How we rank
No pay-to-rank. Ever.
How we rank
The 596+ platforms in our directory are ordered by three things, in this order. That is the whole list.
- 01
Tier
Major platforms first, then mid-market, then emerging. Tier reflects how established a platform is in the trades — install base, market presence, how long it has been serving trade businesses — and it is an editorial judgment we make, not something a vendor sets or buys.
- 02
Rating
Within a tier, the higher third-party rating ranks first. We use the G2 score where one exists and fall back to Capterra where it does not. These are other people's numbers and we show them as such, with their source named on every listing.
- 03
Name
Where tier and rating tie, alphabetically. A tie is a tie — we do not break it with anything you would have to take on faith.
What the ranking does not consider: whether a vendor sponsors anything, whether we earn a referral fee on them, whether they advertise with us, and whether they have ever spoken to us. None of those are inputs, and the comment sitting above that function in our source says so in as many words — they “must never become inputs.”
What our labels mean
- Featured
- Our editors picked it. Nobody paid for it, and nobody can.
- Sponsored
- Someone paid for that placement. It is labeled every single time it appears, and it never changes the ranking of anything around it. A sponsored slot is an ad in a marked box, not a better position in the list.
- Affiliate links
- Where we earn a fee if you sign up through a link, the listing says so — on the listing, next to the link, not buried in a footer. That is true whether the listing is Featured, Sponsored, or neither, because how we get paid and where something ranks are two separate questions.
How we make money
TradeAtlas is free to use and funded three ways: affiliate relationships with some of the tools and courses we point you toward, sponsored placements that are always labeled as such, and research sponsorship.
Sponsors fund research. They do not see individual survey responses, they do not influence our matching tools or calculators, and they do not get access to findings before publication. The 2026 Subcontractor Tech Benchmark is sponsored by Riffle, and that is disclosed on the survey itself.
What we are not
We are not a software vendor, a reseller, a trade school, or a private-equity firm sourcing deals through educational content. We do not take a buy-side fee and we do not broker transactions. We are the resource that sits in between all of them — the one without a stake in which door you walk through.
When we get it wrong
We will. Pricing changes, products get discontinued, and a verdict that was right last year stops being right. If something here is wrong, tell us — corrections from the people who actually run this software are the fastest way this gets better, and we would rather be corrected than quietly stale.