It’s been touted as “the secret to buying the perfect diamond.” But is shopping for your diamond engagement ring through Rare Carat the best way to get a great price on a great diamond?

Rare Carat, a diamond aggregator founded by Ajay Anand, says it's the “Kayak for diamonds,” a way to easily compare the pricing on diamonds so you can get a good deal.

Here’s how it works. When you do a diamond search on www.rarecarat.com, you see listings from a few small online retailers like Adiamor, Yadav, and With Clarity, so you can compare prices between those vendors.

If you click on a link to view a diamond, Rare Carat earns a commission. As the site says: “we get paid when you click on diamonds.”

Pros To Using Rare Carat

Used correctly, Rare Carat can help you get a good price by providing a price comparison to better-known online jewelry retailers like Blue Nile or James Allen. It’s like having three tabs of your browser open at once while you’re shopping, with the addition of a “deal meter” that tells you whether a diamond is a good deal.

Since some diamond wholesalers sell to many online retailers, you can use Rare Carat’s diamond search to find the same diamond listed on different websites, often at different prices. In some cases, you might even find the exact same diamond offered by different online retailers. If one of Rare Carat’s small diamond vendors is willing to sell you the diamond you want at a smaller profit, you can save.

Cons To Using Rare Carat

The most important drawback to using Rare Carat to find a diamond is that even if you find the best price, you can’t really be sure that you have found the best diamond.

Rare Carat itself explains this on its website: “A good deal score does not mean the diamond is high quality, just good value.”

So that great price you found might be on a not-so-great diamond.

The second drawback to using Rare Carat is that the company refers you to small vendors who may not be reliable. It’s as if Kayak only searched Spirit, Southwest, and CheapAir.

Rare Carat uses written policies, online reviews and BBB ratings to assess vendors: the same criteria that are available to you. Those retailers are Rare Carat’s customers, not you.

In fact, until recently, one of the vendors recommended by Rare Carat was Enchanted Diamonds, a company that closed suddenly , leaving some customers who were referred by Rare Carat without the diamond engagement rings or their money.

That’s why we don’t recommend using the “wire transfer” cash option with any of these small vendors. You lose the protection of your credit card company if something goes wrong.

Another issue is that the small vendor who is offering you a deal on a diamond might not offer the ring style or level of craftsmanship you want for your engagement ring. That means you might have to go elsewhere for your ring. You could end up spending more for the setting since you are not buying the diamond and the setting at the same place.

An Alternative to Rare Carat

If you want a great diamond as well as a great deal, we really believe you should also shop for your diamond at RockHer. You’ve got nothing to lose and potentially a lot to gain. Here’s why.

RockHer’s artificial intelligence tool ROSI not only searches our database to find you the best diamond value for your budget, it also assesses each diamond’s quality, weighing more than 30 different factors. It’s the artificial intelligence version of a gemologist. ROSI will recommend a great diamond that’s a great value, not just the cheapest option.

Although you can learn a lot by researching diamonds online, you don’t have the experience of looking at thousands of loose diamond listings to weigh what all the small differences in color grades, cut grades, proportions, and locations of inclusions really mean when you are looking at diamonds in real life, not in images blown up to paperweight size in controlled lighting. Will a diamond that looks the best in a video look the best in your own ring when you are looking at it in your home or office? It’s a gamble.

At RockHer, we aren’t just resellers drop shipping diamond inventory from our suppliers, we’re real jewelers, with three generations of tradition, now selling to consumers for the first time.

At RockHer, unlike Blue Nile and James Allen, the engagement ring you select will be made to order expressly for you, from scratch in one piece, to fit your diamond and your finger size precisely. We use the latest CAD/CAM technology combined with skilled hand-finishing in our Los Angeles workshop to craft engagement rings to the highest possible quality standard for fine jewelry.

We programmed ROSI with all our knowledge about what makes a diamond beautiful and the choices we would make for ourselves when buying a diamond: where to splurge and where to save in order to get the best value.

And because we think it's the right thing to do, we only use responsibly sourced gems and recycled metals. You can even trace your diamond to the source right on our product pages.

RockHer also offers a free comparison tool: no matter where you found your diamond (*cough* Blue Nile), just enter the GIA report number and you’ll see if ROSI can find a better diamond for the same price. (And it also will show you if there’s a better price available on the same diamond like Rare Carat’s comparison tool, saving you a step.) Basically, it’s the automated version of a second opinion. You’ll get the confidence you need to pull the trigger on a diamond you’ll be proud of forever.

You don’t just want a better price: you want a better diamond too! And a better engagement ring, of course. With RockHer, you can have all three.