Amplence vs Locus Robotics

Locus ships physical capability. Origin handles person-to-goods picking while associates stay at the station; Vector moves heavy or oversized inventory; Array does robot-to-goods with in-aisle consolidation and covers picking, putaway, replenishment, slotting, auto induct/drop-off and pick-and-pass. LocusONE assigns tasks across robots, people and workflows in real time, with dashboards and LocusIntelligence behind routing. The vendor claims up to 90% less unproductive walking and 2-3x productivity, and deployments scale from 10 bots to 1,000+ at one site. Mezzanine picking works without fixed infrastructure, and APIs connect to 65+ WMS/ERP systems. Limits are explicit: collaborative picking still staffs stations, so it is not lights-out; heavy items beyond Array's arm limit need Origin or Vector; narrow aisles need a site survey.

Amplence ships software. Its catalogue is custom AI agents, RAG pipelines over proprietary documents and case precedents, chatbots with tiered human escalation, and n8n/Zapier automation — invoice parsing with duplicate, bank-detail and PO-match checks before routing to a named approver in Slack; lead scoring synced to CRM and Slack within a minute; multilingual order and support handling in English, Spanish, French and German; risk scoring across five government databases producing a PDF report. Human-in-the-loop sign-off and compliance stops are built in by design. Nothing here touches a warehouse floor, and nothing from Locus touches document reasoning.

Neither publishes a price, and the structures differ in kind. Locus prices a Robots-as-a-Service subscription that bundles deployment, optimization, field services and 24/7 global support — the pitch being recurring OpEx instead of a large upfront CapEx project. That subscription only pays back at meaningful daily pick volume; the vendor itself says small warehouses with low volume won't see the return. Budget for a site survey, WMS/ERP integration work, and aisle or mezzanine considerations before the first robot moves.

Amplence is an agency, so you're buying a scoped build, then likely running costs on the infrastructure it lands on — Vercel, AWS, Supabase, n8n. Its own news coverage of n8n 2026 pricing is the useful cost signal: Cloud plans are billed in USD by execution count with a hard stop at your plan limit, and self-hosting is the alternative economics. That means your ongoing bill tracks volume, not headcount. Both vendors also screen buyers: Locus needs the volume to justify a subscription, Amplence needs a describable workflow and internal capacity to review a proposal and sign off on edge cases. Expect a proposal-and-scoping motion on both sides, not a checkout page.