Independent software reviews
Soft Shortlist
About Soft Shortlist
- North America
- 46 products
- 9,072 reviews
- 5 categories
Choosing business software is a high stakes, low information decision. You will pay for it monthly and live in it daily, and the reviews meant to help are mostly vendor sponsored lists that quietly assume a different country.
A business in Toronto reads a glowing payroll review, signs up, and discovers there is no T4, no ROE, no remittance to CRA. A business in Ohio reads that sales tax is handled and finds out at audit that local jurisdictions were not. The information was out there. It was just written for someone else.
So we built the thing we wanted. Every product carries verified user reviews. Every rating is computed from those reviews and cannot be bought. And where the US and Canada genuinely differ, we say so plainly rather than papering over it.
Three rules hold everything together
01 — 03
Ratings are computed, never assigned
Every score is a plain average of verified user reviews, rounded to one decimal. Nobody edits it, in the admin panel or anywhere else. A vendor cannot raise a rating by asking, and we have been asked.
We are paid by affiliates, and we say so
Some links earn us a commission. That funds the work and buys a vendor nothing editorial. The disclosure sits next to the link, in plain sight, the way the FTC endorsement guides and the Canadian Competition Act both expect.
We write for where you actually file
A review that only knows the IRS is useless to a business in Ontario. Where a fact is country specific, we state both the US and the Canadian version rather than blur them into one that does not exist.
What we measure
Every product meets the same yardstick
- Sales tax and nexus
- Whether the tool tracks state and local sales tax and handles economic nexus once you sell across state lines, or hands it to a specialist.
- GST, HST and PST
- Whether it files GST and HST to CRA and handles provincial PST, per province, rather than assuming one national rate.
- Payroll filings
- Form 941 and 940, W-2 and 1099-NEC, in every state you employ people, filed and paid rather than calculated and handed back.
- Payroll filings
- T4 slips, the ROE within days of an interruption, and correct CPP and EI, remitted to CRA on your schedule.
- Privacy posture
- How the vendor handles your data under CCPA and CPRA in the US, and PIPEDA and Quebec Law 25 in Canada. We name the regulators.
- Real price to run
- Not the sticker price. The seat minimums, the renewal increases, the implementation fees and the add ons that show up on the second invoice.
US
Canada
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Canada
Both
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From the editor
One name behind every verdict
Ahmad founded Soft Shortlist to make software comparison answerable: ratings computed from user reviews rather than typed in by hand, a published methodology, and no way for a vendor to buy a position. He sets the criteria every product here is judged against and edits the directory himself.
Ahmad Raza Hassan
Founder and editor
Corrections go straight to the editor and are noted on the page rather than quietly fixed.
Send a correctionSTART.
Start with the software, not the sales pitch. Read the reviews, then make the call with real information for once.