Software Advice Software Buyers Guides Methodology

Software Advice Buyers Guides are designed with our proprietary data and insights to support software buyers as they evaluate systems that are most appropriate for their needs. Below are the sources used to produce these guides:

Software Advice reviews and ratings data

Software Advice provides a user-driven reviews platform where users can review software products. Software Advice has published over 2 million verified reviews across more than 45,000 software products in more than 1,200 software categories.

Our team of experts manually examine all reviews in an effort to ensure published reviews are from verified sources and provide helpful content. All reviews are treated equally during the verification process, regardless of rating or vendor. During this process, the team verifies the reviewer’s identity, checks for conflicts of interest, and evaluates the review against our site guidelines. Learn more about our review verification process.

We analyze the sentiment of the submitted reviews to identify user feedback trends, such as what users find to be the most beneficial about using the software or, conversely, what they find challenging. We assign a sentiment score by identifying the most positive and negative user sentiment around a specific subject (e.g., software integration, benefits, pricing, ease of use, functionality).

Review excerpts are passages extracted from longer reviews written by verified reviewers. We obtain these excerpts by applying an algorithm that considers factors including, but not limited to, word count and topic coverage. Excerpts are not edited for clarity or grammar.

Additionally, for each software category, we ask reviewers to rate—on a scale of “low importance” to “critical”—how important different features are for that software.

Reviews data is used to inform buyers of users' key considerations when looking to purchase software, reveal what users find to be their most commonly-used features for a particular type of software, allow us to understand what users find to be the most beneficial about using that software, and conversely, what do they find to be challenging about using that type of software?

Reviews represent user opinion and do not represent the views of, nor constitute an endorsement by, Software Advice or its affiliates.

Software Advice advisor call notes

Findings are based on data from conversations that Software Advice’s advisor team has daily with software buyers seeking guidance on purchase decisions. The findings in these guides represent buyers who contacted Software Advice and may not be indicative of the market as a whole.

Software Advice software pricing data

Only products with publicly available pricing information and qualified software products within the category are included in our pricing analyses. We summarize publicly available pricing sources, including vendor websites, beginning with the lowest monthly pricing (not considering annual discounts) for packages that include the core functionality for the software category. We also list pricing for more advanced packages (per user, when available) that include these core software feature(s). Individual software buyers’ specific feature needs may differ, and final pricing will vary.

Software Advice 2024 Tech Trends Survey 

Software Advice’s 2024 Tech Trends Survey was designed to understand the timeline, organizational challenges, adoption and budget, vendor research behaviors, ROI expectations, and satisfaction levels for software buyers.

The survey was conducted online in July 2023 among 3,484 respondents from the U.S., U.K., Canada, Australia, France, India, Germany, Brazil, and Japan, with businesses across multiple industries and company sizes (five or more employees). Respondents were screened to ensure involvement in software purchasing decisions.