SkillsDBvsSkills Base

A consulting practice has twelve consultants up for senior consultant and budget for four promotions. The skills matrix shows all twelve rated 4 out of 5 on client delivery and solution design. That is what they said about themselves, and it does not help you choose.

In SkillsDB, the same twelve look different. The senior consultant role profile requires Level 4 in solution design and Level 3 in commercial management. The scorecard shows self, manager, and benchmark side by side: five people are confirmed at or above the bar by their managers, four rated themselves a full level higher than their manager did, and three are one skill short, each with a development plan already tied to that gap.

Now the conversation changes. You promote on evidence, you know which four need a calibration talk, and the three who missed get a specific answer to "what do I need to do to get there" instead of "maybe next cycle."

Skills Base does the first job of skills management well: it gets a team off a spreadsheet and into a shared, verified skills matrix quickly. The product is positioned for frontline and operational teams, and its pricing is public and approachable, with a perpetual free tier for small teams, per-person paid tiers, and an enterprise tier that adds single sign-on, proficiency targets, and scheduled reporting. For a department that needs a clean matrix and a credible self-plus-verified rating in a matter of days, that is a real advantage.

It is also more than a pure tracker today. Skills Base publishes a skills taxonomy, certificate-currency tracking, gap reporting, career-development links from gaps to interventions, and, on its top tier, internal-mobility insights and an AI assistant. Data residency in the United States, Australia, and Germany is offered, and the company describes GDPR compliance and ISO 27001-aligned practices. If your scope is one operational function and your budget is tight, Skills Base is a reasonable place to start.

Inventory vs readiness. Both products record a rating against a skill. The difference is what the rating is measured against. SkillsDB scores every person-to-skill link on an anchored proficiency level scale, compares it to the level each role requires, and records who assessed it, how, when, and, for perishable skills, when it expires. That is what lets the data answer "who is ready for this role" and not only "who has this skill." Skills Base verifies ratings and tracks certificate currency, but the assessment model is lighter and proficiency targets arrive only on higher tiers.

Self-report vs calibration. Self-assessment is a useful starting point and a weak basis for promotion. SkillsDB runs manager and self assessment against the same anchored levels and puts self, manager, and benchmark on one scorecard, so the gaps in perception surface before they turn into a bad promotion or an unfair one.

Showing the gap vs closing it. A matrix shows where the gap is. SkillsDB turns it into work: gap analysis per person, role, and team, development plans tied to the specific skills that are short, and career pathways that show each person what the next level requires. The same record feeds the training matrix and certifications for regulated work.

Security posture. SkillsDB holds a SOC 2 Type II attestation, independently audited by Johanson Group LLP, and is GDPR compliant, with SSO and SCIM provisioning. Skills Base describes GDPR compliance and ISO 27001-aligned practices, offers SAML single sign-on on its enterprise tier, and hosts in three regions. If your security team works from audited reports, ask each vendor for the report itself.

Choose Skills Base if…

• You need a shared skills matrix for one team and want to be live this month.
• Public per-person pricing and a free tier matter more than what the data does after it is captured.

Choose SkillsDB if…

• Everyone in your matrix rated themselves a 4, and you still cannot tell who is ready for the next role.
• Promotion, development, and staffing decisions need to run off the same assessed record, not an export.
• Employees keep asking what they need to do to get to the next level, and you want the answer written down per role.
• Your security review expects a SOC 2 Type II report and your IT team expects SCIM provisioning, and you want both answered in week one.

Most of what you built in Skills Base carries over: the skills list becomes the seed of your SkillsDB skills library, existing ratings map onto an anchored proficiency scale, and certificates with dates import as certifications with expiries. Team and role groupings become role profiles with required levels, which is the step Skills Base data usually lacks. Plan for a short calibration pass so that a 3 in the old system means the same thing as a 3 in the new one.

Coexistence is uncommon because the products overlap at the matrix layer, but it is workable during a phased rollout: keep Skills Base for a department mid-cycle while SkillsDB becomes the system of record for the organization, with both connected to the HRIS for people data. Implementations are measured in weeks, not months; the calendar is set by how fast your subject-matter experts can agree on frameworks, not by the software.

• Show me five people who all rated themselves a 4 on the same skill. Which of them is actually ready for the next role, and how do you know?
• How is each proficiency level anchored, and can two assessors reach the same rating from the description alone?
• Can I see self, manager, and role benchmark for one person on one screen?
• Does every rating carry an assessor, a method, a trained date, and an expiry where the skill decays?
• When a gap appears, what happens next? Is a development plan created from it, or does someone export the matrix?
• Which features are on which pricing tier, and what does the API expose on each?
• Can I see the SOC 2 Type II report or ISO 27001 certificate itself, and where is the data hosted?