How this works

Most sites in this corner of the internet race each other to list everything, which leaves you exactly where you started: staring at a wall of names and guessing. We went the other way on purpose. Fewer tools, each one checked by a person, the ones we use rated in the open, and all of them matched to what you are trying to do.

For you

Three questions, four names

  1. 01

    You tell us three things

    What you are working on, how many of you there are, and what you can spend. No account and no email, and it takes about ten seconds.

  2. 02

    We answer with four

    Not forty. Four is a number you can actually work through, and a shortlist you can disagree with is more useful than a catalogue you cannot.

  3. 03

    You can see why

    Every pick links to what it is good at, what it costs and where it falls down, so you can overrule us with your own judgement rather than ours.

Our method

Two scores, never blended

What we think

An editorial score, given after using the tool for real work rather than after reading its home page. It weighs whether the thing does what it claims, whether the free tier is honest, and whether you would still be using it in a month.

What people who use it think

A separate score from readers, kept apart from ours and never averaged into it. When the two disagree that disagreement is the most useful thing on the page, and blending them would hide the one signal worth having.

How a tool comes off the list

Being listed is not permanent. A tool leaves when the site stops answering, when the free tier quietly becomes a trial, or when something else does the same job plainly better. A directory that only ever grows is a directory nobody has read in a year.

For tool authors

What we look for

We would rather list a tool nobody has heard of that works than the one everybody is posting about this week. If yours solves a narrow problem well, that is exactly what we are looking for.

  • It does one thing, and the page says which thing
  • There is a price, or an honest free tier, and both are findable
  • It works without a sales call
  • It will still be there in a month

What we will not do

Sell a score. Placement can be bought and is labelled where it is; a rating cannot, and an unlabelled paid placement is the fastest way to become a site nobody believes.

Where we earn a commission on a link, we earn it whether we praised the tool or not, which is the only arrangement under which the review is worth reading.

Still reading

Then you may as well let us do the work. Three questions, four names, and you can tell us we are wrong afterwards.