How we review B2B software and vendors at Comparitech

Comparitech offers a wide range of helpful content to guide buyers toward a confident decision when shopping for software. While our consumer-focused software reviews are centered around rigorous independent in-house testing methods, we take a slightly different approach with B2B software.

Buying software for a business is a distinct experience compared to buying software for personal use. The stakes are much higher, and depending on the type of software you’re purchasing, the cost of making the wrong choice could be catastrophic for your company (or your job prospects).

To that end, most B2B software purchase decisions tend to lean on several buying factors that aren’t important from a B2C perspective. B2B buyers must also take more seriously other areas that B2C buyers tend to consider at a much lower priority.

The 5 key factors we use for B2B software reviews

When we select and review B2B software, we do so through the lens of someone buying for a business and not for an individual. From our experience, there are five important buying factors for businesses that remain true across almost every B2B software category:

1. The software’s cost versus its value to the company as a solution to a problem
2. The functionality and scalability of the software
3. Customer experiences when using the software
4. The vendor’s ability to support both its customer’s needs and the needs of its own product
5. The vendor’s history of transparency about its products and services

We find these factors all work together to answer a fundamental question for B2B buyers:

Will this software give my business the return on investment I need to justify its purchase?

Cost vs. value

When we research and review software, we examine and report on the cost of the software where that information is visible to us. Many B2B software vendors have variable or negotiated pricing schemes. As a customer, your price may differ vastly from that of a different business. It all comes down to how effectively you or your buying team can negotiate the price.

Given that, we don’t can’t always provide a price in our reviews. However, we perform extensive research to determine whether the vendor’s pricing strategy aligns with the needs of different business sizes (small, medium, or large/enterprise).

We determine software cost and/or business size in multiple ways:

• Direct contact with the vendor
• Pricing information available through online sources, such as the company’s website
• Clues that indicate the vendor’s target market, such as their existing customer list

We consider and include B2B software vendors that meet the needs of businesses across every business size. In fact, we believe it’s vital that each “best of” round-up we write includes the best B2B software for businesses of every size within that category.

We provide pricing information and/or target market sizes to help you decide whether it’s worth reaching out to a vendor. When possible, we also provide RFP templates for different software categories that you can use to negotiate better prices with your vendor of choice.

Functionality and scalability

B2B software needs to solve the specific problems your business is facing, comply with security and industry regulations, and be able to scale with your company. If any of these are untrue about the software, it may be risky to form contract with that vendor.

Our review process prioritizes software that meets the bare minimum features expected for its respective category. We also examine the scalability of the software in question to determine what size of business it’s best suited to serve (and this factors into how we classify the company’s target market).

Our reviews only cover a vendor’s features when we review them, and we update our reviews annually as new features become available.

We determine functionality and scalability in multiple ways:

• Features listed on the vendor’s product website
• Features known to us based on direct contact with the vendor
• Features we’ve found through independent product testing (when possible)

If you purchase software that lacks key features or capabilities, you may be stuck in an expensive and lengthy contract for software you can’t use. The average contract length for B2B software is between 1 and 3 years, which could result in a significant sunk cost, depending on the contract’s release terms.

A vendor may have certain features you need on its product roadmap. That’s promising, but it’s not something you should count on or use to make a buying decision.

Customer experiences with the product

As a business software buyer, reading about honest customer experiences is often a significant part of the decision-making process. This falls under “social proof,” including other factors, such as a vendor’s existing client list.

The more positive the experiences other companies have had with a vendor, the more confident you can be in shortlisting that vendor and potentially making a purchase.

We determine customer experience in multiple ways:

• Assessing user reviews and scores on software directories, such as Gartner, G2, and Capterra
• Assessing product sentiment from users in various category-specific forums on social platforms
• Evaluating feedback and reviews across other locations where information about customer experiences may be found

We also consider the quality and efficacy of customer experience sources as we research and review vendors. Notably, all customer reviews should be taken with some skepticism.

