A Buyer's Guide for 2025: Comparing Cambrion's Agentic Platform vs. Legacy IDP

Buyers Guide
Written By Daniel Gamber

You’ve made the decision to automate. You’ve identified the bottlenecks, calculated the costs of manual processing, and you're now in the market for an Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) solution.

Your research has likely led you to a list of established players, often powerful, cloud-based tools that represent the last wave of AI innovation. But now, a new choice has emerged: Cambrion's Agentic Platform.

How do you compare them? A simple feature checklist won't tell the whole story. To make a truly future-proof decision, you need to compare them on the strategic pillars that determine success in today's business environment.

Here is that strategic comparison.

1. Time-to-Value: Minutes vs. Months

  • Legacy IDP Platforms: The journey with these tools often begins with a lengthy and costly setup process. They require you to provide large datasets for annotation, engage in complex model training, and configure rigid templates and rules. This is a process measured in weeks or even months, requiring significant effort from your technical teams before you see a single piece of automated data.

  • Cambrion's Agentic Platform: Our philosophy is built on immediate value. Powered by next-generation Vision-Language Models, our platform works "zero-shot," meaning it understands documents instantly without any prior training. You can configure a production-ready pipeline in minutes through a simple, self-serve interface, not months. This isn't an acceleration of the old process; it's the elimination of it.

2. Flexibility: Rigid Templates vs. Agentic Adaptation

  • Legacy IDP Platforms: These systems are often bound by the templates they were trained on. When a supplier slightly changes an invoice layout or a new document format appears, the automation breaks. This brittleness creates a constant, reactive cycle of maintenance and firefighting, undermining the very promise of automation.

  • Cambrion's Agentic Platform: Our platform is designed for the real world, where documents are varied and layouts change. Because our AI agents understand documents conceptually, just like a human would, they adapt to variations instantly. This means less maintenance, higher uptime, and an automation system that gets stronger and more knowledgeable over time, not more fragile.

3. User Experience: Developer-Dependent vs. Expert-Empowered

  • Legacy IDP Platforms: Many first-wave AI tools were built only for developers. Making changes, handling exceptions, or setting up new workflows often requires coding or highly technical skills, creating a bottleneck that slows down your business operations.

  • Cambrion's Agentic Platform: We believe the true experts on your documents often are your business users. Our platform is designed for them. With a simple, user-centric interface and integrations with no-code tools like Make, your logistics, finance, or operations teams can build and manage their own automation pipelines without writing a single line of code.

4. Data Security & Sovereignty: A Risk vs. A Guarantee

  • Legacy IDP Platforms: The question of data governance is paramount. Many IDP vendors are based in the US, which can mean your sensitive financial and client data is processed and stored in environments outside of EU legal jurisdiction. For any European company, this presents a significant compliance risk under GDPR.

  • Cambrion's Agentic Platform: We eliminate this risk entirely. We are a German company, EU-native by design, and built for the world's strictest privacy standards. We offer GDPR-compliant processing, with data hosted in European cloud servers or, for maximum control, directly within your own on-premise environment. With Cambrion, data sovereignty isn't a feature; it's our foundation.

5. The Scope of Automation: Extraction vs. Operation

  • Legacy IDP Platforms: The job of these tools typically ends at one word: extraction. They pull data from point A and drop it at point B.

  • Cambrion's Agentic Platform: Our agents are not just extractors; they are operators. An agentic pipeline can be instructed to perform complex, multi-step tasks. It can extract data from an invoice, enrich it by looking up a supplier code in your database, validate a VAT number via an external web search, and then deliver that clean, validated, and enriched data to your system (e.g. ERP, CRM, WMS). This is not just data extraction; this is intelligent operational automation.

The Choice Before You

Legacy IDP (The Old Way)

  • Time-to-Value: Months of training & setup

  • Flexibility: Rigid, template-bound systems that break

  • User Experience: Creating bottlenecks

  • Data Security: Potential GDPR & data sovereignty risks

  • Scope: Limited to simple data extraction

Cambrion Agentic Platform (The New Way)

  • Time-to-Value: Minutes via zero-shot self-service

  • Flexibility: Instantly adapts to any document variation

  • User Experience: Empowers even non-technical business experts

  • Data Security: EU-native, GDPR-compliant processing

  • Scope: Full operational automation: extract, enrich, validate

The choice is clearer now. It's not about which product has a longer feature list. It's about which platform is built on a more modern, flexible, and secure philosophy.

Daniel Gamber
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