COMPLETE ANSWER · DATA & ANALYTICS

Walmart Scintilla Basic vs Charter: what does each tier actually include?

What Scintilla Basic and Charter include after the July 2026 release, how to confirm your tier, and which claims each tier can support in a Walmart line review.

By Matt Drake, practicing retail advisor ·

DIRECT ANSWER

Scintilla Basic is Report Builder over your own Channel Performance data in Walmart Scintilla: build, schedule, export, no sharing. As of September 2026, Charter adds Channel Insights, Boards, Shopper Behavior, Customer Perception, report sharing, and the API, Cloud Feeds, and BI Link integrations; competitor item data still needs Category Advisor.

Scintilla Basic is one working module, Report Builder, running over your own Channel Performance sales and inventory data, plus the documentation surfaces: the Knowledge Base, Scintilla Learn, and the Data Dictionary. Scintilla Charter is everything else in Walmart Scintilla: the Channel Insights dashboards, the Boards Walmart added on July 22, 2026, the category and shopper modules such as Shopper Behavior, primary research through Customer Perception, Insights Activation, report sharing, and the outbound integrations (Data Feeds API, Cloud Feeds, BI Link). A third designation, Category Advisor, sits above Charter. Walmart grants it under a separate agreement rather than selling it, and it is what adds competitor and whole-category visibility inside Channel Performance, which Charter alone does not include. As of September 2026, the tier you are on decides which questions Scintilla can answer for you at all.

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. The nearest thing to a demographic read is the Tender Analysis quick report, where SNAP and WIC penetration works as a proxy.

Channel Performance comes from Walmart’s Finance Data Lake: item-level actuals, refreshed daily, with 104 weeks of history. On Basic, Report Builder can query nine Walmart-curated datasets (Store Sales & Inventory, DC Metrics, Modular Plan Metrics for your own shelf placement, the Store Demand and Order Forecasts, Store Markup and Markdowns, and the eComm Sales, Inventory, and Returns datasets) and run seven quick reports. The Vendor Scorecard carries the most weight in a line review, and on Basic it holds four sections: Store Sales, Store Inventory, DC (Warehouse) Inventory, and Margins and Markdowns. Scheduling recurring runs 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 only a few hundred of the Data Dictionary’s roughly 2,500 elements are visible on Basic. 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, nil picks, and substitution rates, are not available anywhere on Basic: not as columns, and not in the Basic Vendor Scorecard. 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, plus Guided Insights, which flags anomalies in your dollar share of Walmart’s sales, and Custom Rules, which email you when a metric crosses a threshold. Scintilla Boards, added on July 22, 2026 and Charter-only, are Walmart-provided topic dashboards: Business Overview, End-to-End Inventory, Tender Analysis, and Digital Landscapes, which moved inside Boards in the same release. Shopper Behavior opens the whole category at UPC level (a 10% 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, video surveys, in-home usage tests) against the Walmart Customer Spark Community, paid per study; a survey takes one to two weeks to field, and an in-home usage test takes longer.

Charter also unlocks the padlocked Report Builder datasets (Omni Sales, Omni OTIF, Purchase Order, Hourly Store Inventory, Register Sales, Kit Sales), in-app report sharing (recipe only, or recipe plus data when every recipient holds the same Channel Performance access level; never to a supplier at another company), and the integrations: BI Link for BI tools, Cloud Feeds over Delta Sharing, and the Data Feeds API. Marty, the in-app assistant added in July 2026, answers documentation questions with cited sources and does not run reports; it is confirmed on Charter and unconfirmed on Basic. 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, as do the Customer Decision Tree tools in Assortment Deep Dive.

The July 2026 release also changed Report Builder: a Calendar Day of the Week attribute for weekday analysis, a consolidated Omni Hierarchy item-attribute view in Omni Sales, and Tender Analysis extended to 104 weeks of year-over-year comparison, with online pickup and delivery sales assigned to their real tender types instead of the Dotcom bucket. Those changes were observed on Charter; whether the day-of-week column is unlocked on Basic has not been separately confirmed, so look for the padlock.

Basic is the tier Walmart provides to suppliers at no charge; Charter is the paid tier, and Walmart does not publish Basic or Charter pricing publicly. Confirm Charter terms with your Walmart Account Manager rather than with any article, this one included. An upgrade converts overnight: recurring and saved reports migrate, one-time reports and Vendor Scorecards do not, and Basic’s eComm Sales reports become Omni Sales reports filtered to the eComm channels.

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 item added in July 2026, which Basic does not show at all; a visible Boards item means you are not on Basic.

Treat the banner and the padlocks as authoritative, not the navigation count and not the documentation. The Knowledge Base and the Data Dictionary are readable on Basic and cover the Charter modules too; they describe the platform, not your entitlement. Walmart does not label the tier anywhere more prominent than that; the module names do not say it. Category Advisor is different again: if you hold that status in Retail Link, Scintilla elevates you automatically, with no separate request.

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 October. 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 from Report Builder over your own Channel Performance data: the Vendor Scorecard, dollars per traited store per week, in-stock and the inventory pipeline, and your own items’ shelf placement from Modular Plan Metrics. 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.

For a repeatable review, Startup Success Lab explains how to make Scintilla Charter part of how your team works. If the immediate problem is two different sales totals, start with the Boards and Channel Insights reconciliation.

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. In Retail Reason chat, submit your plan and tier to check the assumptions behind it. Review any guidance verification date displayed in chat; guidance through connected assistants also includes a confidence class. A source date does not mean each fact was reverified that day. It checks plans and answers questions; it does not access your account or guarantee outcomes. Pricing is here, or contact Matt.

What are the limits of this answer?

The tier map above was last verified September 6, 2026 and reflects the July 22, 2026 release. Walmart Data Ventures ships Scintilla releases roughly twice a month, so a later release may already have moved a detail here, and its Inspire event runs September 16 and 17, 2026 in Rogers, Arkansas; anything announced there can move a module across the line. Two facts are labeled unconfirmed above: Marty on Basic, and the day-of-week column on Basic. Pricing, Category Advisor terms, and conversion mechanics are contractual; confirm them with your Walmart Account Manager.

Retail Reason cannot see your account. It does not connect to Scintilla, Retail Link, or Supplier One, run a report, or inspect a padlock for you. It can identify which tier a plan assumes, flag the steps that fail on your tier, and reason from the context you provide. See the coverage map and the full service limitations.

Sources checked

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