Ratings are computed, never assigned

Every product rating is a plain average of its verified user reviews, rounded to one decimal. The four dimension scores, ease of use, value for money, functionality and customer service, are each averaged the same way. When a reviewer leaves a dimension blank, it is excluded rather than counted as zero.

These numbers are recomputed every time a review is added, changed or hidden. Nobody types a rating in by hand. There is no field in our admin panel to override one, by design. That is the core integrity guarantee of this site, and removing it would make everything else here worthless.

Every review is checked before it is published. Many reviewers confirm their identity through LinkedIn, and those carry a marker. We publish first and moderate after: a review goes live once it passes the check, and can be hidden later if it turns out to break the rules, which recomputes the rating automatically.

• Reviewers must have actually used the product.
• We do not accept reviews from a vendor about its own product, or about a competitor.
• We do not accept reviews written for payment or any other incentive from a vendor.

The homepage and category pages do not rank by raw star average, because that would let a product with thirty reviews outrank one with three hundred. Instead we use a review weighted score, the Bayesian average that review marketplaces use, which pulls a product with few reviews toward the platform mean and lets a well evidenced product keep its own average. The honest label for those sections is "best reviewed", not "highest rated", and we keep the copy matched to the maths.

A comparison verdict is written by our editors from the reviews on both products. A vendor never sees it before publication and cannot request a change. When we recommend one product over another, the reason is in the reviews, and you can read them yourself.

We earn affiliate commissions on some links. That funds the work and buys a vendor nothing editorial. The full explanation is in our affiliate disclosure.

We serve the United States and Canada as one market, but where a fact is country specific, a tax form, a filing, a regulator, we state both versions rather than blur them. A review that only knows the IRS is useless to a business that files with CRA, and we treat that as a defect to fix, not a detail to skip.

We get things wrong sometimes. Software changes, vendors reprice, features are removed. When we find an error, or you tell us about one at hello@softshortlist.com, we correct it and note the correction rather than quietly editing the page.