AccessPoint vs. FOI Assist

The short answer

FOI Assist is a well-regarded, lightweight SaaS for Ontario FIPPA/MFIPPA institutions — deadline tracking, guided workflows, compliant letters, and automatic IPC annual statistics, built by an Ontario lawyer who ran a major FOI program himself. For a very small office that mainly needs deadlines and correspondence handled, it's an honest, affordable answer. AccessPoint plays a different game: document collection from Microsoft 365, a full redaction studio, privacy and algorithmic impact assessments, breach response, complaints, risk, and a court-ready audit ledger — running inside your own tenant, across 106 jurisdictions.

What is FOI Assist?

FOI Assist was created by Justin Petrillo, an Ontario lawyer and former software developer (with NVIDIA and Microsoft on his résumé) who ran the freedom-of-information program for the Toronto 2015 Pan Am / Parapan Am Games. Released commercially in February 2021, it's a browser-based subscription tool aimed squarely at Ontario institutions governed by FIPPA and MFIPPA — municipalities, police services, universities, colleges, school boards, hospitals, and health units.

The product focuses on the administrative spine of Ontario FOI work: tracking statutory deadlines, guiding each request through a compliant workflow, generating decision letters and notices, and producing the annual statistical reports the Information and Privacy Commissioner requires. Petrillo also maintains a genuinely useful free FOI knowledge base and seminar series that many Ontario coordinators rely on — credit where due.

The comparison isn't about quality — it's about scope and architecture. FOI Assist handles the paperwork layer of Ontario FOI in its own hosted service. AccessPoint operates the whole mandate — records collection from SharePoint and Outlook, redaction with exemption tagging, PIAs and AIAs (including Ontario's Bill 194 obligations), breach response, complaints, and privacy risk — inside the Microsoft 365 tenant your institution already secures.

FOI Assist fact sheet

Product: FOI Assist — browser-based subscription software plus a free public FOI knowledge base
Vendor: FOI Assist (Justin Petrillo), London, Ontario; released February 2021
Deployment: Vendor-hosted SaaS, nothing to install
Market: Ontario FIPPA/MFIPPA institutions — municipalities, police, school boards, universities, hospitals
Status: Actively developed and sold

Sources

FOI Assist and AccessPoint, side by side

	FOI Assist	AccessPoint
Scope	Deadlines, workflows, letters, and IPC statistics for Ontario FOI	Access requests plus PIAs, AIAs, breach response, complaints, and a privacy risk register
Where your data lives	Vendor-hosted service	Your own Microsoft 365 and Azure tenant
Records collection	Handled outside the tool	Pulled straight from SharePoint, OneDrive, Outlook, and Teams
Redaction	Handled outside the tool	Browser-native studio with statutory exemption tagging, fall-backs, and AI-proposed redactions
Jurisdiction coverage	Ontario (FIPPA/MFIPPA)	106 jurisdiction packs — Ontario included, plus federal ATIP, other provinces, US, EU, UK
Statutory reporting	Automatic IPC annual statistical reports	Statutory report templates per jurisdiction, plus Report Studio dashboards and My Day live tiles
Best-fit office size	Small offices and solo coordinators	Small teams through multi-department programs — flat pricing, no per-user fees
Pricing	Annual subscription	Flat annual, published on the site, no per-user fees

Competitor capabilities vary by product edition and configuration; this table reflects each product's public positioning as of August 2026.

Where FOI Assist fits

A fair comparison cuts both ways — FOI Assist is a reasonable choice when:

You're a small Ontario institution — perhaps a solo coordinator — whose pain is deadlines, letters, and the IPC annual statistics, and records volumes are low enough to handle outside the tool.
Budget is the binding constraint and a lightweight subscription covers your genuine needs.
You value the practitioner-built Ontario specificity — the workflows track FIPPA/MFIPPA closely, and the free knowledge base alone is worth knowing about.

