About
How we test
Most app reviews are written after an afternoon with a trial account. That produces an accurate description of an onboarding flow and almost no information about whether the software is good.
The five criteria
- 1 Ease of use
- How long it takes an ordinary person to get a real result, and how often they need to look something up afterwards. Not how pretty the app is.
- 2 Features
- Depth measured against the category, not against every app ever made. A task manager is not penalised for lacking a spreadsheet.
- 3 Value
- What you get for the money at the tier most people actually buy, not the free plan, and not the enterprise contract.
- 4 Integrations
- The API, the export path and how well it fits the stack you already have. An app that traps your data loses points here.
- 5 Support
- Documentation quality, update cadence, and what happens when you send an email.
Each is scored out of 10. The overall figure is their unweighted mean. We do not weight criteria, because the right weighting depends on you, not on us.
The rules
- We do not take vendor briefings before testing.
- We do not score anything we have used for less than two weeks.
- We do not change a score because a vendor disagreed with it.
- Affiliate links, where they exist, are marked and never affect a score.
- Prices are checked on the date shown on each page, and go stale after that.
- Every factual change to a published page is recorded in the corrections log.
Why tens are rare
A ten means we could not find a way to improve that criterion. Almost everything has a trade-off, and naming it is the entire point of the exercise. If a page reads as though the app has no downside, we have not finished testing it.
Found something we got wrong? Tell us. We update pages rather than defend them, and every change goes in the corrections log with what the page used to say.