DitchCarbon vs EcoVadis: A Guide to Supplier Emissions Data

Choosing Your Supplier Sustainability Platform

For organisations serious about tackling Scope 3 emissions, particularly from purchased goods and services, the challenge is clear: how do you get reliable data from hundreds or thousands of suppliers? The market offers different philosophies and tools to solve this problem. Two prominent names, DitchCarbon and EcoVadis, represent distinct approaches to gathering and using supplier sustainability information.

DitchCarbon is a specialised platform designed to calculate, verify, and reduce Scope 3 emissions with audit-ready precision. It focuses squarely on greenhouse gas (GHG) data to support decarbonisation programmes. EcoVadis, on the other hand, provides a comprehensive sustainability rating service, assessing suppliers across environment, labour and human rights, ethics, and sustainable procurement. Carbon emissions are a key part of its environmental assessment, but not its sole focus.

This comparison will explore the core differences in their methodology, supplier engagement, pricing, and ideal use cases to help you decide which platform best aligns with your organisation’s climate and procurement goals.

At a Glance: DitchCarbon vs EcoVadis

Data Methodology and Accuracy

The fundamental difference between DitchCarbon and EcoVadis lies in their approach to data. Your choice will depend on whether your primary need is for a precise carbon figure or a broad sustainability indicator.

DitchCarbon: A Focus on Verifiable Emissions Data

DitchCarbon is built around the principle of creating a single source of truth for supplier emissions. The platform prioritises collecting and verifying actual GHG data with full provenance. Its methodology follows a clear hierarchy:

1. Primary Data: Direct collection from suppliers through a streamlined, user-friendly portal.
2. Verified Public Data: The platform automatically maps and ingests data from sources like CDP, corporate sustainability reports, and other public disclosures, normalising it for consistency. This significantly reduces the need to survey every supplier.
3. High-Quality Estimates: Where primary or public data is unavailable, DitchCarbon uses sophisticated, industry-specific models to fill coverage gaps, always flagging the data source transparently.

The emphasis is on creating an audit-ready dataset. Every number has a source, a version history, and a quality score, giving sustainability and finance teams the confidence to use the data for external reporting, target tracking, and strategic decision-making.

EcoVadis: A Focus on Holistic Assessment and Ratings

EcoVadis’s methodology is designed to produce a comparable sustainability rating. Suppliers complete a comprehensive questionnaire tailored to their industry, size, and location. They must provide evidence to support their answers, which is then analysed by EcoVadis experts. The result is a scorecard with an overall score out of 100 and scores for four themes: Environment, Labour & Human Rights, Ethics, and Sustainable Procurement.

Carbon and GHG emissions data are collected as part of the Environment theme. While this provides a valuable signal, the final output is a rating, not a granular, standalone emissions figure in kgCO₂e ready for aggregation into a corporate footprint. The platform can provide a Carbon Scorecard, but the core product is the holistic rating. This is excellent for comparing suppliers on a broad ESG basis but may require additional steps to translate into a precise figure for your corporate GHG inventory.

Supplier Engagement and Workflow

How a platform interacts with your supply chain has a significant impact on response rates, data quality, and supplier relationships. Both platforms aim to engage suppliers at scale, but their models create very different experiences.

DitchCarbon: Minimising Supplier Burden

DitchCarbon’s philosophy is to “engage without chaos.” The platform is designed to lighten the load on suppliers by doing the heavy lifting first. By pre-populating profiles with verified public data, it reduces the number of questions suppliers need to answer. The engagement process is automated, with reminders and support to boost response rates, and is always free for suppliers to participate. The goal is to make providing data as simple as possible, fostering collaboration rather than fatigue. This approach helps engage the “long tail” of smaller suppliers who may lack dedicated sustainability teams.

EcoVadis: Comprehensive but Intensive Assessment

The EcoVadis assessment is thorough and, consequently, can be resource-intensive for suppliers. Completing the questionnaire and gathering the required evidence can take considerable time and effort. This rigour is what gives the EcoVadis rating its credibility. However, it can also be a barrier for smaller suppliers. Furthermore, EcoVadis operates a hybrid business model where suppliers are encouraged to purchase a subscription to access their detailed scorecard, benchmarks, and improvement tools. While this can incentivise improvement, it can also create friction with procurement teams who are asking their partners to participate.

Pricing and Business Model

The commercial models of the two platforms reflect their different philosophies on where the value lies and who should pay for it.

• DitchCarbon operates on a straightforward enterprise Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model. The buying organisation pays an annual subscription based on the size of its supply chain and required features. Supplier engagement and data submission are always free for the supplier, removing any financial barriers to participation. This aligns the cost with the organisation that benefits directly from the Scope 3 data.
• EcoVadis uses a two-sided model. The enterprise client pays a subscription to access the platform, invite suppliers, and view their ratings. Suppliers can submit their assessment for free but have limited access to their results. To get the full value-including their detailed scorecard, corrective action plans, and benchmarking-suppliers are encouraged to purchase their own subscription. This model funds the detailed analysis but can be a point of contention for suppliers who feel they are paying to comply with a customer request.

When to Choose Which Platform

Both DitchCarbon and EcoVadis are powerful tools, but they are optimised for different jobs. The right choice depends on your organisation's primary objective.

Choose DitchCarbon if:

• Your primary goal is to accurately measure, report, and reduce your Scope 3 footprint in an auditable way.
• You need to set and track progress against science-based targets (SBTi).
• You want to embed a reliable emissions signal into your procurement process to make decisions before the purchase order.
• You need a scalable way to engage your entire supply chain, including the long tail, without causing supplier fatigue or imposing costs on them.
• You are focused on a collaborative approach to decarbonisation, providing suppliers with data and tools to help them improve.

Choose EcoVadis if:

• Your primary goal is to manage broad ESG and reputational risk within your supply chain.
• You need a single, standardised, and globally recognised rating to qualify and compare suppliers on a wide range of sustainability criteria.
• Your procurement and compliance teams need a tool to ensure suppliers meet a baseline of ethical, social, and environmental standards.
• You value a comprehensive, evidence-based assessment of a supplier's policies and procedures over a specific focus on their operational emissions data.

In summary, for deep, actionable, and audit-ready carbon data aimed at driving decarbonisation, DitchCarbon offers a specialised and powerful solution. For broad-based ESG risk management and supplier qualification using a standardised rating, EcoVadis remains a market leader.