How we work
Plenty of sites have a page like this that just promises to be fair. We wanted to write something more useful, so most of what follows is about the checks we have actually built into how the site gets published, rather than the things we intend to do.
Checks that run before anything goes live
These run automatically every time we publish. If one of them fails the page does not go out at all, which keeps us honest on the days we are in a hurry.
- Every tool has a price, or we say plainly that we could not find one.
- Every tool has something listed that it is not good at.
- A tool gets the same underlying ratings everywhere, even though its score changes from guide to guide.
- No page can quote a price the rest of the site does not back up.
- Scores are calculated, never typed in by hand.
- Tool profiles cannot carry their own prices or scores.
- Internal links have to point at a page that exists.
- The price index counts its own tables rather than trusting a number we typed.
Choosing what goes in a guide
- A tool appears because it is a genuine option for the buyer named in the title, not because the company is large or the product is new.
- We order guides by how well each tool fits that particular buyer, not by its overall score. Those two often disagree, and we say so on the page.
- If a tool is the wrong answer for that reader we leave it out, even when it is a good product in general.
- If we could not find a price for a vendor anywhere, we name them and say so rather than dropping them without comment.
How the scores work
Every tool gets a score out of 10 on each guide it appears on. It comes mostly from where the tool sits in that guide, nudged slightly by how much of the job it does and whether the vendor publishes a price. The full workings are on our methodology page.
A tool scores differently from guide to guide, because we score it for the job that guide is about. Spellbook is our top pick for lawyers drafting in Word and scores accordingly there; on a guide about commercial leases it sits further down the list and scores lower. Its underlying ratings never change, only its place in a particular guide.
What you will never see is a tool scoring higher than the one listed above it. If our ranking and our scores disagreed, one of them would be wrong, and it would be fair to ask which.
One thing we deliberately do not score is accuracy. Doing it properly would mean running a real benchmark, and anything less would mean repeating vendors' own claims as though we had checked them. Our benchmarks page covers what independent researchers have actually measured, including findings that are not flattering to tools we recommend.
Where our prices come from
- If a vendor publishes a rate card, we quote it and note when we checked.
- If they do not, we use figures reported from marketplace and procurement data, label them clearly as reported, and treat them as a rough guide rather than a quote.
- If we cannot find either, we say so on the page instead of guessing.
- When a vendor says something about their own practice, like whether they train AI models on your documents, we quote them directly and link to where they said it.
- We do not copy vendors' certification claims into our own tables. Putting them there would suggest we had verified them, and we have not.
The commercial side
- Nobody pays to appear in a guide.
- There are no affiliate links anywhere on the site, and our links out to vendors do not pass any SEO value.
- No vendor sees a page before it goes live, and nobody outside our team signs anything off.
- You cannot buy a score, which is a much easier promise to keep when the scores are calculated from published criteria rather than decided by a person.
Reviews and dates
A named reviewer reads every guide before it publishes, and you can read about his background on the reviewers page. Each page shows when we last checked it, and we re-verify the prices before we move that date rather than after.
If you think we have got something wrong, our corrections page explains how to tell us and what we will do about it.