Step 1
A named editor owns the comparison.
One of our nine staff editors signs the article. Their name, beat, and recent work are linked in the byline. Anonymous ghostwriting is not a thing we do.
How We Score.
A plain-language look at the 47-point rubric that runs beneath every WhichBetter comparison — the same one our editorial board has refined since 2017, and the reason 1.8 million readers a month trust us to call a clear winner.
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Editorial posture
We are independently owned, ad-free on review pages, and willing to publish the word neither.
There is no sponsored slot inside any ranking on this site. We tell you when the answer is "buy A," when it is "buy B," and — roughly one comparison in seven — when it is "buy neither and wait six months." That posture is the product. The 47-point rubric is how we keep it honest.
— Marcus Halberstam & Priya Ranganathan, co-founders
The full scoring breakdown
Seven categories. Forty-seven points. One published rubric.
Every product we compare is run through the same seven-category framework. Weights are applied the same way on every article, so a nine in core functionality in March reads the same as a nine in core functionality in November.
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01of 07
Core functionality & task completion
8 points · ~17% of the total score
Does the product do the primary job a reader would hire it for? We test against the three to five tasks that define the category, scored against documented panel outcomes and public benchmarks.
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02of 07
Pricing & total cost of ownership
7 points · ~15% of the total score
Sticker price, tier structure, annual step-ups, add-on fees, and the "this looks free until the third renewal" pattern. We score the three-year cost, not the landing-page number.
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03of 07
Documentation, onboarding & support
7 points · ~15% of the total score
A great product with no usable documentation is a half-product. We time a new user's first successful task and grade every channel a real reader would actually try.
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04of 07
Reliability, security & data handling
7 points · ~15% of the total score
Uptime history, breach disclosures, SOC 2 / ISO status, third-party audit reports. A product that loses your data once forfeits more than points — it forfeits the recommendation.
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05of 07
Integration breadth & ecosystem fit
6 points · ~13% of the total score
How well it plays with the rest of a reader's stack. Native integrations matter most; Zapier-tier glue matters less. We grade the integrations a reader would set up on day one.
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06of 07
User experience & accessibility
7 points · ~15% of the total score
Speed, learnability, keyboard coverage, screen-reader behavior, mobile parity. A 300-millisecond lag on a primary action is enough to drop half a point.
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07of 07
Track record, roadmap & editorial verdict
5 points · ~11% of the total score
Company stability, shipping cadence, public roadmap honesty, and the editor's read on whether the product is gaining or losing momentum. Some weight, deliberately, is human judgment.
47 points total · weighted, not summed raw · every score is published in full on the comparison page
Methodology in practice
Here is how a score actually gets produced.
Step 2
Documented user panels run the category checks.
Three to five readers, recruited to match the audience of the product, complete the same task list on both contenders. Sessions are recorded and timestamped so claims are reproducible.
Step 3
We score against public data, not vibes.
Pricing pages, status pages, changelogs, third-party benchmarks, G2 and TrustRadius volume patterns, and the SEC filings of parent companies. Each input is linked in the article footnotes.
Step 4
A weighted total is published in full.
Not a rounded star rating — the per-category score, the weight, and the weighted total are all visible. Readers can disagree with our weights and re-total the math themselves.
Step 5
Verdict is "Winner," "Runner-up," or "Neither."
There are exactly three verdicts. If both contenders score under a calibrated threshold, the article recommends waiting — and explains what to wait for.
Step 6
A second editor signs off before publish.
Every article is fact-checked against its sources and reviewed by an editor who did not run the panel. The two-signature rule has been in place since 2018.
We don't grade on a curve. If neither product clears the bar, the verdict is "wait" — and we'd rather lose a click than lie to a reader.
Marcus Halberstam Co-founder, WhichBetter · former Wirecutter senior editor
It is the explicit anti-five-star-fake signal — and the reason our recommendations convert at 4.3x the affiliate benchmark.
Audits, awards, ownership
The verifiable trust signals behind the rubric.
The 47-point rubric is one form of proof. The other is who signs the work, who has audited it, and who owns the company that publishes it.
Audit
96% factual-accuracy across 600 articles
An independent 2023 audit by ABC Interactive reviewed 600 sampled comparison articles against their cited sources and graded WhichBetter at a 96% factual-accuracy score. The remaining 4% were editorial-quality corrections, not factual reversals.
Editorial
14 named humans, zero sponsored rankings
WhichBetter is operated by 14 staff: 9 editors, 3 researchers, 2 engineers. Every article carries a named byline. We have not accepted a sponsored ranking since launch in 2017, and the affiliate relationships we do carry are disclosed on every page.
Award
"Best Consumer Review Site" — Digiday 2023
WhichBetter won the Digiday Publishing Awards "Best Consumer Review Site" category in 2023 and was a finalist for "Explanatory Journalism" at the Online Journalism Awards in 2024.
Business
Profitable since Q2 2023
We raised a $3.2M Series A from Foundry Group in 2021 and crossed into profitability in Q2 2023. Profitability is the part of the trust story that lets us say "neither" without flinching at the lost click.
Outcome
4.7 / 5 average reader-decision score
In 2024, 41,200 readers answered the post-read survey. When asked "Did this comparison help me decide?", the average answer was 4.7 out of 5 — across every vertical we publish.
Reach
1.8M readers · 187,400 subscribers
Google Analytics 4 measured 1.8M monthly unique readers on a Q4 2024 trailing 90-day average. The Better Brief newsletter reaches 187,400 subscribers as of January 2025.
Read the rubric in your inbox, every Sunday.
Affiliate disclosure: WhichBetter is transparently compensated via affiliate links disclosed on every review page. Independence of the editorial verdict is unaffected.