Forbes Advisor Small Business Rating and Review Methodology

Forbes Advisor Small Business helps small businesses of all kinds make the best decisions for their growth and success. We strive to help entrepreneurs across industries make sense of complex products, services and concepts so that they can make the best choices and focus on growing their businesses.

We may earn a commission from select partner links on Forbes Advisor. However, the compensation we receive does not influence our editorial decisions, nor does it impact our product recommendations or any advice we offer in our content.

At Forbes Advisor Small Business, we evaluate products and services based on a combination of extensive product research, rigorous hands-on testing and insights from real-world customers. You may discover that some products have varying ratings across articles. This is because some products are covered for multiple purposes and may warrant slight variations in the methodology to better serve that topic.

For example, a system that works well as an all-in-one HR platform might come up short when evaluated as a payroll solution and compared on more payroll-specific features against specialized platforms. In these cases, we explain when we are covering a product in a specialized category.

Forbes Advisor Small Business Rating and Review Methodology

We devise ratings from a scoring formula that takes into account factors such as product features, pricing, aggregate user reviews online, our own informed opinion on the “soft skills” of a system such as ease of use, overall value of a product for the money, and the product’s popularity and reputation within the space. Other scoring factors include pricing transparency—we penalize companies for not having publicly available pricing information. We feel that forcing potential customers to go through a process of sales pitches, demonstrations and upselling is inconvenient for small businesses with precious little time to jump through these hoops just for a pricing quote.

We consider dozens of products in each category before conducting our data research. During this phase, we also consider the most prevalent features in the space and determine what factors should be weighed against others. For example, we give more scoring weight to unlimited domestic calling in our VoIP evaluations than the inclusion of call center functionality. This is because we feel that unlimited calls are universally important to the majority of VoIP customers and are a “must-have,” while some customers might not care about call center functionality.

Factors Considered When Evaluating Products and Services

We review dozens of different solutions across a range of industries according to relevant features and considerations, and therefore the weights and features evaluated for each product category will differ. With that in mind, we condense our ratings into a set of general considerations:

Pricing

We score pricing for products from “affordable” to “expensive,” with variants in between. To determine whether a product or service is affordable, we compare it to the average price of a solution in its category. For example, if the mean price of all entry-level packages of a system we examined is $9.99 per month, a product that starts at $25.99 per month would get the lower score.

General Features

With each product category, there is always a certain set of “must-haves” that we feel a product should have to be considered competitive in its space. For example, any modern VPN should offer ample choices of server locations all over the world. Therefore, our general features criteria carry more weight than our additional features section, which focuses more on “nice-to-haves” that add value or make a product stand out in a meaningful way.

Additional Features

In addition to core features, our additional features scoring section reflects any functionality that is prevalent in a given category but might not be essential for prospective customers. We do not weigh these as heavily as general features. For example, several point-of-sale (POS) systems now offer features for deploying and managing customer loyalty programs. While this may not interest all small business owners, it could be a highly useful feature to retail shops and restaurants.

Product Reviews

We look at product reviews and scores from aggregate sites such as G2, Trustpilot and others. While we don’t weigh these too heavily against pricing and features, we believe there is value in accounting for customer opinions in our evaluations.

Expert Score

Our expert score is where our staff leverage their industry knowledge and hands-on testing experience and evaluate the less tangible aspects of a solution, such as the product’s overall ease of use, reputation within the industry and whether the product feels like a good value considering what it offers compared to its competitors.

The Forbes Advisor Small Business editorial team comprises experienced staff writers and editors. We run every article through a detailed vetting process. Writers conduct fact-checks prior to submitting articles, and editors do another round of fact-checking to ensure that content is accurate and up to date. We also work closely with a team of in-house data researchers who collect and aggregate detailed product information.

The products we cover tend to exist in highly competitive, ever-changing markets. Product features and pricing change frequently, and as such, we revisit our existing content regularly.