Where AccessPoint differs

The records work, not just the paperwork Collection tasks to custodians, dedupe and relevance review, full-text search with OCR, and a browser-native redaction studio — the document-heavy middle of FOI work that letter-and-deadline tools leave to you.

Bill 194 and beyond Ontario institutions now carry mandatory PIAs and incoming AI rules. AccessPoint runs PIAs, AIAs, breach response, complaints, and privacy risk on the same platform as requests — one audit ledger across the mandate.

Inside your own tenant Requests, records, and audit history live in your Microsoft 365 and Azure environment, governed by your existing security stack — nothing hosted by the software vendor.

Reporting that grows with you Jurisdiction-pack statutory reports plus Report Studio — compose your own dashboards, pin live tiles to My Day, and answer plain-language reporting questions with Ask AccessPoint.

Migrating from FOI Assist to AccessPoint

Outgrowing a lightweight tool is a good problem. AccessPoint imports your history without an ETL project — and without losing the years of tracking discipline you've built.

Export your request history to Excel from your current tool.
Download AccessPoint's import template from Settings → Data import & export — it carries your tenant's own type codes, and your existing file numbers persist as legacy references.
Upload and validate: a per-row created / skipped / errors report runs before anything imports, with safe re-runs on corrected files.
Stage any historical documents in the migration-staging container in your own Azure storage, with optional hash verification.
Import in the background — records arrive historical, with no notifications, no recomputed deadlines, and Imported audit provenance.

Your historical IPC reporting stays reproducible: imported requests carry their original dates, so register reports over past periods reflect the history you actually had.

Plan your migration → · Data Import & Export guide · Migration & onboarding services

Questions people ask about FOI Assist and AccessPoint

How is AccessPoint different from FOI Assist?

FOI Assist focuses on the administrative layer of Ontario FOI — deadlines, guided workflows, compliant letters, and IPC annual statistics — in a lightweight hosted subscription. AccessPoint is an operating platform for the whole mandate: records collection from Microsoft 365, a full redaction studio with exemption tagging, PIAs and AIAs, breach response, complaints, and a privacy risk register, running inside your own tenant with a hash-chained audit ledger. Small Ontario offices legitimately choose FOI Assist; offices with document volume, privacy obligations, or multi-statute scope outgrow the lightweight category.

Is FOI Assist only for Ontario?

Yes — it's built specifically for Ontario institutions under FIPPA and MFIPPA, which is part of its appeal for that market. AccessPoint ships an Ontario jurisdiction pack with the same statutory specificity (deadlines, exemptions, fee rules, IPC reporting), plus 71 other packs covering federal ATIP, the other provinces, US FOIA and state laws, EU GDPR, and UK FOI — relevant if you're a shared service, a multi-jurisdiction organization, or simply want room to grow.

We mainly struggle with deadlines and letters. Isn't a lighter tool enough?

It might be — an honest vendor says so. If your volumes are low and records review is manageable by hand, a deadline-and-letters tool solves your actual problem. The threshold to watch: when document collection, redaction, Bill 194 PIAs, or breach response start consuming your week, those are platform problems, and solving them piecemeal (a redaction tool here, a spreadsheet risk register there) costs more than one system that runs it all.

Does AccessPoint produce the IPC annual statistical report like FOI Assist does?

Yes — the Ontario jurisdiction pack includes the statutory reporting templates for Ontario institutions, generated from the same case data you process day to day, alongside operational dashboards and Report Studio for everything the statute doesn't ask but your leadership does.

Can we start with FOI Assist and move to AccessPoint later?

Yes, and the path is clean: export your request history to Excel, map it into AccessPoint's tenant-generated import template, validate per row before anything imports, and keep your original file numbers as legacy references. Imported records arrive historical with full audit provenance. Portability works in both directions — AccessPoint's one-click export means you're never locked in here either.

Competitor information on this page is drawn from public sources — vendor websites, government reports, and press coverage — and was last reviewed in August 2026. Products evolve, and a comparison is never the whole story: capabilities vary by edition and configuration. Spot something out of date? Tell us and we'll correct it.