Sawtooth Software’s Lighthouse Studio has been the industry standard for conjoint analysis since the 1980s. It is powerful, well-documented and widely trusted. It is also a desktop application with per-seat licensing, built in an era before cloud collaboration was expected. Ordeen Choice Modelling delivers the same statistical rigour on a modern cloud platform at a fraction of the all-in cost.
Where Ordeen matches Sawtooth
Hierarchical Bayesian estimation — same NUTS sampler, same non-centred parameterisation, same LKJ prior on correlation matrices
Convergence diagnostics — Gelman-Rubin $\hat{R}$, effective sample size, divergent transition monitoring
ACBC with Build-Your-Own + screener + tournament — full adaptive design, respondent-specific choice sets, correct per-respondent likelihood
MaxDiff — anchored and unanchored, hierarchical estimation, population centring
MBC (Menu-Based Choice) — hierarchical binary logit with price and threshold terms
Krinsky-Robb WTP — posterior-draw credible intervals, degeneracy detection
Latent class segmentation — BIC-selected $K$, posterior membership probabilities
BH-corrected interaction testing — with Haldane small-cell correction
If you are migrating from Lighthouse, the posterior means will be within Monte Carlo noise of each other.
Where Ordeen beats Sawtooth
Cloud-native — no desktop install, no “which version of Lighthouse are you running?” questions, no copying files between laptops
Modern UX — designed by people who have used Figma, not Access 2003
Flat monthly pricing — £2,500/month + respondent packs, no per-seat negotiation, invite as many collaborators as you want
Integrated panel — field through Prodege without a separate panel-provider contract and currency reconciliation
Live simulator sharing — send a link to the client, they get the interactive simulator (not a static PDF)
Published methodology — our estimator is documented in full, not inside a proprietary binary
Faster iteration — design brief to fielded study in days, not weeks
Where Sawtooth beats Ordeen
Honest acknowledgement:
Legacy ecosystem — some agencies have 20 years of Lighthouse infrastructure, SSI exports and training materials. Migration cost is real.
Specialised features we don’t have yet — nested-logit CBC estimation, GridCBC, some ancillary modules
Community — Sawtooth has an annual conference and a decades-deep user base
Pricing comparison
Sawtooth is quoted per-seat with annual contracts; actual pricing depends on your account team. Public reports from users suggest £6,000–£15,000/seat/year for Lighthouse Studio, plus panel sourcing separately. Ordeen is £2,500/month flat for the workspace with unlimited seats, plus respondent packs billed transparently per complete. Total cost of ownership for a 3-person research team: roughly 60–80% less with Ordeen.
Who should stay on Sawtooth
Agencies with heavy Lighthouse infrastructure and a stable team already trained on it
Studies requiring GridCBC or other Sawtooth-only modules
Clients contractually locked to Sawtooth for consistency with historical studies
Who should switch to Ordeen
In-house teams starting choice modelling from scratch
Agencies modernising their stack — collaboration pain outweighs migration cost
Teams spending more on seats than on actual research
Clients who want live interactive simulator sharing, not static decks
Start a 14-day free trial at app.ordeen.com/auth/sign-up.
Related reading
Full statistical methodology · Ordeen vs Qualtrics · Ordeen vs Conjointly