Most HR software lists are written by a vendor

What the citations showed

We asked the kind of questions a buyer asks: the best HR system for a 30-person agency, alternatives to a named tool, what a vendor costs. Then we sorted every cited page by who published it.

Vendor-written pages made up at least 27% of all citations, and that's a lower bound because some publishers don't say who owns them. About one in ten citations was a comparison, an alternatives list or a best-of page written by a vendor that appears in it.

Review sites carried 13% and independent listicles 12%. So when you read a roundup, the odds that its author sells one of the entries are far from small.

Even the assistants notice

The assistant flagged the problem in its own answers. Asked for alternatives to Float, it said most of those articles "are written by the vendors themselves". It named Runn, Productive, Milient, Saviom and Resource Guru, "so each one ranks its own product first."

Asked for Productive.io alternatives, it named six vendors that each publish one, "so each puts itself first." Asked for the best HR software for a 30-person agency, it recommended Gusto from Gusto's own guide, then added: "That source is Gusto's own, so treat it as marketing."

An answer engine that warns you about its sources is still quoting them. You're left to do the checking yourself.

A vendor list isn't worthless

A vendor knows its category well, and its list often names real tools you hadn't heard of. The problem is the ranking, because nobody puts a rival first on their own blog.

So read a vendor's list for the names and read the vendor's pricing pages for the facts. Treat the order as a pitch.

How to read any best-of list

Run these checks before you trust a ranking, whoever wrote it. A list that fails most of them is marketing, however neutral it sounds.

• Does it say who wrote it, and does that company sell one of the entries?
• Does it print the criteria it ranked on, before the ranking?
• Is every price dated and taken from the vendor's own page?
• Does it show gated prices as gated, or does it guess a number?
• Could you rebuild the order yourself from the facts it prints?

How our lists are built

PeopleMuster publishes best-of pages too, and we sell one of the products on them. So each one prints its method first: what was compared, the criteria, and the date every price was read from the vendor's own pricing page.

Where a vendor keeps its price behind a sales call, the page says so and prints no number. Every published price sits in the table beside ours, $3 per person per month.

You can check every row against the vendor's site and decide whether the order holds. That's the test we'd ask you to apply to anyone's list, ours included.