How we test and rank
Every recommendation on this site is built for businesses with 1–25 people and no IT department. Here is exactly how we evaluate products — and how you can audit us.
Testing statuses (every product page shows one)
| Label | What it requires |
|---|---|
| Hands-on tested | We ran the product in our lab with a simulated small company: signup through cancellation, including user invites, MFA, offboarding, data export, and (for backup) an actual restore. A dated test log exists. |
| Trial tested | We completed a real trial with core workflows, but not the full lab protocol. |
| Long-term tested | We have run this product in real use for 6+ months. |
| Documentation review | Our assessment is based on official documentation, security whitepapers, and pricing pages — not our own usage. We say so prominently. |
| Vendor briefing | The vendor demonstrated the product to us. Useful context, weakest evidence — never the basis of a ranking. |
| Not yet tested | On our list; no evaluation completed. We do not rank untested products above tested ones. |
We never label a summary of vendor marketing as a hands-on review.
Scoring categories
Products are scored 1–10 in each category, weighted for small teams:
- Small-team usability (15%) — can a non-technical owner run this?
- Security (15%) — MFA, passkeys, audit logs, recovery, admin controls on the minimum useful plan.
- Employee lifecycle (10%) — onboarding, offboarding, and what happens to data when someone leaves.
- Total cost (15%) — real cost at 1/5/10/25 users, renewal pricing, required add-ons.
- Setup effort (10%) — measured time-to-working, not vendor claims.
- Data portability & cancellation (10%) — export quality and how hard leaving is.
- Administration (10%) — ongoing admin workload.
- Support (5%), Integrations (5%), Scalability (5%).
Every review discloses
- Whether we tested it, and how (status above), with the last test date
- Whether we used a free trial, bought a paid plan, or were given vendor access
- Whether the vendor is an affiliate partner
- Whether the vendor saw the article before publication (vendors never get editorial control; factual-error review only, and we say when it happened)
- The date prices were last checked
What money can never change
Affiliate commissions do not determine rankings. Mechanically: scores are finalized against the rubric above before we check whether a product has an affiliate program, and the ranking is locked at that point. Some of our top recommendations pay us nothing — Bitwarden, for example, has no affiliate program; we recommend it wherever it is genuinely the best fit.
Limits of our testing
We simulate small companies in an isolated lab; we cannot reproduce every environment, and a product that worked flawlessly for us can still fail for you. Nothing here is a guarantee of security, compliance, or fitness — no product makes a business “unhackable,” and anyone who says otherwise is selling something. Found an error? See our corrections policy.