MAEQ vs OpenAI Frontier + workspace agents
OpenAI's enterprise platform for AI coworkers, plus agents inside ChatGPT.
Checked against public documentation on 14 October 2026MAEQ
Managed AI agents on any model, a branded AI portal and an enterprise context layer, with governance set once.
OpenAI Frontier + workspace agents
OpenAI's enterprise platform for AI coworkers, plus agents inside ChatGPT.
Covers: OpenAI Frontier, ChatGPT workspace agents, Agents API and Agents SDK
Vendor website ↗When OpenAI Frontier + workspace agents is the better fit
Companies standardising on OpenAI models and ChatGPT.
How MAEQ differs
MAEQ runs OpenAI next to Claude, Gemini and Mistral under one set of policies, with EU data residency and your own keys.
29 capabilities, side by side.
Foundations
OpenAI, Claude, Gemini, Mistral (EU), Azure OpenAI and Azure AI Foundry, side by side. Your own keys or usage-billed access.
OpenAI models only on Frontier, workspace agents and the Agents API; the open-source SDK supports other models.
openai.com ↗EU company (Amsterdam). EU storage and vector cloud by default; US or Asia, or your own S3 or Azure Blob, on request.
ChatGPT Enterprise offers EU data and inference residency; the Agents API is US-only.
help.openai.com ↗Hosted SaaS today.
Agents can run in your infrastructure or self-hosted sandboxes; the platform itself is OpenAI-hosted.
openai.com ↗Managed agents
Agents, portals and automations run on MAEQ; there is nothing to deploy or scale.
Workspace agents run in the cloud; the Agents API is a managed runtime in beta.
openai.com ↗Agents are generated from a plain-language description and automations are compiled from plain language, reviewed before saving.
Workspace agents are built conversationally; the Agent Builder canvas shuts down on 30 Nov 2026.
help.openai.com ↗The portal orchestrator routes each question to specialist agents, runs them in parallel and merges their answers.
Sub-agents in the Agents API; handoffs in the Agents SDK.
developers.openai.com ↗Not yet. Agents carry an A2A-style description card, but there is no A2A endpoint.
Not described in the documentation.
developers.openai.com ↗Shared and per-person memory; portal users can see and delete what is remembered about them.
Workspace agents retain what they learn and can be corrected in conversation; a memory editor is not documented.
openai.com ↗E2B, Daytona or Blaxel workspaces, with git for GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket and Azure DevOps.
Hosted sandboxes in the Agents API; Codex for coding.
openai.com ↗Tools, actions and automations
1,600+ toolkits through Composio, first-party OAuth for GitHub, Slack, Jira, Teams, Azure DevOps and Gmail, and your own MCP servers.
Custom MCP servers and apps such as Google Drive, SharePoint, Slack and GitHub.
help.openai.com ↗Claude, Cursor and other MCP clients can search the knowledge and ask the portals a scoped key allows.
Not described in the documentation.
help.openai.com ↗Scheduled, run-now, chained and platform-event triggers; inbound webhook triggers are not available yet.
Workspace agents run on schedules and API triggers.
help.openai.com ↗The reviewer sees the exact pending action, such as the email about to be sent, and can edit, swap or regenerate it.
Write actions ask for approval by default.
help.openai.com ↗Enterprise context layer
SharePoint, Google Drive and Dropbox sync incrementally, following changes and deletions; S3 and Azure Blob are read in place.
Synced connectors such as SharePoint in ChatGPT.
help.openai.com ↗Dropped folders and archives are de-duplicated, grouped by topic and proposed as knowledge bases; duplicates merge into restorable golden records.
Snowflake Cortex Analyst and Databricks Genie: the warehouse writes and runs the SQL, and MAEQ shows it.
Frontier connects warehouses and CRM through a semantic layer; specific warehouses are not named.
openai.com ↗Portals and end users
Branded portals for staff or customers, an embeddable website assistant, and SSO with Entra ID, Okta or any OIDC provider.
ChatGPT for staff, and ChatKit as an embeddable chat for websites and apps.
openai.com ↗Governance, quality and cost
25 policy types (PII, prompt injection, toxicity, quotas, IP and time limits, tool-chain control), plus Lakera Guard, Bedrock Guardrails, NeMo and Guardrails AI.
Per-agent permissions, prompt-injection safeguards and a guardrails library.
openai.com ↗A versioned registry of your MAEQ agents with auto-written description cards; other vendors' agents are not covered.
Frontier gives each agent an identity and permissions, including third-party agents.
openai.com ↗Every call with its steps and cost; export traces to your own Langfuse. LangSmith, Arize and Helicone export are coming.
Agents SDK tracing and workspace agent analytics.
github.com ↗Automatically built test sets, recall@k and MRR, regression checks, AI-judge groundedness, citation checks, and Comparison Lab to test models and search settings side by side.
Hosted Evals shuts down on 30 Nov 2026; Frontier describes evaluation loops.
developers.openai.com ↗Users rate answers with a reason; a triage console turns each complaint into a recommended fix and where to make it.
Agents can be corrected in conversation; usage analytics.
openai.com ↗Not yet: no simulated users or task-completion graders.
Hosted Evals is being retired; Frontier describes optimisation loops.
developers.openai.com ↗The cost of every call is recorded in a credit ledger, with token, cost and invocation quotas.
Daily discovery of new and retiring models across four providers, and a watch on deprecation pages. Guided migration with an impact preview and rollback, started by a person.
Deprecation notices and migration guides; no automated migration.
developers.openai.com ↗Each client gets an isolated tenant with its own branding, data and plan; a partner console across clients is not available yet.
A console across multiple API organisations; partner delivery through alliances.
openai.com ↗On the MAEQ roadmapComing soon
Intake already prepares the hand-off. Next is a model of your entities, terms and relationships, built automatically from your documents and data.
Frontier describes a semantic layer over warehouses and CRM.
openai.com ↗Agents already combine warehouse figures and documents in one answer. Next, MAEQ decides per question which source should answer what.
Frontier's business context spans warehouses and documents.
openai.com ↗Detect conflicting figures and statements across datasets, data types and local, regional and global sources; score confidence and send low-confidence cases to a reviewer.
How this comparison is made
Every OpenAI Frontier + workspace agents cell is based on the vendor's own documentation, release notes or pricing pages, checked on 14 October 2026, and links to its source. If something here is out of date, email hello@maeq.com and we will correct it.
“Not documented” means we could not confirm a capability from public sources, not that it is missing. Rows in the last group are on the MAEQ roadmap and marked “Coming soon”.
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