How we rule
Every page on this site answers one question: should you use this, or not? Everything else is supporting evidence.
Where the judgment comes from
We do not claim to have installed and run every product here. Nobody publishing at this volume has, and a site that tells you otherwise is not being straight with you.
What we do instead is read everything that already exists about a product and turn it into a decision. For each ruling that means the developer’s own documentation and release notes; the complaints that keep surfacing in support forums, review threads and discussion sites; and what people who actually use it recommend instead. Where a drawback is contested, we say who is reporting it rather than presenting it as settled fact.
That is a real limitation and we would rather state it than dress it up. It also happens to be useful: almost nobody has time to read four hundred support threads before choosing a plugin.
What a ruling contains
- The verdict — the decision itself, in the first two sentences, before anything else
- Best for and Skip it if — the two most useful lines on the page
- What it actually does — capability, stripped of marketing
- What users complain about — sourced from public reports, not imagined
- How it compares — real named alternatives, and when each is the better pick
- Questions people ask — answered directly, in full sentences
What we will not publish
We do not invent benchmark figures, install counts, ratings or test results. We do not quote prices, because they change and a stale price is worse than none. We do not write “in our testing” about testing that did not happen.
And we rule against things. A site that recommends everything recommends nothing, so Not recommended and Situational are used whenever they are the honest answer. The running count is on the homepage.
When we get it wrong
Software moves. A complaint that was fair last year may have been fixed in the last release, and a recommendation can age badly. If a ruling here is out of date or simply wrong, tell us and we will look at it again. Corrections are the cheapest credibility there is.