How we research and rank

A ranking is only worth as much as the method behind it. Here is ours, in plain terms, so you can judge whether our picks fit your situation.

What we actually do

We are a research desk. For each tool we read long-term operator reports on Reddit, Hacker News, G2 and other review sites; we read the vendor's own documentation, feature pages and changelog; and we read the pricing page and record the price with the date we checked it. We do not run paid campaigns through every tool, and we will not pretend we do. Where a call needs first-hand testing, we say so on the page.

What we weigh, in order

1. Does the core job hold up. For a tracker, that means attribution accuracy and the depth of server-side conversion tracking. A tool that gets the central job wrong cannot be saved by features.
2. Real cost at spend. Not the headline tier. We add the automation, faster data sync and extra seats an operator at scale would actually run, because that is the real bill.
3. Fit to your traffic. Paid social, affiliate and native, or high-ticket call funnels want different tools. We rank by who a tool suits, not by a single overall winner.
4. Data ownership and portability. Whether you own your click and conversion data, and how hard it is to leave.
5. Support and reliability. What happens when a pixel breaks mid-launch, drawn from what users report.

Why the ranking is ordinal

We do not publish stars or a score out of ten on the roundup. A number invites arguments about the last decimal and hides the reasoning. Instead each tool gets a numbered place and one non-overlapping reason it earns it. If two tools would earn the same reason, one of them is in the wrong place.

When we update

We revisit the money pages roughly every 90 days, and sooner when a vendor changes pricing or ships something that moves our judgment. Each of those pages carries a dated changelog so you can see what changed and when.

Corrections

If a price is stale or a fact is wrong, tell us and we will fix it and note the change. See the contact page.