# Digica vs Sputnik Digital

> Two top-rated AI Development agencies in Manchester. Side by side: published rates, team size, service and industry coverage, and the curator's assessment of both — pairings are never sold.

Canonical page: https://www.aiagencies.eu/compare/digica-vs-sputnik-digital
Generated: 2026-09-21 · Curated by Gabor Kiss · No paid placements — inclusion, score, and rank are never sold.

## Facts
| | Digica | Sputnik Digital |
|---|---|---|
| Editorial score | 60/100 | 51/100 |
| Hourly rate | €45-85/hr (directory-listed) | €85-130/hr (directory-listed) |
| Team size | 50-249 | 2-9 |
| Location | Manchester, United Kingdom | Manchester, United Kingdom |
| Founded | 2009 | 1998 |
| Last reviewed | 2026-08-04 | 2026-08-04 |
| Services | AI Development, AI Consulting | AI Development, AI Consulting |
| Industries | Manufacturing, Healthcare | FinTech, SaaS & B2B |

## Our take on Digica
Reviewed 2026-08-04 by Gabor Kiss against published evidence.

The preventive-maintenance work is documented the way an engineering buyer would want it: a neural network with XGBoost decision trees and SHAP for explainability, predicting mobile-device failure at 91% accuracy.

Sensor-fusion work covers training convolutional networks on synthetic images and combining RGB with near-infrared, and there is published work running language models on Arm CPUs for edge devices—a constraint most AI agencies never encounter.

Clients are named as logos rather than attached to engagements, so the technical evidence is strong and the commercial evidence is not.

Best for manufacturers and device makers who need models running on hardware rather than in a cloud region, and who will recognize the difference immediately.

### Key strengths
- Explainability is built in, not bolted on—SHAP appears in the published method, which regulated buyers will need
- Embedded and edge deployment is a stated specializm, including LLMs on Arm CPUs
- 80+ data scientists and engineers, with offices in the UK, Poland and Berlin

### Good to know
- The blue-chip logo wall is not connected to the case studies—ask which names map to which engagements
- No founding year published, and the €45–85/h shown here is a third-party directory figure, not Digica's own

## Our take on Sputnik Digital
Reviewed 2026-08-04 by Gabor Kiss against published evidence.

Two named clients carry AI work here: Hollr, a generative-AI platform producing personalized video messages, and Invntry, which identifies and values household belongings from photographs for home-insurance claims.

The Invntry write-up is the more useful of the two, describing an agnostic LLM integration and structured prompt design—an architecture choice that keeps the client off a single model vendor, and worth asking about directly.

Neither case publishes an outcome figure, and the wider practice is positioned as product engineering rather than AI specifically, with discovery, design and conversion work alongside.

Best for insurance and consumer platforms adding an AI feature to a product that already exists, rather than commissioning an AI system from scratch.

### Key strengths
- Two separate named-client AI builds, in different techniques—generative video and image recognition
- Model-agnostic integration is a stated design choice, not an afterthought
- Full product capability around the AI work: discovery, UX, engineering and optimization in one team

### Good to know
- No outcome figures on either AI case—ask what accuracy or adoption looked like after launch
- No published founding year, headcount or rates

## Which to choose
Choose Digica for:
- a more cost-effective engagement (~40% lower rate)
- larger team capacity for multi-stream or enterprise-scale programs
- disclosed specialization in Manufacturing / Healthcare
- a higher overall editorial score

Choose Sputnik Digital for:
- closer collaboration at a smaller team scale
- disclosed specialization in FinTech / SaaS & B2B

## Questions buyers ask

### Which is cheaper, Digica or Sputnik Digital?
Digica is cheaper by roughly 40% — €65/hr median vs €108/hr at Sputnik Digital. Published rates cover different things at different agencies — seniority mix, discovery and included revisions are the usual variables — so treat the gap as a question to ask, not a verdict.

### Which scores higher overall, Digica or Sputnik Digital?
Digica scores 60/100, 9 points higher than Sputnik Digital at 51/100. Both portfolio quality and business credibility feed into the score — see our methodology for the full breakdown.

### Which is faster to engage, Digica or Sputnik Digital?
Neither publishes lead times, so this is a read on team size rather than a measured answer. Sputnik Digital runs the smaller team, which usually means fewer procurement gates and a shorter path to kickoff. Digica runs a larger one, which tends to mean more steps but more capacity to start parallel workstreams. Current kickoff availability is the number that actually decides it — ask both.

### When should I consider both Digica and Sputnik Digital?
Consider running parallel discovery briefs with Digica and Sputnik Digital if your project spans multiple workstreams, you want competitive proposals to compare scope and approach, or you're undecided between the specialization angles each brings (see the Best for cards above). Most engagements ultimately go with one — but the parallel-brief phase is a low-cost way to validate fit.

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Source: AIAgencies.eu — the curated register of European AI agencies. Rate provenance: "agency-confirmed" = disclosed via submission or claimed profile; "directory-listed" = Clutch or two agreeing B2B directories (lone unverified sources are never written). Full method: https://www.aiagencies.eu/methodology · Rate index: https://www.aiagencies.eu/rates