Go look at Coolset's pricing page, then ours. Both sit in the same roughly €5K–€15K/year bracket that a 200-person manufacturer in Rotterdam or a 400-person food brand in Lyon can actually sign off without a procurement committee meeting. Both were built after 2020, both treat the Big Four price tag as the thing they're quietly undercutting, and both will get a first-year CSRD filer across the finish line.
The difference isn't price. It's whether you'd rather click through a wizard or talk to an agent.
Coolset, founded in Amsterdam in 2021, is one of the better products in the SMB ESG category. They've put real engineering into CSRD onboarding flows and carbon accounting for mid-sized European companies, and their demo is polished in a way that only comes from iterating with actual SMB customers instead of just selling upmarket. We'll say nice things about them in this piece because they deserve it. We'll also explain exactly where an agent-native tool like Formist does things Coolset's wizard model can't.
What the two tools have in common
Both Coolset and Formist — Formist is an AI-powered compliance platform built by WeCarbon that works like a knowledgeable colleague you upload documents to and ask questions of — are pitched at the same buyer. That buyer is usually a head of sustainability, a finance director wearing a second hat, or a sustainability analyst hire #1 at a company that doesn't have #2 yet. They've been quoted €80K–€150K by a consultant, they've looked at Workiva and bounced off the enterprise pricing, and they want something that doesn't require a six-month implementation.
Both platforms handle:
- CSRD / ESRS disclosures — data collection, materiality support, drafting, XBRL output.
- Carbon accounting — Scope 1, 2, and the realistic parts of Scope 3 for an SMB.
- CBAM quarterly reporting — though the depth differs, more on that below.
- Document upload and evidence storage — attach the energy bill to the datapoint.
- Multi-user collaboration — approvals, review flows, audit trails.
Pricing-wise, both are in the range that a CFO can approve without escalating. Coolset's public tier lands around €5K/year for the entry plan and goes up from there with modules and company size. Formist's plans are in the same ballpark — pay-per-use for lighter users, annual subscription for teams, well under the €80K invoice the same team would have paid a consultant for year one.
If your shortlist is Coolset vs. Formist, you are already past the "can we afford compliance software" conversation. The real question is how you want to interact with the tool for the next three years.
Where Coolset wins
Let's be specific instead of hedging.
1. First-time CSRD hand-holding. Coolset has invested in wizards that walk a first-time filer through double materiality, IRO identification, and disclosure selection in a structured UI. For a finance-trained user who has never read ESRS E1 and would rather be guided step by step with progress bars than describe their situation in prose, this is genuinely comforting. The wizard asks questions in an order someone has thought about. You answer, click next, and the disclosure list narrows. It's good software for people who like software to feel like software.
2. EU SMB market fit. Coolset is Dutch, their customer base is concentrated in the Netherlands, Germany, France, and the Nordics, and their sales and onboarding teams know the local regulatory nuances — CSRD national transposition differences, VAT handling inside the platform, SBR taxonomy quirks. If you're a Dutch or German mid-cap and your accountant is already using SBR, Coolset fits into that world without friction. Their collateral reads like it was written by someone who has actually sat in a Dutch compliance meeting, not translated from a San Francisco deck.
3. A mature dashboard for ongoing tracking. Coolset's ongoing-reporting view — emissions trends month over month, data completeness by subsidiary, CSRD readiness score — is a proper SaaS dashboard. If your job involves showing the board a screen once a quarter that says "here's our progress," Coolset produces that screen out of the box. Formist will generate charts and exports too, but Coolset's dashboard is a more finished product if a live view is the main artifact you need.
4. The wizard IS the training. For a team with zero ESG background, being forced down a linear path is a feature. You can't skip steps you don't understand; the software won't let you. That is a meaningful advantage for an organization that is genuinely learning CSRD from zero and wants the tool to act as a teacher.
Those are real wins. If any of them describe your situation precisely, Coolset is a strong pick, and you don't need the rest of this article to tell you otherwise.
Where Formist wins
Three things, with specifics.
1. Agent vs. wizard as the primary interaction. This is the big one. Coolset's model: click through structured forms, fill cells, advance through wizard steps. Formist's model: upload your annual report, your energy bills, your procurement CSV, and a PDF your Chinese supplier sent in Mandarin — then describe what you need. The Formist agent reads the documents, extracts the relevant datapoints, drafts the disclosures with source citations, asks clarifying questions for the ambiguous bits, and produces the same structured output a wizard would, without the 40 wizard screens.
This matters most when your inputs are messy. A real mid-cap's data does not arrive in tidy CSV format. It arrives as a scanned utility bill, an HR headcount report with four tabs, an ERP export that a consultant swore was "nearly ready," and a supplier questionnaire half-completed in the wrong language. A wizard assumes you have already cleaned that data. An agent will look at what you have and tell you what's missing. Those are different jobs.
