How we rank tools
Every page on this site puts tools in an order. This page explains what decides that order, what our prices do and do not mean, and which claims we deliberately refuse to make. If a comparison site will not tell you its method, its ranking is worth nothing.
Why there is no quality score
Until recently every tool here carried two numbers — "ease of use" and "feature depth" — and their sum decided the order of every category page, every alternatives list, and which tools we treated as each other's closest peers.
We removed them. Across all 316 tools those scores sat in a band so narrow that they could not actually separate anything, and we could not show you where a single one of them came from. A precise-looking number with no method behind it is worse than no number: it looks like evidence.
What orders the lists now
Starting price, cheapest first — the one number on this site that can be checked against the vendor's own page. Tools that cannot go on that scale (usage-based pricing, a free tier, or a price we could not verify) are listed after them and say which case they are.
Cheapest is not best. Price ordering is not a quality ranking and we do not present it as one. It is simply the only ordering we can justify today.
What our prices mean
A price on this site is the published starting price of the cheapest paid plan, where we could establish one. Right now that is 81 of 316 tools.
The remaining 235 are shown as not verified, usage-based or free tier, and they are deliberately left out of every "cheapest" claim and every price comparison. Showing a usage-based tool such as Stripe or AWS as "$0/mo" would be cheaper to write and simply untrue.
Software pricing changes often. We do not yet stamp each tool with the date its price was last checked, so treat every figure as a starting point and confirm on the vendor's own page before you buy.
What we do not publish
- No star ratings and no review counts — we do not collect them, so we do not show them.
- No sponsored placements, and no "partner" tiers that move a tool up the page.
- No invented complaints. The drawbacks on an alternatives page are the ones from our own review of that tool.
How we make money
At the moment: we do not. ToolCompare is in no affiliate programme and earns no commission from any link on this site.
That is likely to change. If it does, this page and our terms will be updated before a single paid link goes live, every compensated link will be marked as sponsored, and the ranking rules above will not change to favour tools that pay us. Ranking by who pays is the failure mode of this entire category of website; the whole point of the rules on this page is that they are written down in advance.
Coverage
We list 316 tools across 14 categories, and 316 of them have a written review — a verdict, pros and cons. The other 0 are directory entries: we can tell you what they are, what they cost to start and what the closest alternatives are, and their pages say plainly that we have not reviewed them. We would rather list a tool honestly than pad it with a verdict we did not write.
Every tool here was checked by machine before it was added: we fetch the vendor's own website and confirm the page really belongs to that tool. That check exists because six entries on this site once turned out to be products that did not exist at all. They have been removed, and nothing gets in now without passing it. Missing something? Send it in.