There is no reason to buy a strategy platform if your actual problem is narrower. The useful question is what kind of work you need the system to support, how often it happens and how much strategic judgement the user can bring to it.
A practical comparison
| Approach | Choose it when | What it brings |
|---|---|---|
| ChatGPT or Claude | You need a flexible assistant for thinking, drafting and occasional strategic questions. You can supply the strategic method and judge the answers. | Maximum flexibility, but users must supply more of the strategic method. |
| Specialist research tool | Your bottleneck is finding, retrieving and examining information. Research is the main problem you need to solve. | Strong fit for information discovery, but not a connected agency strategy process. |
| Internal system | You have a distinctive strategic method worth encoding, or strategy needs to feed your own execution agents. | Maximum control and integration potential, with substantial design and maintenance responsibilities. |
| Mirel | You do brand, communication or campaign strategy repeatedly, across clients and teams. Less relevant for predominantly performance or social execution, rare strategic assignments or one specialist task. | A pre-built strategic process and persistent client context for the agency disciplines it is designed to support. |
Use ChatGPT or Claude when
You want a flexible general assistant for thinking, drafting and occasional strategic questions. You have strategists who can frame the problem, build good instructions, challenge assumptions and recognise weak answers.
A general LLM can be extremely good at going deep on a direction. It can also challenge you when asked. The risk is relying on the user to know what to ask and what has been missed.
Use a specialist research tool when
The bottleneck is finding, retrieving and examining information. If research is the only pain point, a research-oriented tool such as Perplexity may be a more sensible first purchase. Research and strategy are related, but they are not the same job.
Build internally when
You have a genuinely distinctive strategic method worth encoding, or a larger system in which strategy needs to feed proprietary execution agents. Internal agents can also be excellent for repeatable operational work such as tenders and finance.
But building a capable strategic system is not just a developer assignment. Strategists must describe their process precisely enough for software to use. Developers and strategists must resolve translation problems. And the system needs to be tested and maintained. Building Mirel involved more than 800 hours of development effort. That is an account of our experience, not a universal cost estimate.
Consider Mirel when
You do brand, communication or campaign strategy repeatedly, across clients and teams. You want the process and questions built in, with persistent context and a structure designed around agency work.
Mirel is less relevant if your work is predominantly performance or social execution, if strategic assignments are rare, or if one specialist task is your only problem.
Try before you decide
Use a familiar client brief. Ask whether the system covers most of your recurring jobs, thinks in a way your strategists respect and reaches recommendations you would seriously consider. Ignore exotic edge cases until the fundamentals work.