue? Launching four products a quarter means you need repeatable assessment, not repeated engagements.

How novel is the product? Standard consumer goods are well-mapped territory. Something the regulation did not anticipate needs a person.

If you want to see the arithmetic on your own numbers rather than our examples, the calculator compares all three paths side by side. For the full cost breakdown behind those benchmarks, see our guide to what EU product compliance actually costs in 2026.

Common questions about the choice

Can I use both? Most companies over about twenty products end up doing exactly that: the platform holds the catalogue, the assessments, the documentation and the monitoring, and a consultant is engaged for specific hard questions — a borderline classification, a notified-body conversation, an authority query. That is a sensible allocation, and it is much cheaper than routing everything through professional fees.

What happens if the platform is wrong about my product? The platform's answer is only as good as the data you give it and the rule set behind it. That is why every assessed obligation in Regonance carries the article reference it comes from, so you can check the reasoning rather than trust an output. Where a duty depends on an unadopted act, it is marked provisional rather than answered confidently. If you want a human to review that judgement, managed services exist for it.

Do consultants not also monitor changes? Some do, well, under retainer. Many engagements end when the deliverable lands, and the seller assumes an assessment done in 2025 still describes their position in 2027. It usually does not — standards get superseded, tariffs change, deadlines arrive and marketplace requirements tighten.

Is a consultant faster? Almost never for the first answer, frequently for a hard answer. Two to six weeks for an initial applicability assessment is normal, because you are queuing for someone's calendar. But if the question is genuinely novel, a fast wrong answer is worth nothing.

How do I judge a consultant? Ask which regulations they personally work in, not which their firm covers. Ask for an anonymised example deliverable. Ask what happens after the engagement ends. Ask whether they will sign anything or whether the declaration remains yours — it will remain yours.

What to ask a platform vendor

Symmetrically, four questions worth putting to us or any competitor.

How many obligations do you actually assess, and against what? A count with a source beats a claim of full coverage. Ours is 431 across nine regulations, each mapped to the article it derives from, with mapped-versus-audited coverage shown honestly per regulation rather than rounded up to 100%.

What do you do when the law is unfinished? The right answer is "flag it and tell you what is expected". The wrong answer is a confident requirement invented from a draft.

What do I own when I leave? Documentation should be exportable and readable without the platform.

What do you explicitly not do? Any vendor who cannot answer that quickly has not thought about it. We do not certify, do not sign declarations, do not act as your responsible person and do not file with national registers.

The honest summary is that this is not a contest with one winner. Software is better at breadth, consistency and memory. People are better at novelty, judgement and negotiation. The expensive mistake is buying the wrong one for your actual problem — and the most common version of that mistake is paying professional fees for work that is identical across ten thousand sellers.