Stria vs ScopeGuardian: paste SOW or a record

Stria vs ScopeGuardian at a glance

Stria — Scope, sign-off and billing as one record — every client request judged against a locked baseline, and a tamper-evident approval you can export.

ScopeGuardian — An agency-oriented scope platform. Its intake is an uploaded SOW plus the pasted request; it was in a twenty-five-agency beta on our verification date.

The short version

ScopeGuardian is aimed higher up the market than Stria — Pro is priced for an agency and carries ten seats. The commercial term to read carefully is the 5% of approved change orders the vendor describes charging after beta, which is a share of the revenue the tool helps you recover. Stria charges a flat subscription and takes nothing from a change order.

ScopeGuardian figures were read from their own pricing page on 2026-09-01 and are re-checked on a 120-day cycle. Prices move — confirm current terms before deciding. ScopeGuardian pricing

Choose Stria if

You want the money you recover to stay yours, on a flat price, with a smaller seat count.

Choose ScopeGuardian if

You run an agency, need ten seats, and the percentage of recovered revenue is worth it for the rest of the platform.

All comparisons

ScopeGuardian is the 2026 name that looks, at a glance, like ScopeGuard AI with a longer

memory. We fetched the live page. They are not the same product, and we are not going to

collapse them.

The short answer

ScopeGuardian is a SOW-citation engine for agencies. You give it a statement of work and

a client request. It returns a green / yellow / red verdict with a confidence score, an

exact SOW citation, low-estimate-high hours by phase, diplomat and direct reply drafts, and

a change-order template you can send for digital signature or export as PDF. Pro adds a

precedent engine against your own past analyses.

Stria is a live record. Forwarded mail and a selected Slack channel are judged against a

locked, versioned scope. A signed extra supersedes that version and becomes an invoice. There

is no success fee on collected change orders.

If your problem is one PM citing a different clause than the last PM, ScopeGuardian is aimed

at institutional memory. If the problem is extras that never got pasted into an analyser,

keep reading.

Where ScopeGuardian is the better choice

• The citation is the product. GREEN / YELLOW / RED with the SOW line quoted is a

sharper artefact to put in front of a client than a score. We also cite a clause; they

built the whole UI around doing it in public, with confidence drivers listed.

• Hour ranges by phase. Discovery, design, dev, testing, PM, with a reproducible total.

Stria prices against your rate card. It does not break a Shopify embed into an 18-hour

phase table.

• Precedent Engine. Similar past requests, whether you billed them or ate them. That is

genuinely useful the week a new PM joins, and we do not have it.

• Two tones, one click. Diplomat and Direct drafts. The hard part of scope creep is

often the sentence, and having both registers is practical help.

• A standing free tier for solos. Five analyses a month, one project, one user, including

change-order generation and reply drafts. Always free, per the page — not a trial.

• They only take a cut when a change order is approved. After beta, Pro is $99 a month

plus 5% of approved change orders, capped per year. That is a different commercial bet

than a flat seat price, and for an agency recovering large extras it can be the honest

one.

Where Stria is the better choice

1. You do not have to remember to run it

ScopeGuardian's public flow is upload the SOW, paste the request, get the verdict. That is

the right design for an analyser, and its limit: the extras that cost the most did not look

like extras, so nobody pasted them.

Stria detects an out-of-scope request inside forwarded client email, with no mailbox to

connect, and watches a selected Slack channel without workspace-wide message access. It

determines scope on every client comment, not only the ones a PM filed.

2. No success fee, and the money actually moves

Five percent of an approved change order is a real cost. Their own FAQ example is a 500-dollar

fee on a 10,000-dollar extra, capped yearly. Stria has no success fee. It also issues the

invoice, collects on your own Stripe with no platform fee, and syncs invoices, payments and

reconciliation with either Xero or QuickBooks Online, one ledger at a time. ScopeGuardian

describes sending change orders for digital approval; the public page does not describe

invoicing.

3. The product is not a 25-spot beta

Pro is currently offered as 30 days with no base fee and no success fee for the first 25

agencies. That is a trial, not a price, and the page still shows spots remaining. After beta

the ladder is $99 a month plus the 5% cut. Stria's published ladder is what a buyer pays

now.

4. Price, stated fairly

Read from each vendor's own site on 1 September 2026:

Feature comparison

"Not stated" means their site does not describe it either way.

How to decide in ten minutes

1. Is the failure mode inconsistent PMs, or unnoticed extras? Inconsistent: their

precedent engine. Unnoticed: a paste box will not save you.

1. Are you willing to pay a percentage of recovered extras? If that feels fair, their

commercial model matches the job. If it feels like a tax on doing the right thing, it is.

Moving over

There is nothing to import from a scope tool, so this is the easy part — what you carry over is

your client book, not your scope history.

Import clients, projects and unpaid invoices from a CSV export — HoneyBook, Bonsai, Dubsado or a

spreadsheet. Columns are matched by name where we recognise them, split first and last name

columns are joined, and anything we cannot place is listed for you to point at a field before a

single row is written. The preview tells you how many clients are new and how much is already

past due.

Where to start

Stria is open. The free plan carries three clients and six deliverables a month and needs no card,

which is enough to put a real project through before deciding.

Start your 14-day trial, or try it with no account at all: the

free scope check needs no signup and

saves nothing. The live demo shows what the client sees.

Useful alongside this comparison whichever tool you choose:

what scope creep actually looks like,

how to tell a client a request is out of scope,

the change order template clients sign, and

scope creep software in 2026.

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*ScopeGuardian pricing, fees, beta terms and feature descriptions were read from the vendor's own site at scopeguardian.ai on 1 September 2026. Vendors reprice

and change terms — verify current pricing and features on ScopeGuardian's own site before

deciding, particularly the success fee and whether the 25-spot beta is still open. Stria figures

are from our published pricing. Content was rephrased for compliance with licensing restrictions.*

Related reading

• What is scope creep for freelancers?
• How to tell a client it's out of scope
• Freelance change order template
• Stria vs ScopeLock: scope tool or system of record
• Stria vs ScopeFence: the closest comparison here

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