What is a Software Comparison Website?

Software Comparison Website Definition

A software comparison website is a platform that advertises itself as a way to find and select software, usually grouped by categories. It is a large field of data that needs frequent updating. Software comparison platforms may compare just one specific tool/platform/operating system like iPod file managers, or they may provide comparisons within many types, categories, or sub-categories of software.

Software Comparison Methodologies

Many of today's software comparison sites rely heavily on customer reviews. Unfortunately there is a downside to this method. Many of these reviews are outdated or no longer apply to the current software version. Also, finding accurate, unpaid, human-generated reviews is becoming much more difficult with the advent of modern natural language generators like GPT-3 and Facebook’s Megatron. In fact, a large amount of B2B (business to business) software reviews ‘look outright fraudulent’. Many businesses, including software comparison sites, are having to find ways to avoid these problems.

In the realm of software comparisons, a data-driven approach can be much more reliable. Some things to look for include up-to-date, ordered feature lists and their descriptions; content-change monitoring to stay up-to-date, proprietary interactive charts; and other important business details. Obviously we here at Doakio are partial to our own method of overcoming these problems in the software comparisons space. We believe that transparency is the best approach. You can even see a comparison of other software comparison platforms here.

How to Compare Software on Doakio

If you’d like an overview of our own methods, you can watch this informative video. If you would like to jump right in, move on to step 2.

Simply go to our home page and select the software category of your choice. This will bring up our research publication on that subject.

Once you have opened the publication and start reading, you’ll quickly find our custom survey button. By participating in this survey, you will hone in on the software tools that fit your use case the best. (We’ll email a complimentary custom report based on your feature preferences!)

In the research publication, below our “top ten” list, be sure to make use of the interactive scatter plot. This shows where all the different tools stand in relation to each other, in two dimensions. This chart makes use of a built-in proprietary weighted layer based on input from a cohort of industry professionals. These experts let us know what they thought were the most important features.

Software Comparison Site Features

This feature list will help you keep in mind some of the attributes to consider as you look for the right software comparison website (in order of feature commonality):

Attribute Rating – A method of scoring the software solutions based on the actual attributes or features of the software.

Proprietary Report / Chart – Provides a unique report or chart to interpret or evaluate the software functions and features, and provide visual results.

Human Generated Reports – Human curated reports.

Comprehensive Research – Meticulously and methodologically prepared research that doesn’t limit consideration to only those software vendors who paid or otherwise chose to participate in the research.

Customer / 3rd Party Reviews – Provides or accepts reviews from customers and 3rd parties (parties not controlled by a seller or a customer). Reviews may provide valuable insights but are hard to police and validate.

Ad-Free – Contains no advertisements.

Alternative Offerings – List of other optional products closely related to the products/services being offered.

Auto-Generated Reports – Reports are automatically generated by the software system.

Lists Software Features – This includes feature lists for either the entire category of software, or for each individual software solution.

Free Customized Reports – Gathers visitor's preferences automatically, and generates a customized report based on those preferences.

Rank Ordering – A sorted list of software tools according to a specific quality or metric.

Interactive Filters – The user can select one or more filters to apply to the software feature data.

Software Comparison Platforms

To get you started on your journey, this list of software-comparison websites is in order of popularity:

For help in finding a comparison tool that fits your needs, please see our original research publication on software comparison platforms that is always kept up-to-date. Also, remember to participate in our custom Software Comparison Platforms Survey so you can layer in your own importance prioritization for each feature. At Doakio we love helping amazing people find amazing software fast!

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