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Comparisons

General knowledge, or your course.

ChatGPT is a better general assistant than anything we will build. It is not grounded in your syllabus, and for coursework that is the property that decides the outcome.

Choose Zelvi if

  • The answer has to come from a specific course’s material, not from the internet.
  • You need a citation back to the document and page.
  • Your institution needs to decide what the tutor may read, and to see what it is teaching.
  • You want the tool to say plainly when the course material does not cover something.

Choose ChatGPT if

  • You are working on something outside any course.
  • You want general writing, coding or research assistance.
  • You need breadth across topics no institution has published material for.
  • You want the frontier of general model capability rather than a scoped tutor.

Feature by feature

Zelvi compared with ChatGPT, feature by feature
FeatureZelviChatGPT
What it answers fromDocuments an instructor published to the courseGeneral training data and browsing
Citation to a specific pageOn every grounded answerLinks when browsing; not to your course material
Behaviour outside the syllabusRefuses and says the material does not cover itAnswers, in the same confident register
General capability outside a courseNarrow by designFar broader than anything scoped to a syllabus
Institutional control of what the tutor readsInstructor publishes; drafts are invisible to studentsNot an institutional control surface
Per-institution data isolationEnforced at the database, exercised as a signed-in userEnterprise controls exist; not organised around a course roster
Interactive STEM and anatomy visualsGenerated from typed parameters and manipulableImages and charts; not a manipulable course diagram
Breadth of general writing and coding helpNot what it is forIts core strength

What ChatGPT does better

ChatGPT is a stronger general assistant than Zelvi and will remain one. For anything outside a specific course — general writing, coding, research, exploring a topic nobody has published material for — it is the better tool, and pretending otherwise would be the kind of claim this site exists to prevent.

What our side of this rests on

  • Answers cited back to your own material, with the instructor one tap away when the material does not cover itOn our go/no-go benchmark every answer retrieved the right passage, carried a valid citation and stayed inside the material, and every out-of-scope question routed the learner to the instructor rather than a guess — against 54.2% for handing the model the whole document.
  • Every procedure step and rubric criterion carries a reference back to the document it came fromA criterion with no source reference is refused before it can be saved. Not a warning — a rejection.
  • Instructors attach their own documents to a course, review them as a draft, and publish when readyFourteen checks driven through a real browser, including that a student cannot see a draft and that publishing opens the document itself.
  • Each institution’s data is isolated at the database level, not by application codeTen checks run as a real signed-in user, so the database’s own access rules are genuinely exercised rather than assumed.

Questions people actually ask

Can I use both?
Yes, and most learners will. They answer different questions. The distinction worth keeping is that coursework assessed against a specific syllabus should be worked from that syllabus.
Does Zelvi use the same underlying models?
Zelvi routes across several providers with a declared fallback and timeout per modality. The difference is not which model answers; it is what the model is given to answer from.
Is a general assistant an academic integrity problem?
The problem is usually visibility rather than capability. Work done on an unsanctioned tool leaves the institution no record and no ability to say what level of assistance was appropriate for the task.

Other comparisons