How review sites make money, and what that does to a score
A review site is a business. Most of its customers are the vendors on its pages. That does not make its reviews false. It tells you how to read them.
Who sells what
Software directories make their money from vendors. G2 sells vendors profiles, help gathering reviews and data on who is shopping. In 2026, G2 announced it was buying Capterra, Software Advice and GetApp from Gartner. One company now holds most of the big directories.
Trustpilot is free for readers. It sells businesses tools for inviting and handling reviews. So a review count depends partly on how many customers a business invites. The score does not show you that.
What that does to a score
- A high rating on many reviews can reflect invitations. Read the newest reviews and the share of one-star ratings, not just the average.
- A low rating on few reviews can reflect only the angry. People with a billing dispute write more often than happy customers.
- A low Trustpilot score can sit beside many five-star reviews. We checked 51 companies on 2026-11-05. For 13, the score sits at least a point below its average star count. Across all 51, the score tracks the newest ten reviews more closely. The correlation is 0.89, against 0.74. So recent reviews seem to weigh more. That is our own count. We could not read Trustpilot's explanation of its score, so we show both figures.
- A directory's rank may count more than reviews. G2 publishes a market presence score beside its satisfaction score. It counts signals other than what users said.
The sites themselves get rated
Trustpilot lists G2 at 2.5 on 4,949 reviews, and Capterra at 3.3 on 1,078, as of 2026-11-05. Those counts are small next to the traffic these sites get. They say more about who bothered to write than about the sites.
How to use them
- Use a directory to build a list of names. Leave the choosing for later.
- Read the complaints for a pattern. The same billing story from many people beats any average.
- Check the claim against the vendor's own pricing and terms. Our price table does this for every tool.
That is why no rating orders a table on this site. How we check prices sets out what we use instead.
Sources
- G2, : the purchase of Capterra, Software Advice and GetApp
- Trustpilot, : G2 rating and count
- Trustpilot, : Capterra rating and count