How picks are ranked and verified
Editors place each alternative in a tier; a published score orders the tools inside each tier; money is not an input.
Tiers come first
An editor assigns every alternative to one of three tiers. Tiers are listed in this order on every page.
- Top pick. The editor’s first choice for most people switching.
- Strong. Covers most of the same work, with trade-offs noted on each card.
- Situational. Right for specific needs, or not yet mature enough to recommend widely.
The score orders tools within a tier
Inside a tier, tools are sorted by a score from 0 to 1. This page is rendered from the same code that ranks the tools, so the numbers below are the ones actually used.
score = 0.5 × parity + 0.2 × health + 0.2 × votes + 0.1 × openness
| Component | Weight | How it is measured |
|---|---|---|
| Feature parity | 50% | Average over the paid product’s listed features: full support counts 1, partial 0.5, none 0. A paid product with no listed features gives every alternative 0.5. |
| Maintenance health | 20% | From the status: Active 1, Verified 0.85, Slow 0.6, Not recently verified 0.5, Unknown 0.5, Stalled 0.2, Archived 0. |
| Community votes | 20% | “I switched” votes, smoothed: votes ÷ (votes + 20). Three votes score 0.13; three hundred score 0.94, so a handful of votes cannot beat an established count. Votes from accounts younger than 48 hours are shown but only start counting once the account is 48 hours old. |
| Openness | 10% | Open source 1, Source-available 0.66, Freeware 0.33, Free tier 0. |
Ties are broken by name. Review ratings are shown on profiles but are not part of the score.
License classes
Each tool gets exactly one class, shown with the same badge everywhere:
- License: Open sourceAn OSI-approved open-source license.
- License: Source-availableSource is public, but the license is not OSI open source (fair-code and similar).
- License: FreewareClosed source and free to use.
- License: Free tierA free tier of a paid product, with the limits described on the card.
Maintenance status
Tools with a public repository are checked regularly: archive state, last commit, latest release and license. Each tool page lists its checks with their dates, newest first. Closed-source tools are re-checked by an editor, and a paid product shows the date an editor last checked its price.
- Status: ActiveA commit in the last 90 days.
- Status: SlowLast commit 90 to 365 days ago.
- Status: StalledNo commit for over 365 days. Ranked below Active and Slow tools in the same tier.
- Status: ArchivedRepository archived, or officially discontinued. Removed from Top pick automatically.
- Status: VerifiedClosed-source tool, or open-source tool without a GitHub, GitLab or Codeberg repository, re-checked by an editor within 180 days. The pill shows the date.
- Status: Not recently verifiedClosed-source tool whose last editor check is older than 180 days.
- Status: UnknownNo public repository and no editor check on file yet.
If a repository cannot be fetched on 3 checks in a row, the tool keeps its last known status, marked “could not verify”, rather than a guess.
How listings are verified
- Every listing is a versioned file under source control. Every change is reviewed before it reaches the site.
- A validator rejects broken references, text over the length limits, prices without a check date, and paid products with fewer than two alternatives. The only exception is a gap: a paid product no free tool ranks Strong for, which may list a single partial option.
- Links are checked for dead pages. Pricing, license and download pages are compared with their last copy; a change goes to an editor.
- License changes found by the repository check wait for an editor before they are published. Status changes publish automatically.
- Prices are never changed automatically. Each price shows the date it was checked.
Every published change is in the change log. Found a mistake? Report it.
GratistackBot
The link and page checks above are made by our crawler. It identifies itself as GratistackBot/1.0 (+https://gratistack.com/methodology#bot), fetches only the pages listed for each product, a few at a time, and follows robots.txt. To keep it off your site, add:
User-agent: GratistackBot
Disallow: /Questions about the crawler: hello@gratistack.com.
How money and ranking are kept apart
- Listing is free for every tool. Nobody can pay to be listed, ranked higher or reviewed more favourably.
- The score above has no input for money. The code that ranks tools does not know who paid for anything.
- A paid fast-track review buys a faster decision, not a different one. A rejected fast-track is refunded in full.
- Sponsors appear in a separate, labeled row above the ranking. The sponsored product keeps its normal place in the ranked list.
- Support payments keep the site running. They are not donations and buy nothing on the site.
Sponsorship rules
- The sponsored product must already be in the catalog and must offer a genuinely free product or free tier.
- It must fit the page: an alternative to that paid product, or a tool in the same category. An editor approves every sponsorship before it goes live.
- Products whose status is Stalled or Archived cannot sponsor.
- Sponsored links carry rel="sponsored noopener". The Sponsored badge links to the advertise page, which publishes these rules.
- Sponsorship is never an input to the ranking score.
Prices and inventory are on the advertise page.