How Software Is Assessed
How the software rankings and reviews on this site are put together: how products are selected, why every entry names who it is wrong for, and how prices are verified or declined.
Six of the pages here rank or review software. This explains how those are put together, so you can judge the ranking rather than take it.
How products get on a list
The question asked of every product is whether a US nonprofit under roughly $5m would plausibly choose it. Not whether it is the biggest, not whether it is the most discussed, and not whether it is the newest.
That test excludes two kinds of thing that fill most nonprofit software lists. Enterprise products an organization of that size would never buy, which are included elsewhere to pad a list to a round number. And products with no discernible nonprofit user base, which are included because a comparison site is contractually able to.
Lists here are short as a result. A roundup of six is a roundup where six were worth naming.
Every entry names who it is wrong for
This is the part that distinguishes these pages, and it is deliberate.
Any product page will tell you who a tool suits. Almost none will tell you who should walk away from it, because that sentence has no commercial value to anybody. It is the sentence a reader actually needs, so every entry in every roundup carries one.
If a table on this site has a column headed “wrong for” and one of the rows is blank, that is an error worth reporting.
How prices are handled
A price is stated only where it was confirmed against the vendor’s own page, or against the page of the donation partner distributing it, and every page carries the date that check was made.
Where a price could not be confirmed at source, the page says so instead of quoting a figure from a comparison article. Two live examples of that on this site:
- QuickBooks list pricing. Intuit changed it on 1 August 2026 and the comparison sites disagreed with each other about the result by significant margins, so the review declines to quote a figure and sends you to Intuit.
- Stripe’s US standard rate. Stripe redirects its pricing page by country, so the rate in the donation fee calculator is corroborated rather than first party, and the calculator says so on the page.
Software pricing changes constantly and often without announcement. Treat every figure on this site as a starting point and confirm it before you budget.
What “we used it” means, and when it is not claimed
Reviews state whether the product was used or whether its documentation was read. Those are different things and conflating them is how software writing stops being worth reading.
Where a paid plan was needed to assess something properly, it was paid for.
What would change a ranking
Three things, and none of them is a vendor asking.
A price change that alters the comparison at a common gift size or organization size.
A capability change that moves a product into or out of the case it was excluded from. Products get better, and a page that assessed something two years ago and never looked again is a page making a claim about a product that no longer exists.
Being wrong. If a page here misstates what a product does, tell us and it gets corrected on the page, dated, with what changed stated plainly. That is set out in the corrections policy.
The wider method
Everything above applies specifically to software. How pages generally are researched, sourced and dated is set out in the methodology, and what the publication holds itself to is in the editorial standards.