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Helm Express vs Aaru
Aaru builds simulated populations for teams to test a product, price, message or strategy on, and starts each engagement with a scoped pilot; Helm Express asks simulated twins of a specific US place.
As of September 2026, from each company’s public site and documentation.
| Aaru | Helm Express | |
|---|---|---|
| Who answers | Simulated agents. Aaru describes each audience as "a population of agents", built from public data, licensed data and, optionally, the customer's own context. It says the result is "a distribution of possible behavior, not a promise about any named person." | In a reading, simulated twins of a place’s residents or businesses; no real person is contacted for a reading. Interviews and short studies with the public and credential-checked experts are run by arrangement, labelled as real people and kept separate. |
| Where | Audiences are described in words with hard parameters such as income or purchase frequency. Aaru says it builds each world from public records, including detailed local geographies, plus licensed data. It says it can represent "every population and audience on the globe", including hard-to-reach groups. | Any of 12,759 US places — cities, counties, metros and states — with a neighbourhood map for most of them. US only. |
| Questions you can ask | Single choice, multiple select, matrix, ranking and free response, with stimuli, hypotheticals and branching logic. | Yes/no, a pick among up to 12 options, or a belief question; an A/B of two messages or two pieces of news; an interview with up to five twins from a reading. |
| What comes back | Interactive results organised by question and audience, with cross-tabs. You can view them in the platform or as a sheet, deck or PDF (.xlsx, .pptx, .pdf). Its published methodology paper describes an error estimate for each question. | Which way the place leans, breakdowns by group and neighbourhood, and an interval and a read-quality grade on every poll result. |
| How you start | Contact Aaru, and it scopes a pilot around one decision. Existing customers sign in. No pricing, self-serve sign-up or API docs are published. | Book a call, or sign in. Planning a question and previewing its cost come before anything runs. |
| Best when | A team wants Aaru to scope and run a pilot around one decision with them, audiences outside the US or defined by behaviour, and richer question types such as matrix, ranking and branching. | You need a fast, low-cost direction on a local question, with its cost shown before it runs — which way the simulated place leans, and among whom — before spending on real fieldwork. |
Choose Aaru when
You want Aaru to scope and run a pilot around one decision with you.
Your audience is outside the US, or is defined by behaviour or role.
You need matrix, multi-select, ranking or branching questions in one study, delivered as a sheet, deck or PDF.
Choose Helm Express when
You want to sign in and start rather than scope a contract, and see a question's cost before it runs.
Your question is about a specific US city, county, metro or state, down to the neighbourhood, on a map.
You want a place-by-place map with neighbourhood breakdowns, plus an interval and a read-quality grade on every poll result, and breakdowns by group.
What we say about Aaru is taken from its own public site and documentation. Check the current version at aaru.com, and tell us if anything here is out of date.
Bring us the decision on your desk.
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