Aside from our combined 35 years of experience in the software industry, part of the reason we started Software Pig was because we felt that that most similar sites fitted into two broad categories.
- The big guns – sites like g2.com, Software Advice.
- Individual bloggers – this tended to include a lot of content reposted from other sites and its usefulness depended on the writing style of the site owner.
The ‘big guns’ offer excellent factual information about specs and pricing, but don’t really give much of an opinion. They tend to feature enormous lists of software, without really ranking which might be the best for a business, or individual.
The ‘individual bloggers’ do offer opinions, but often don’t come with the same level of detail and depth to help someone make a decision – which we felt we could improve.
we take A slower approach.
With our reviews, we wanted to included video breakdowns about why or how we’ve come to certain conclusions, and cover the negatives of each piece as well as the positives.
While we wanted to show the products in our videos, we also didn’t want them to have a spammy AI voiceover – so we narrate each of them individually. It’s incredibly time consuming!
As self-confessed digital software enthusiasts, we also love exploring how a particular software works, or why it’s so clever under the hood.
Ultimately we’re trying to work out the thought processes of the creators and developers.
It means that we can’t review tonnes of software categories per week, we have to move much slower.
Researching software, creating and narrating videos, deciding who an individual software product is best for, and compiling the best tips around problems that the software is designed to solve… It all takes time!
That’s why we’ve divided Software Pig into two simple categories:
- Reviews
- Tips
You can find us here (on this site: softwarepig.com), or watch our content instead on @softwarepig across YouTube, Twitter and Instagram.
So, what are our main reviewing considerations?
We cover what we personally consider the most important in buying a piece of software, including (but not limited to):
- Its time-saving usefulness: Does it save me time as an individual or as a business? Examples of this are Tax software. Yes, it can be done on paper, but efficient tax software is a game-changer.
- Its potential: Does it do something that I, as a human, can not do without it? Examples would include something like an SEO tool, where it would be impossible for me to find keyword data without the right tool. It has knowledge that I cannot find on my own.
- Interface: Is it user-friendly to learn and use? There are examples of complex software where the ceiling for use would be higher, but the interface and experience is terrible – which makes it a difficult piece of software to recommend. A huge part of the software should be its design, intuitive features, FAQs and support base.
- Cost and value for money: We know that this depends on the perspective of the buyer. For example, a business might not care whether the starter plan begins at $30 or $60, but a a startup or individual user absolutely would. Likewise, a bigger business likely wouldn’t take price into account as much as an individual user – they would just want the absolute best tool in terms of features.
- Integrations: When you’ve looked through as much software as we have, you start understanding that most software platforms / tools have been built to integrate several tasks into one, user-friendly system. For example, you could have individual payroll, invoicing and accounting tools – but something like Quickbooks would do all three in a more efficient way. Sometimes it’s better to have unique specialist tools, and sometimes it’s better to have an all-in-one package. We take this into account during our reviews.
Why don’t we just base it all on public user reviews?
This would be a mistake, and here’s why.
Reviews from the likes of Trustpilot are useful, for sure.
However, what they don’t have is context.
By that, we mean all the reviews are mixed into one, and they spit out an overall average score – like 4.7 stars or something similar.
But that creates an issue. A large business might rate a small piece of software 3.5 stars, because it doesn’t do enough for what they need as a larger business.
An individual might rate an incredibly comprehensive tool as 3 stars, because they don’t have the expertise and experience to use all of its 500 features correctly.
Context matters.
Therefore, if you’re buying as a business, the only really relevant reviews would be from business owners in the same position.
That’s not to say we don’t take reviews into account. But rather than saying one software is better than another because of a rating, we do ask the additional question: Who is this piece of software best for?
And sometimes that gives us a different answer.