What a star rating is not
A 4.5-star rating and a per-user price answer different questions, and only one of them can be checked. The largest software directories rank by stars, publish no prices, and do not explain how the ordering is produced.
This site has no stars, by design. Everything here is one computed number with the formula published.
Search for a business VPN and the first results are directories: grids of products with star ratings out of five, review counts, and buttons that say "Compare" or "Visit website". They are useful for discovering that a product exists. They cannot tell you what it costs.
What a directory page actually contains
GetApp's own home page ranks software under headings including "Highest rated", "Ease of use" and "Value for money", with figures like 4.4 and 4.5 stars beside each product. It describes the basis as "Based on GetApp's extensive, proprietary database of in-depth, verified user reviews".
What it does not contain: a price. Not for the products ranked under "Value for money" either.
It also does not explain, on that page, how the ranking is produced beyond the word proprietary, or how the business is funded. The footer names the operating entity and stops.
Why a rating cannot answer a pricing question
Three reasons, none of them about honesty.
A rating aggregates people who are not you. "Value for money: 4.5" is an average of opinions from companies of unknown size on unknown plans. A five-user minimum is a serious problem for a two-person firm and invisible to a fifty-person one. The average tells you nothing about which you are.
A rating cannot be recomputed. If you disagree with a price on this site, you can open the vendor's page and check it in ten seconds. There is no equivalent move for a star: the inputs are not published and the weighting is not published.
A rating drifts with whoever is reviewing. Review counts accumulate from campaigns, incentives and vendor prompts. That is not a scandal — it is how review acquisition works — and it means the number moves for reasons that have nothing to do with the product changing.
What replaces it here
One computed number, with the arithmetic in the open:
Every ranking on this site is that figure, ascending, at a stated team size. Ties break on the published per-user price, then alphabetically. The method page states it in full, and data.json contains every input, so anyone can reproduce the order and get the same rows.
That is the whole claim. It is narrower than a rating — it says nothing about whether a product is good — and unlike a rating it can be audited by a stranger.
Where directories are genuinely better
Discovery. A directory holds thousands of products across hundreds of categories and will surface names you have never heard of, which a 24-vendor price dataset will not.
Breadth of opinion, too, if you read the reviews rather than the average. A dozen written complaints about a support desk are worth more than one aggregate number, and this site has none of that because we have not used these products and will not pretend otherwise.
Use both, for the things each can do. The mistake is treating "4.5 stars, Value for money" as a statement about money.
What this site refuses to add
Stars, scores, badges and the awards other sites hand out. Not because they are always dishonest, but because we could not defend a single one of them. We have not tested these products. Any score we published would be a rearrangement of the price data with an opinion painted over it, and the opinion would be the part readers could not check.
The disclosure page carries the other half of this: the structural reason a scored ranking is dangerous on an affiliate-funded site is that a score is a place a commercial interest can hide, and a published formula is not.
Who this is not for
If what you need is a shortlist of products that exist in a category, a directory will do that better than this site and you should use one. If you need to know how a product feels to administer day to day, you need people who have used it, and again that is not us.
This page is only about one substitution: a rating standing in for a price. That substitution is where the reader loses.
Questions people ask
Do directories charge vendors? The large ones sell listing and lead-generation products to vendors; that is the standard model in this category. What matters for a reader is narrower — whether the page tells you how the ordering is produced. Where a site states its methodology, you can weigh it. Where it says "proprietary", you cannot.
Are user reviews useless? No. Individual written reviews are often the best thing on a directory. It is the aggregate star, used as a ranking key, that carries less information than it appears to.
Why does this site list vendors it cannot rank? Because "this vendor publishes no price" is information a reader can act on. Seven of the 24 vendors here are in that position, and they get a page of their own.
Sources
- GetApp,
https://www.getapp.com/— ranked lists with star ratings; "Based on GetApp's extensive, proprietary database of in-depth, verified user reviews"; no prices published; operating entity named in the footer. Checked 2026-08-21. - The formula, the sort key and the tie-break rules on this site are published on the method page; the inputs are in data.json under CC BY 4.0.
- Vendor counts are computed from that dataset. Every row carries the vendor's own pricing URL and the date it was read — see the vendor list.
Written by Kaz (pen name). Figures are copied from providers' published pricing pages on the dates shown. We have not used these products. Corrections: contact form.