diff --git a/website/source/intro/index.html.md b/website/source/intro/index.html.md
index ff914838b2..27ec9b0475 100644
--- a/website/source/intro/index.html.md
+++ b/website/source/intro/index.html.md
@@ -16,9 +16,15 @@ detailed reference of available features.
 
 ## What is Consul?
 
-Consul is a service mesh solution that has multiple components for
-discovering, connecting, configuring, and securing services in your
-infrastructure. It provides several key features:
+Consul is a service mesh solution providing a full featured control plane
+with service discovery, configuration, and segmentation functionality. Each
+of these features can be used individually as needed, or they can be used
+together to build a full service mesh. Consul requires a data plane and
+supports both a proxy and native integration model. Consul ships with a
+simple built-in proxy so that everything works out of the box, but also
+supports 3rd party proxy integrations such as Envoy.
+
+The key features of Consul are:
 
 * **Service Discovery**: Clients of Consul can register a service, such as
   `api` or `mysql`, and other clients can use Consul to discover providers
diff --git a/website/source/intro/vs/istio.html.md b/website/source/intro/vs/istio.html.md
index 49437e9dec..4710db7da4 100644
--- a/website/source/intro/vs/istio.html.md
+++ b/website/source/intro/vs/istio.html.md
@@ -14,14 +14,10 @@ To enable the full functionality of Istio, multiple services must
 be deployed. For the control plane: Pilot, Mixer, and Citadel must be
 deployed and for the data plane an Envoy sidecar is deployed. Additionally,
 Istio requires a 3rd party service catalog from Kubernetes, Consul, Eureka,
-or others. At a minimum, three Istio-dedicated services along with at
+or others. Finally, Istio requires an external system for storing state,
+typically etcd. At a minimum, three Istio-dedicated services along with at
 least one separate distributed system (in addition to Istio) must be
-configured for the full functionality of Istio.
-
-Istio plans to work on any platform, but currently has a hard dependency
-on the Kubernetes API. While the documentation covers connecting non-Kubernetes
-services, it assumes that a Kubernetes deployment exists for the control
-plane.
+configured to use the full functionality of Istio.
 
 Istio provides layer 7 features for path-based routing, traffic shaping,
 load balancing, and telemetry. Access control policies can be configured
@@ -75,3 +71,9 @@ Because Consul's service connection feature "Connect" is built-in, it
 inherits the operational stability of Consul. Consul has been in production
 for large companies since 2014 and is known to be deployed on as many as
 50,000 nodes in a single cluster.
+
+This comparison is based on our own limited usage of Istio as well as
+talking to Istio users. If you feel there are inaccurate statements in this
+comparison, please click "Edit This Page" in the footer of this page and
+propose edits. We strive for technical accuracy and will review and update
+this post for inaccuracies as quickly as possible.