How We Rank Software

Solevant ranks software in a few places: alternatives on each product page, the Top-Reviewed and Top-Viewed lists on the home page, and Top Comparisons. This page explains exactly how each list is ordered, so you can judge the results for yourself.

Every ranking uses only published product listings and only reviews that have been approved by our moderation team.

Product listings on Solevant are researched and maintained by AI agents, with people checking their work:

• Research agent: reads public sources such as the vendor's website, pricing pages, documentation and app store pages, and assembles the listing: description, features, pricing, integrations, support options, and pros and cons. It is instructed never to invent facts; anything it can't find in a public source is left blank.
• Review agent: revisits existing listings on a rolling schedule, compares them against the vendor's official sources, corrects what has changed and flags anything it isn't confident about for human review.
• Editors: Solevant editors spot-check the agents' work and handle flagged listings.

The product overview, key features, and pros and cons on a listing are written by our agents from public sources. User reviews and star ratings are always written by real users. AI never writes, edits or rates user reviews, and the rankings below are calculated only from those real reviews.

Several lists rely on a single review score. A plain average rating is easy to game: one 5-star review would beat a product with hundreds of 4.8-star reviews. To avoid that, we use a weighted average (a Bayesian average):

Review score = (3 × 5 + sum of all ratings) ÷ (5 + number of reviews)

In plain terms, every product starts as if it had five neutral 3-star reviews. Real reviews then pull the score up or down, and the more reviews a product has, the closer its score gets to its true average rating. A product with no reviews yet scores a neutral 3.0.

The star rating shown on each product is always the plain average of its approved reviews. The review score is only used to decide the order.

Side-by-side comparisons are only meaningful between products that do the same job. Two products can be compared when at least one of these is true:

• They share a category (for example, both are Accounting Software).
• One product's category is listed as a related category of the other's.
• Their categories belong to the same parent group (for example, Digital Banking and Payment Processing are both under Finance & Accounting).

Some parent groups are too broad to count. “Industry-Specific Solutions”, for example, covers everything from restaurant point-of-sale systems to legal case management, so sharing it doesn't make two products comparable.

Products that haven't been assigned a category yet can't be compared until they are. In a three-way comparison, every pair of products has to pass.

Tools that are commonly used together but solve different problems, such as payroll and time tracking, are not treated as comparable.

Each product page lists up to six alternatives. Every alternative passes the comparability rules above, so you can compare any of them with the product you're viewing. They are ordered by:

• Similarity: products sharing more categories with this one come first, then products sharing one category, then products related through a parent group or related category.
• Your country: products that serve your country rank above products that don't. This is a gentle boost, not a filter, so good products from elsewhere still appear when there's nothing closer.
• Review score: higher scores rank higher (see section 2).
• Number of reviews, then the most recently listed product, to break any remaining ties.

The Top-Reviewed list on the home page shows the products with the highest review score across all time. Only products with at least one approved review are included. Ties are broken by the number of reviews. The list is refreshed every hour.

The Top-Viewed list shows the products whose pages were viewed most often during the month shown. It measures interest, not quality, which is why we show it separately from Top-Reviewed. The list is refreshed every hour.

Top Comparisons shows the product pairs that people compare most often on Solevant. We only count comparisons between products that pass the comparability rules in section 3, so unrelated pairs never appear in this list.

We update this page whenever we change how a ranking works. The date at the top shows when it last changed.

If you think a product is in the wrong category or a ranking looks wrong, use “Suggest a correction” on the product page or contact us at the Contact Us page.