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How We Evaluate Software
Business-Software.com has published independent software research since 2002. This page explains how our guides are made, where our numbers come from, and how we make money. You can’t judge advice without knowing who’s paying for it.
How we make money (and how we don’t)
We’re a lead-generation business. Our guides and comparisons are free and ungated; alongside them we offer downloadable resources (pricing guides, comparison reports, buyer’s guides) that ask for your work email. Software vendors pay us when readers choose to be connected with them.
That’s the whole model.
What we don’t do: vendors cannot pay to be ranked higher, to be included in a comparison, to soften a criticism, or to remove a “look elsewhere” verdict. Rankings and verdicts are editorial decisions made before any commercial conversation. Where a piece of content is sponsored or produced with a vendor, it’s labelled as such — sponsorship buys disclosure, not conclusions.
Where our numbers come from
Pricing is the most useful thing in a software comparison and the easiest to get wrong, so we’re specific about sourcing. Published list prices are taken from vendor price lists and dated. Where vendors quote only (most of the mid-market) we use partner-quoted ranges and anonymised buyer budgets: figures from implementation proposals and real projects shared with us, aggregated so no company or partner is identifiable. We never present vendor list prices as street prices, and we never present street-price ranges as official. Every regional guide states its currency, tax treatment (for example, AUD ex GST) and verification date, and pricing is re-verified on a quarterly cycle.
How we score and compare
Every comparison starts from the buyer’s job rather than the vendor’s feature list. For each category we establish the criteria that actually decide outcomes. In Australian ERP, for instance: local partner strength, payroll and statutory compliance depth, real total cost over five years, and industry fit. We weight what matters most to the target buyer and we say so in the guide. Where we publish scores, they’re our editorial judgment informed by capability analysis, current pricing, demos, and practitioner interviews. Treat them as a starting point and reweight for your situation.
Two house rules follow from this. First, every product gets a “watch out” — there is no software without trade-offs, and a comparison that can’t name them isn’t finished. Second, we say who shouldn’t buy — our “look elsewhere if” verdicts exist because the right answer for a reader is sometimes a product we don’t cover, or no purchase at all.
Regional guides
Our country guides (currently Australia, with New Zealand underway) are researched for each market rather than translated from a global template: local pricing in local currency, the compliance regimes that decide projects (STP Phase 2, BAS and SuperStream in Australia; payday filing and KiwiSaver in New Zealand), locally-built vendors that global comparisons ignore, and the implementation-partner reality on the ground.
Freshness and corrections
Guides carry a visible “last reviewed” date and are re-reviewed on a monthly cycle; pricing quarterly; annual editions roll forward each December. When we get something wrong, we correct the page and note the correction. Spotted an error? Email [email protected]. Corrections make the product better and we want them.
Who writes this
Our guides carry named bylines. Business-Software.com is led by Sherman Hsieh, founder and Editor-in-Chief, formerly an executive at Siebel Systems. Years spent selling and deploying enterprise software from the inside shape how we read vendor claims.
How our guides are produced. Our guides are researched, fact-checked and drafted with AI assistance, and reviewed and approved by our editors before publication. Every figure carries its source and the date we checked it.