INDEX · 35 TOOLS · 6 CATEGORIES
All Categories Start from the job, not the logo
Each category ranks its tools by the same formula: published pricing, free-plan reality, editorial ratings and a lock-in grade. Open one and move the sliders to fit the ranking to your team.
How the categories are cut
Categories follow jobs, not vendor marketing: a tool lives where its daily workflow lives, even when its brochure claims three departments. Suites appear in the category their strongest job belongs to (Zoho CRM under CRM, Zoho Books under accounting) because that is how a team actually shortlists. Where one tool would honestly place in two categories, the ranking includes it where the match formula's inputs are most comparable, and the category prose names the overlap. The dataset behind all six categories carries the same fields per tool, so a lock-in grade or a match score means the same thing wherever it appears.
Where to start when the job spans two categories
Most real problems arrive tangled: a sales team that needs a pipeline and campaign email, a product team that needs a tracker and a deploy path. The reliable untangling move is to name the artefact you touch most hours per week and start in its category: deals live in CRM, tasks in project management, designs in design, code in developer tools, sends in marketing, books in accounting. Pick that tool first, then let its integrations shortlist the second category for you: the tool you live in earns the right to constrain the tools you visit. Buying the secondary tool first inverts that leverage, and it is the most common way teams end up with two platforms that both do the main job badly.
Reading a category page in five minutes
Every category page has the same anatomy, so the reading order transfers. The engine at the top recomputes the ranking as you set team size, budget and priority, so move the sliders to your real constraints before you read a single name. The full table below it shows every tool scored by the same formula, with published entry pricing, free-plan status and the lock-in band beside each match score. The prose after the table carries what the numbers compress: which tier actually holds the feature you came for, where the pricing model bites at your team size, and which vendor's free plan is a working environment rather than a fitted trial. Five minutes with the sliders beats an hour of vendor demos, because the sliders cannot be staged.
What the tools count actually tells you
The counts beside each row are deliberately small (8 tools in the largest category, five in the smallest), and the size is a promise, not a limitation. Every listed tool carries the same set of documented fields, each read from the vendor's own published pages and refreshed per dataset revision. A directory of four hundred entries cannot keep that promise; half of its prices go stale within a quarter. The cut here is the field a real shortlist actually considers: the defaults, the credible challengers, and the structurally different answer (a self-hosted option, a genuinely free tier) that reframes the choice. If a tool is missing, it is missing on purpose: either its fields cannot be verified from published pages, or it duplicates a listed tool without moving any number.
Coverage that grows slowly on purpose
Six categories cover the software spending of a typical small team's first years: coordinating work, managing customers, producing designs, shipping code, reaching an audience and keeping the books. Adjacent categories (support desks, HR tooling, data warehouses) are absent not because they do not matter but because covering them honestly means committing to keep every field of every tool current at every revision. A category arrives when its field can carry that commitment, and not before. Until then, the six above stay comparable with each other: one formula, one dataset revision, one meaning for every number, which is what makes a score of 76 in accounting worth exactly as much as a 76 in CRM.