2. Broader framework coverage. Coolset is strong on CSRD and carbon accounting — that's their positioning and they're honest about it. CBAM is there but it's the Excel-like module, not the flagship. ISSB, SBTi, LCA, CDP, and EU Taxonomy get uneven treatment depending on the plan and the module you buy. Formist covers 15+ frameworks — CSRD/ESRS, CBAM, GHG Protocol, EU Taxonomy, CDP, ISSB, SBTi, LCA screening, and more — under one subscription, with data that flows between them. If you're tagging a Scope 1 emission for CSRD E1, the same datapoint populates your CDP climate questionnaire, your ISSB S2 disclosure, and your SBTi inventory.
For a company whose compliance scope is today "CSRD and carbon accounting" but next year becomes "CSRD, carbon, CDP for a key customer, and an SBTi target because procurement is asking" — that multi-framework flow saves a separate platform purchase. Coolset will handle the first two beautifully. Formist will handle the full path without a re-onboarding.
3. Document extraction from real-world inputs. Upload a 62-page PDF of a supplier's environmental report written in Mandarin with embedded tables and hand-drawn factory diagrams. Formist will parse it, pull the emission factors, and tell you which datapoints it can source and which it can't. Coolset's import tools are built around structured formats — CSV, Excel, API. That's faster when your data is structured, and slower when it isn't. Most SMBs don't have structured data. They have the PDF from the supplier.
The pricing comparison (both public, roughly)
Coolset publishes a tiered model with an entry price around €5K/year for smaller companies, scaling to €10K–€15K for the CSRD-ready plan with multiple entities, and custom pricing for larger groups. Exact numbers shift with modules (carbon-only vs. CSRD-included vs. CBAM add-on) and company size.
Formist's published plans sit in the same range. Lighter usage on pay-per-use starts below €500 per filing for single frameworks; annual team subscriptions for a mid-cap doing CSRD plus carbon plus one or two other frameworks land in the €6K–€15K/year zone depending on seats and volume.
Neither of these will save you six figures versus the other. Both will save you six figures versus a Big Four SoW. The budget argument isn't between the two platforms — it's already been won by both.
Which one to pick
Here is the actual answer, not the consultant's answer.
Pick Coolset if:
- Your scope is CSRD and carbon accounting, and you don't foresee it growing to include CDP, ISSB, SBTi, or LCA in the next 18 months.
- You prefer traditional SaaS — wizards, dashboards, structured forms, progress bars. You find conversational tools unsettling and you want a tool that behaves predictably in a demo.
- Your data is already reasonably structured. Your ERP exports clean numbers; your suppliers send you spreadsheets, not PDFs.
- You're a Dutch, German, or Nordic mid-cap and you value vendors with local regulatory depth and a support team in your time zone.
Pick Formist if:
- Your framework scope is genuinely multi — CSRD plus CBAM plus CDP, or ISSB on the near horizon, or an SBTi target your customer is demanding, or an LCA screening for a product launch. You don't want to buy two or three tools.
- Your input data is messy. Scanned PDFs, supplier documents in four languages, unstructured annual reports, emails with attachments. You want document extraction as a first-class feature, not a bolt-on.
- You'd rather describe what you need in a sentence than navigate a 40-step wizard. Your sustainability lead is a former analyst or consultant who thinks faster than they click.
- You want one agent that knows your company's data across every framework, so the same CO2e figure doesn't get re-typed into three different platforms.
These are close competitors. Nobody reading this should feel like they're choosing between a good tool and a bad tool. You're choosing between a polished wizard built for first-time CSRD filers with clean data, and an agent built for messy inputs and broad scope.
A footnote on switching cost
One point worth making: if you sign with either platform this year and decide in 18 months you chose wrong, the switching cost is real but survivable. Both platforms export your data — datapoint structures, evidence files, disclosures — in formats you can import elsewhere. Neither traps you in the way enterprise CSRD suites do with proprietary taxonomies and six-figure migration fees. The CSRD narrative you drafted in Coolset can be copy-pasted into Formist's draft editor, and vice versa. The carbon footprint you calculated in one platform can be re-derived in the other because both use the same GHG Protocol methodology underneath.
Don't agonize over the decision as if it's permanent. It isn't. Pick the one that matches how you want to work this year, and if the fit is wrong, switching is a two-week project, not a two-quarter project.
The ESG software market finally has affordable, SMB-native products that don't look and feel like compliance waterboarding. Coolset and Formist are both part of that shift. The question is just whether you'd rather fill in the form, or describe the problem.
Formist is built by WeCarbon, a climate-tech company with offices in Shanghai, Paris, and Dubai. It supports CSRD/ESRS, CBAM, GHG Protocol, EU Taxonomy, CDP, ISSB, SBTi, LCA screening, and 15+ other sustainability frameworks under one agent.