aivimo vs Trackbase (2026): self-hosted licence or EU-hosted SaaS for AI visibility?
aivimo is a €4,500 on-premise licence from Vienna. Trackbase is Dutch, EU-hosted SaaS from 49 EUR/mo with 11 models and crawler analytics. A buyer's guide for privacy-minded teams.
European buyers who care where their data sits usually end up choosing between two models. One is software on your own hardware, which aivimo sells. The other is a European vendor hosting it for you in the EU, which is what Trackbase offers. aivimo gives you full control and a large invoice up front. Trackbase gives you daily data on eleven models for a monthly fee, with a much smaller prompt allowance.
We read both vendors' pages on 20 October 2026. Promptwatch, also European, is the third column.
Side by side
| aivimo | Trackbase | Promptwatch | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Vendor | Activaria GmbH, Vienna | Built in the Netherlands, EU-hosted | Promptwatch B.V., Amsterdam |
| Where data lives | Your server or VM, or Activaria's European data centre | EU; llms.txt says infrastructure in the Netherlands | Not published |
| Price model | One-time licence: €4,500 (M), €7,500 (L), €9,000 (XL) | 49 EUR/mo Essential, 199 EUR/mo Professional | $95/mo Essential, $245/mo Professional (Explore is free) |
| Ongoing cost | Optional maintenance €800 to €2,500/yr, plus API fees | Monthly subscription; add-ons on Professional | Monthly or annual (12 months for the price of 10) |
| Trial | Not published | 14 days, no card | 7 days on Essential |
| Prompt volume | Set by you; brand caps of 10 (M) and 30 (L) | 10 prompts (Essential), 20 (Professional) | 50 (Essential), 150 (Professional) |
| Engines | OpenAI, Perplexity, Anthropic, Google, xAI and others, via API | 3 on Essential, 11 on Professional | All tracked LLMs |
| Refresh | You set it, for example daily or weekly | Every 24 hours | Daily |
| AI crawler data | Not published | Crawler analytics via Cloudflare Worker, Logpush or WordPress plugin | Agent Analytics from Professional, 8 log source types |
| Shopping | Not published | ChatGPT Shopping (add-on on Professional) | ChatGPT Shopping tracking, Ads Radar |
| Conversions | Not published | Not published | Visitor analytics with conversions |
aivimo: your server, your audit trail
aivimo is a German-language monitor that you install, or have Activaria install, on your own infrastructure. It sends your prompt sets to the providers' APIs and stores every answer in a local SQL database with the provider, model, timestamp and cost. Prompt and configuration changes go into an audit trail with version history, and a citation explorer lets you search cited URLs by pattern and drill into the answers. The product PDF describes the core as a Go service that can feed existing monitoring and reporting stacks.
That is attractive to a DPO. It is also all you get: there are no crawler logs, traffic attribution or content features. The site doesn't say whether prices include VAT or whether API fees come on top, though the per-answer cost logging suggests they do. And the agency pitch of "unlimited brands" doesn't square with the 10 and 30 brand caps on M and L.
Trackbase: EU cloud, broad engine coverage, few prompts
Trackbase runs a fixed prompt set every 24 hours on up to 11 models: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Google AI Overview, Google AI Mode, Perplexity, Grok, DeepSeek, Copilot, LLaMA and Mistral. It turns the answers into a visibility score, sentiment, share of voice, citations and competitor rankings, filterable by market, language and model.
It covers more than tracking. Crawler analytics shows which AI bots visit, which pages they read and the status codes they got, set up with a Cloudflare Worker snippet, Cloudflare Logpush or a WordPress plugin. A ChatGPT Shopping module records product positions, displayed prices and tags, with alerts on changes. There's an action list with a predicted impact score per task and an MCP server.
The trade-off is volume. Essential at 49 EUR covers 10 prompts on 3 models. Professional at 199 EUR covers 20 prompts on all 11. MCP, schema automation and ChatGPT Shopping are paid add-ons on Professional, and the pricing page doesn't say which plan includes crawler analytics. The site's llms.txt also still lists older prices (a free Launch plan, 79 and 249 EUR tiers, a 7-day trial) that the live pricing page no longer shows.
A procurement checklist
Questions to send each vendor before a purchase order:
- aivimo: are prices net of VAT, and are AI provider API fees included or billed by the provider?
- aivimo: which models and search modes does it call, and can it read consumer interfaces at all?
- Trackbase: which plan includes crawler analytics, and what do the MCP and ChatGPT Shopping add-ons cost?
- Trackbase: which price list applies, the live page or llms.txt?
- Both: can you sign a data processing agreement naming the sub-processors that receive our prompts?
Who should pick which
Pick aivimo if policy rules out any SaaS for brand and prompt data, or you're a publisher or corporate group that wants answers archived on your own systems with costs logged per answer. Accept that you are paying for control, not features.
Pick Trackbase if EU hosting is enough for your legal team and you want daily runs across nearly every engine, plus crawler and shopping data, at a low monthly price. It works best for a brand check or a webshop with a short list of buying questions.
The Promptwatch option
Trackbase gets closest to a full platform here, but its 20-prompt limit is the snag. A category with dozens of buying questions won't fit. Promptwatch Professional at $245 a month covers 150 prompts on every tracked engine with a daily refresh, and each prompt comes with search volume, a difficulty score and query fan-outs, so you can pick the 150 that matter. Agent Analytics accepts logs from Cloudflare, AWS CloudFront, Fastly, Vercel, Netlify, Akamai, Google Cloud CDN and custom HTTP sources, not only Cloudflare and WordPress. Visitor analytics ties AI-referred sessions to conversions, which neither tool here describes.
For webshops weighing Trackbase's shopping module, Promptwatch also tracks ChatGPT Shopping, and its Ads Radar follows sponsored placements.
Verdict
aivimo is a niche answer for organisations that must self-host, and a fair one at that. Trackbase is the better product for most European teams, with daily data, eleven models and crawler analytics, provided 20 prompts are enough. When they aren't, or when you need to show conversions, Promptwatch is the platform to put on the shortlist first.
FAQ
Does Trackbase store data in the EU?
Trackbase says all data is hosted in the EU, and its llms.txt specifies infrastructure in the Netherlands.
Does aivimo need an internet connection?
It queries AI providers through their APIs, so the server needs outbound access to those providers. The results themselves stay in your local database.
Which tool has crawler data?
Trackbase has crawler analytics through Cloudflare or WordPress. aivimo doesn't describe any. Promptwatch's Agent Analytics covers eight log source types; see promptwatch.com.