Our Software Review Methodology
The CTO's Software Review Methodology
We’re a community of passionate and driven IT and tech leaders with one main desire: create educational, trustworthy, and helpful resources that help tech leaders grow their companies and careers. We achieve this through our tool reviews, thought leadership articles from industry experts, and best practice guides.
When it comes to software, our aim is to provide useful, up-to-date reviews and information that help decision-makers compare and contrast their options. Choosing a new software tool that best matches your needs is not an easy task, not to mention narrowing down the 1000s of options out there into a shortlist.
Our software reviews are designed to make this process easier by eliminating the endless research process and providing a single source of truth on all the software that tech leaders might use day-to-day.
What's included on this page
What Makes Us Qualified?
As part of the Black and White Zebra media portfolio, we’ve been running our publication for 4 years. In that time,
- We've worked with 170+ management professionals
- Researched over 2,000 software tools for different use cases
- Written over 1,000 comprehensive software reviews
How We Test Software and What Criteria We Look For:
We know that each company’s software needs are unique and depend on a variety of factors, all of which are taken into account in our stringent set of review criteria, outlined below.
When considering which tools to include in our lists, our process might include any of the following:
- Speaking with the software company directly to better understand features and functionality
- Reviewing demos and free trials
- Testing key features (which differ by software type; key features for each software type can be found directly on that page)
- Noting key features that might be missing or not up to snuff
- Weighing what other users have to say (not including testimonials directly from the software company)
Here are the main criteria that we use to compare and contrast each software tool we look at:
- Usability: How intuitive the software is, and what resources are available to learn the tool
- Standout features: The quality and quantity of available features for a given plan, and their usefulness for the average market use case
- Reporting & analytics: The ability to store and analyze data through dashboards, reports, and visualizations
- Integrations: Whether the tool integrates with the rest of your existing tech stack, such as calendars, a CMS, databases, and communication tools
- Support: The level of support and resources offered for onboarding, training, engagement, and continued post-implementation success
- Price: Whether the price of the tool aligns with the value it offers