DIRECT ANSWER
Scintilla Basic gives suppliers Report Builder over their own Channel Performance data and documentation tools. Charter adds dashboards, category and shopper modules, research, sharing, and data integrations; competitor item-level visibility in Channel Performance still requires Walmart’s separate Category Advisor designation.
The short version: Scintilla Basic is one working module, Report Builder, running over your own Channel Performance sales and inventory data, plus the documentation surfaces (Knowledge Base, Scintilla Learn, the Data Dictionary). Charter is everything else: the pre-built Channel Insights dashboards, the category-and-competitor modules such as Shopper Behavior, primary research through Customer Perception, and the rest of the Charter module suite, along with report sharing and the outbound data integrations. A third designation, Category Advisor, sits above Charter. It is granted by Walmart, not purchased, and adds competitor item-level visibility inside Channel Performance, which Charter alone does not include. Which tier you are on determines what questions Scintilla can answer for you at all; Walmart drew that line, and it shapes any analysis from the first step.
What does Scintilla Basic actually include?
Basic is Report Builder over your own items’ Channel Performance data; nothing else in the module map is part of the plan. That one surface is deeper than the plan name suggests, but its boundary is hard: own items only, no competitor or category visibility, no customer-behavior data.
Channel Performance is sourced from Walmart’s finance data: item-level actuals, refreshed daily, with roughly two years of history. On Basic, Report Builder can query a subset of the Channel Performance datasets (store sales and inventory, planogram placement for your own items, demand and order forecasts, eCommerce sales and returns among them) and run a set of pre-built quick reports, of which the Report Builder Vendor Scorecard quick report is the one that carries the most weight in a line review. Scheduling recurring reports and exporting to Excel or CSV work on Basic. Sharing a report to another user inside Scintilla does not; that is a Charter feature.
Walmart draws two boundaries in places the module map does not show. First, gating applies at the column level, not just the module or dataset level: inside a dataset Basic can open, individual fields carry a padlock and a “Charter only” label, and most of what you’ll find in the Data Dictionary is Charter-gated. A dataset appearing in your picker is not evidence that every column in it will build. Second, the execution metrics, meaning OTIF and the online-pickup-and-delivery store-fulfillment measures such as first-time pick rate and substitution rates, are not available anywhere on Basic. A Basic supplier reads OTIF in Retail Link, outside Scintilla entirely.
What does Charter add?
Charter adds the module suite and the category view: pre-built dashboards, shopper-level and category-level data, primary research, and the ability to move data out of Scintilla into your own systems. Structurally, Basic answers “how are my items doing?” and Charter can also answer “compared to what, bought by whom, and why?”
These are examples, not a roster. Channel Insights provides the pre-built sales and inventory dashboards over the same data lake Report Builder queries, including anomaly detection on your share of category sales. Shopper Behavior opens the whole category at UPC level (a sample in the app, unsampled through the API): brand share, switching, trial and repeat, basket composition, which is what the category-share and switching parts of a line-review story are built on. Customer Perception runs primary research (surveys, in-home usage tests) against Walmart shoppers, billed per study. Charter also unlocks the Charter-only Report Builder datasets, in-app report sharing, and the API and warehouse-feed integrations. Competitor visibility inside Channel Performance itself, meaning a competitor’s item-level sales, inventory, and shelf placement, still requires the Category Advisor designation even within Charter.
Basic is the tier Walmart extends to suppliers at no charge; Charter is the paid tier, and Walmart does not publish Charter pricing. Confirm Charter terms with your Walmart Account Manager rather than with any article, this one included.
How do you find out which tier you’re on?
Log in and read the left navigation, then confirm with the plan banner. On Basic, the sidebar shows three items (Home, Report Builder, Support) and Report Builder displays the banner “Your current plan is Scintilla Basic.” On Charter, the sidebar shows the full module set, including the Boards surface Walmart added in July 2026, which Basic does not show at all.
Treat the banner and the padlocks as authoritative, not the navigation count and not the documentation. The Knowledge Base is readable on Basic and documents the Charter modules too; it describes the platform, not your entitlement. Walmart does not label the tier anywhere more prominent than that: the module names do not say it, and the Knowledge Base describes both tiers. The banner and the padlocks are where it lives.
What does the tier mean for a line review?
It decides which half of the deck Scintilla can build for you. Basic builds the velocity and in-stock story about your own items; the category story needs Charter, or data from somewhere else. Here is the shape of it.
A supplier on Basic has a line review on the calendar for early September. The deck the merchant expects has four parts: a velocity story, an in-stock story, a category-share trend, and a switching analysis showing where lapsed buyers went. Basic produces the first two well, and produces them from Report Builder over your own Channel Performance data: the Vendor Scorecard, dollars per traited store per week, in-stock and inventory pipeline, and your own items’ shelf placement from modular data. The category-share trend and the switching analysis require Shopper Behavior, which is Charter. Neither can be produced on Basic at any effort level, and there is no Basic workaround that yields competitor data. That is where Walmart drew the line between the two subscriptions.
So the tier sets the plan. On Basic, the own-item half of the deck comes out of Scintilla; the category half comes from a Charter upgrade, a syndicated-data purchase, or a narrower share story. Walmart’s tier line is what forces that choice, and the platform shows it only as a missing module or a padlocked column, so the choice belongs at the top of the line-review calendar, not the end. Either way, the velocity bar that matters for modular decisions is the merchant’s number, and it is not published in Scintilla.
What else does the tier quietly decide?
The tier is one of a family of things Walmart’s data platform decides for you and labels only in passing: whether a dataset includes the column you need or gates it, whether a metric lives in Scintilla or in Retail Link, whether a number is current or was restated. Retail Reason exists so you don’t have to hold all of that in your head. Paste the plan into the context comparison and it flags the assumptions that fail on your tier, with a verification date and a confidence class on every answer. It checks plans and answers questions; it does not access your account or guarantee outcomes. Pricing is here, or contact Matt.