Categories
How to use this page
Most people arrive with a problem rather than a product name — ads eating the margin, stock running out, no idea what the real profit is. The categories are written to be read that way round: find the job, open it, and the catalogue page gives you every tool that does it, sortable by rating or price.
From there, two things are worth doing before you buy anything. Put the shortlist side by side so the differences stop being marketing copy and become rows in a table. And check the “top con” on each — a tool can be excellent and still miss the one thing your week depends on.
What the numbers on a card mean
The count is how many live tools we have reviewed in that category. Discontinued ones are not in it; they live in the Archive instead.
The leader is whichever of them currently holds the highest editor score: the mean of four criteria — ease of use, features, support, value for money — that every tool is scored on the same way. It is not a placement, and nobody can buy the position.
The four names underneath are simply the next-best in that category, so you can tell at a glance whether a category is a two-horse race or a crowded field.
A tool can sit in more than one place
Categories describe work, and the large suites do several kinds of work. That is deliberate: forcing a tool into one box would mean hiding it from people searching for the other job it does well. The practical consequence is that the counts overlap, and that the same name turns up in two or three categories — which is usually the first hint that a suite might replace two subscriptions.
The Archive is a category on purpose
Tools die. When one does, its page stays, moves to the Archive, and is drawn in grey with a dashed border so nothing about it reads as a recommendation. Where there is a successor, the page says so.
Keeping them visible costs nothing and answers a real question: somebody who used that tool for two years and found it gone deserves a page explaining what happened, not a 404 and a guess.
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Questions about categories
Can one tool be in several categories?
Yes, and most of the large ones are. A category describes a job to be done, not a vendor, so a suite that does product research and keyword work honestly belongs in both. It is also why the tool counts on the cards add up to more than the number of tools on the site.
What does “leader” mean on a card?
The live tool with the highest editor score in that category right now — the mean of four criteria every tool is scored on, not a paid slot. A category where nothing has a full set of scores yet simply does not show one.
Why keep discontinued tools listed at all?
Because people still land on them. A tool that shut down is kept in the Archive, drawn in grey with a dashed border, with a note about what happened and what replaced it where there is a successor. Deleting the page would turn an answer into a dead end.
How do I choose a category if I do not know the vocabulary yet?
Start from the problem rather than the label. If you do not know which products to buy, that is product research; if you do not know what you actually earned, that is profit analytics; if you keep running out of stock, that is inventory. Or skip the guessing and answer the five questions on Match.
Are these categories fixed?
No. They follow what sellers actually buy software for, which changes — the AI assistants category did not need to exist a couple of years ago.