What Sentinel Visualizer is
Sentinel Visualizer is a Windows desktop link-analysis application made by FMS, Inc., a Virginia-based US company that has built database and analytics tools since the 1980s. Sentinel has been on the market since approximately 2003 and is used by many sheriff's departments, fraud examiners, county-level investigators, and some federal LE shops. The product offers solid social network analysis (centrality, betweenness, shortest path), timeline charting, geospatial overlay, and basic reporting. Pricing runs roughly $1,500–$2,000/seat for the Standard edition and $3,500–$5,000/seat for Advanced, with educational discounts available. Files are stored in a proprietary .sntl format. Multi-user collaboration is via shared file storage — there is no real-time sync server.
Why Sentinel is your closest direct comparable
Of all the tools MemoryJar competes against, Sentinel Visualizer is the most direct match by deployment model, target buyer, and price tier. Both are American-made desktop applications. Both target law enforcement and intelligence analysts. Both are priced in the analyst-affordable range (well below i2's $6,600). Both run offline on Windows. Both produce reports that can be entered into evidence. The differences are mostly product modernity: Sentinel's UI is unmistakably Windows Forms-era, with the visual conventions of 2008 software, while MemoryJar is a modern web-stack application running in Electron. Sentinel handles a few thousand entities comfortably; MemoryJar scales to 30,000+. Sentinel's notes are basic text fields; MemoryJar uses rich-text notes with @mention auto-cross-link.
Where MemoryJar wins on capability
MemoryJar provides eight purpose-built jar types — investigation, case file, mind map, workflow, systems architecture, financial fraud, CRM, and executive protection — each with its own entity types, fields, reports, and import formats. Sentinel is link-analysis only. MemoryJar's 38 typed entities cover OSINT, LE, financial, and architectural workflows; Sentinel offers approximately 10 entity types focused on the LE link-analysis use case. MemoryJar produces court-admissible Evidence Package exports (ZIP + DOCX + PDF + manifest) with SHA-256 hashing of every attachment at ingest, FRE 901 ready out of the box. Sentinel produces PDF and image exports without per-attachment cryptographic chain of custody. MemoryJar supports real-time team collaboration via the LAN Shelf — multiple analysts editing the same case simultaneously, with presence and role-based access control. Sentinel's multi-user model is shared-drive file access.
Where Sentinel still wins
Sentinel has 22+ years of LE customer relationships. Many county and state agencies have written training programs, evidence-handling SOPs, and procurement vehicles around Sentinel. For an agency where every analyst already knows Sentinel, where the existing case archive is in .sntl format, and where the procurement office understands FMS, Inc. — switching to a new tool means retraining, file migration, and SOP updates. That switching cost is real. MemoryJar's argument to those agencies is not 'rip out Sentinel today' but rather 'use MemoryJar for new investigations, keep Sentinel for archive lookup of historical cases, and migrate selectively when the value is high.'
Pricing comparison
An analyst on Sentinel Standard pays $1,500–$2,000/year per seat. An analyst on MemoryJar pays $600/year for a 1-year license. A team of five analysts on Sentinel pays $7,500–$10,000/year. The same team on MemoryJar Team pays $3,000/year flat. Sentinel Advanced — needed for some SNA features — runs $3,500–$5,000/seat, where MemoryJar's full feature set is in the base license. For agencies under budget pressure (most of them), the math favors MemoryJar at every tier.