Editorial policy

Where the money comes from

All of our revenue comes from customers who pay us for software and services. None of it comes from vendors, publishers, analysts, or partners. There is no affiliate revenue, no sponsorship, and no arrangement in which a placement can be purchased.

This matters most on the directory. Intuit and Xero both run substantial affiliate programmes for pages exactly like our accounting software comparison, and several AP automation vendors would pay for referrals. Declining that is what allows us to score a competitor above ourselves on the same page.

What we decline to include

Analyst ratings, because the funding relationships behind them are rarely disclosed clearly enough for us to weight fairly. That is a comment on disclosure practice rather than on the analysts.

Customer review aggregates, because incentivised reviews are widespread enough in this category that the averages do not mean what they appear to mean.

Enterprise products, from mid-market comparisons, because including them distorts the scoring for the products the directory exists to compare. And products with a thin customer base, because ecosystem and support cannot be assessed credibly on one.

Where our bias actually sits

Removing vendor payments removes one conflict. It does not remove the structural one: we sell a competing product, and research concluding that this category matters is research that helps us.

We also hold views that are encoded in our weights and that you should adjust if you disagree:

• Implementation risk is underweighted by most buyers. We give it 15%.
• Total cost of ownership is systematically understated in vendor proposals, particularly the internal-time line. We give it 20% and include that line.
• Extensibility and the cost of leaving matter more than feature counts. We give it 10% where most comparisons give it nothing.

Those are opinions. They are stated on the methodology page and on every scored comparison so you can weight them differently.

How we decide what to publish

We publish research when we have measured something ourselves and can state the method. We do not license third-party data and present it as our own, and we do not run surveys where respondents self-report figures they have not measured.

We publish a comparison when we have enough basis to score a product honestly — from documentation, trials, customer conversations, and engagements where we have encountered it. Where we lack that basis, we decline rather than guess with a decimal point.

We publish things that cost us. The manufacturing industry guide tells manufacturers not to buy us and names two competitors instead. Most migration guides open by arguing you should stay where you are. The compliance page states that we do not hold SOC 2 Type II.

Corrections

If something is factually wrong, tell us and we will fix it and note that we did. Dated, visible corrections are what make a page citable; silent edits make one worthless as a reference.

If something is unfavourable but accurate, we will not change it because a vendor objects. We will publish a vendor response alongside it if one is sent.

Every research and comparison page carries a review cadence and a date. Where a page decays faster than others — the AI in ERP survey, particularly — we say so on the page.

Vendors: how to engage with us

Submit a product for consideration at /software/submit. There is no fee and no way to influence the assessment. You do not get pre-publication review, and we will correct factual errors after publication.

If you would rather not be listed at all, tell us and we will remove the entry. We would rather run a smaller directory than assess a product whose vendor objects to being assessed.