For example, most B2B software directories compensate customers for leaving reviews to help boost their review database. This practice can at times lead to more in-depth product reviews, but it’s a system that’s easily gamed by vendors. Many companies (illegally) offer incentives for customers to leave them positive reviews, reducing the efficacy of the reviews you will find. That issue is why both Yelp and Google banned the practice on their sites.

Meanwhile, forum posts can often be a good source of honest experiences from real, unpaid users. However, software vendors increasingly use these spaces to spam positive messages about their products covertly. This also leads to trust issues with these sources.

Given this, we examine reviews across multiple sources to look for trends in how a product is being discussed. Only products that we deem to be trustworthy will make it onto our ranking lists. We may indicate the trustworthiness of customer experience reviews on individual product review pages if we feel there is some concern.

Customer and product support

B2B buyers with experience working with vendors understandably weigh customer and product support very heavily in buying decisions. Many products are incredibly complex to integrate, scale, and support. If the vendor cannot adequately offer that support, companies may fail to sufficiently launch the software, resulting in significant costs and potential security risks.

Product support coincides with this, as well. If the vendor’s team cannot actively maintain, update, and expand the capabilities of its software, the buyer will have a negative and costly experience, not to mention the potential for increased security risks that can emerge when integrating third-party software into sensitive internal systems.

We determine customer experience using five metrics:

• Number of employees
• Annual revenue or financial investments
• Existing customer service/success staff
• Employee job satisfaction
• Existing self-support documentation

We use our proprietary SupportScore formula to provide B2B buyers with an overall score for each company’s customer and product support capabilities and how it measures up in each category.

You can read more about this on our separate SupportScore methodology page.

Vendor transparency and trustworthiness

Trust remains essential when purchasing a product, especially for B2B buyers. Does the vendor talk honestly about its products and services, or does it embellish details in its marketing material? Most companies’ marketing teams and sales reps stretch the truth to get you into the door and make a sale.

We only list products that we believe utilize fair and honest business practices. If we find trust issues, you will know about them. In many cases, products with distinctly serious trust issues will never be listed on our site or will come with a recommendation as a product not to use.

We determine transparency and trustworthiness holistically related to the other four factors we examine.

E.g., as we explore a software vendor’s cost structure, features, customer experiences, and support capabilities, we ultimately determine how trustworthy it is. Suppose all these areas don’t match what a vendor says about itself. In that case, we may determine that the vendor is low on trustworthiness, and its services may be deemed not worth your time at worst, or at a minimum, should be viewed and engaged with using a high degree of skepticism.

How to use our reviews

We understand that B2B software buying decisions are rarely made individually, and the research process can often take months before a decision is made. We’ve designed our reviews in such a way that you can confidently take one of the following actions:

1. Discover the most trustworthy vendors aligned to your needs
2. Create a vendor shortlist to present to your buying team
3. Collect information to help justify buying decisions
4. Arm yourself with information to discuss with vendors’ sales representatives

Comparitech is rarely the last step in a buying decision. Our methodology was designed to help you get closer to making a confident buying decision that will result in a positive and safe outcome for yourself and your company.

Conflicts of interest

If a reviewer has a personal or financial conflict of interest with a company or product, we ask them to disclose this information to their editor. In that event, we will take steps to assign a different reviewer.

Advertising and affiliate policy

When a product or service is listed on our site, we typically link to it. Some of those links allow us to earn a referral fee if the reader clicks on it and makes a purchase. This, in turn, enables us to fund the site and continue producing quality content.

Our reviewers are instructed to review products and services honestly and without bias. We only recommend products that we are happy to use ourselves. Comparitech employs reviewers and receives the same compensation, whether their review is positive or negative. Our commercial relationships never affect review scores or content.

We maintain a firewall between reviewers and our commercial team. Affiliate links and accompanying text are added to reviews by a commercial team member after the review is completed not to compromise the reviewer’s integrity. Reviewers are hired and paid solely by us and, to our knowledge, have no commercial relationships with any companies whose products we review.