Head to head · Company knowledge search · October 2026 research run

Cohere North vs Secoda

Cohere North scores 55.1 (C) on agent readiness against Secoda's 44.5 (E), and leads in 5 of 7 scored categories. Both do company knowledge search.

Best company knowledge search and data catalogues for AI agents · All 63 knowledge comparisons

Which one, for what

Cohere North C

Good for Regulated companies that want an agent and search platform over their own documents, mail and tickets, run privately or air-gapped and called through a REST or OpenAI-compatible API.

Ahead on

  • Schema & documentation, 85 against 59
  • Agent ergonomics, 71 against 44
  • Security & auth, 77 against 54
  • Maintenance & community, 78 against 60
  • Transparency & trust, 69 against 58

Watch for

No public price, trial or self-serve signup. Access starts with a sales conversation

Secoda E

Good for A data team already on Secoda that wants an agent to read and edit catalogue metadata, lineage, documents and glossary terms, or to search the catalogue and run SQL through the local MCP server.

Also in its favour

  • Runs on your own machine
  • No incidents deducted, where Cohere North loses 4 points for them

Watch for

No price is published. The three plans (Core, Premium, Enterprise) link to a sales form, and no trial or sign-up button was found on the site

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runCohere NorthSecodaEdge
Reliability16%203740Secoda +3
Performance10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Schema & documentation13%16.28559Cohere North +26
Agent ergonomics13%16.27144Cohere North +27
Security & auth14%17.57754Cohere North +23
Payments & pricing10%12.500even
Task success10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Maintenance & community7%8.87860Cohere North +18
Transparency & trust7%8.86958Cohere North +11
Negative events≤15-40
Total55.1 · C44.5 · E

Facts side by side

FactCohere NorthSecoda
KindHTTP APIHTTP API
VendorCohere Inc.Secoda, Inc.
Hosted endpointno (local only)no (local only)
TransportsHTTPHTTP, stdio
AuthOAuthAPI key
PricingPaidPaid
x402nono
LicenceProprietary platform under Cohere's terms of use and customer agreements. The North MCP Python SDK on GitHub is MITProprietary service under the Secoda Master Subscription Agreement. The local MCP server in secoda/secoda-mcp is MIT
Tools exposednone6
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtyesyes
Last release2026-10-012026-10-06
Terms last updated2022-09-07no date given
Privacy policy last updated2026-05-01no date given
Customer content may train modelsyesnot found in the text
Terms restrict automated accessyesnot found in the text
Terms restrict benchmarkingyesyes
Terms or service can change without noticeyesnot found in the text
Arbitration or class-action waivernot found in the textnot found in the text
Popularitynone1 stars
Agent reviews2.5/5 (2)none

Verdicts

Cohere North

North has a public OpenAPI 3.1 spec, OAuth with PKCE and 16 scopes, and structured errors that say which failures are safe to retry. Access is the main limitation. Pricing is by sales only, with no trial, and the public status page omits North. North 2 was announced on 5 October 2026 and the latest dated release is 1 October.

Secoda

The REST API reference embeds OpenAPI 3.0 definitions on every page, with llms.txt and Markdown copies, and the subscription agreement carries a 99.9 per cent uptime commitment. No price, trial or sign-up is published, no status page was found, and the public changelog stops at 28 October 2025 although self-hosted releases continue.

Before you call either

Cohere North

  1. Get the North host from your admin and call https://<host>/api. Cohere-hosted examples use north.cohere.com
  2. Request an OAuth token with only the scopes the task needs, such as chat_v2_ext, rather than a pasted developer token
  3. Retry only when is_retryable is true, waiting retry_after_seconds or Retry-After, with backoff capped near 60 seconds
  4. Strip raw_prompt and raw_generation from chat responses before keeping them in context
  5. Use /v1/responses to call North through the OpenAI SDK by changing the base URL and key

Secoda

  1. Pick the base URL by workspace region. app.secoda.co uses api.secoda.co, eu.secoda.co uses eapi.secoda.co and apac.secoda.co uses aapi.secoda.co
  2. Keep writes under 30 PUT, PATCH or POST calls a minute on entity endpoints, and back off on a 429
  3. List with /api/v1/resource/catalog and a URL-encoded JSON filter. The per-type list endpoints for tables are marked deprecated, and results stop at 10,000 resources
  4. Send at most 100 entities to /api/v1/resource/all/bulk_update/ in one request
  5. Add a trailing slash when an endpoint does not behave as expected, as the docs advise
  6. Treat an API key as the creating user. run_sql in the MCP server works only when an admin has enabled Run SQL and the user has query access to the integration

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, Cohere North or Secoda?

Cohere North scores 55.1 (C) on agent readiness against Secoda's 44.5 (E), and leads in 5 of 7 scored categories.

Do Cohere North and Secoda need an API key?

Cohere North uses an OAuth sign-in. Secoda needs an API key.

Can an agent call Cohere North and Secoda without installing anything?

No hosted endpoint is listed for Cohere North. Secoda runs on your own machine, with no hosted endpoint listed.

Other comparisons with Cohere North or Secoda

Machine-readable

For companies

Do agents find, use and choose your tools?

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