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 518 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 142 of 518 tools.
The remaining 376 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, so every record now carries the URL its price came from and the date an editor read it. Treat a figure as accurate as of that date and no later, and confirm on the vendor's own page before you buy.
All of it — the sources, the dates and the records we could not verify — is published as a free dataset under CC BY 4.0: see the open dataset.
What we do not publish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
Through affiliate links. Some outbound links earn us a commission if you sign up through them. It never changes a price you pay, a verdict we publish, or the order tools appear in.
The ranking rules above did not change when the first paid link went live, and every compensated link carries rel="sponsored" in the page source, so you can check that claim yourself rather than take our word for it. 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 were written down in advance.
Coverage
We list 518 tools across 14 categories, and 466 of them have a written review — a verdict, pros and cons. The other 52 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.