The Sector
How to read the review sites when you're buying an AMS
Ask a membership director where their last software search began and the answer, off the record, is usually a search engine, which means it began on one of four websites: Capterra, G2, GetApp or Software Advice. Since January 2026 all four have been converging on a single owner, which makes understanding what they actually measure a procurement skill rather than a curiosity.
Review sites are longlisting tools, not shortlisting tools. Their rankings aggregate review volume, ratings and search interest, which favours large US vendors with big SMB customer bases and works against enterprise, quote-priced and UK-specialist platforms. Use them to build a longlist and to read three-star reviews for failure modes; never use them as the decision. Since 29 January 2026, G2 has been acquiring Capterra, Software Advice and GetApp from Gartner, putting the whole layer under one owner.
Who owns the review sites now?
One company, shortly. G2 agreed on 29 January 2026 to acquire Capterra, Software Advice and GetApp from Gartner, in a deal Gartner’s SEC filings valued at around $110 million; we covered the announcement in our news report. Gartner had run the three as Gartner Digital Markets since 2015, so the four biggest software discovery brands were already two companies. The deal makes them one.
The combined pitch is scale for an era of AI-driven software search. The buyer’s-eye view is simpler: when every road into “best AMS” searches leads to the same company’s data, the healthy habit of comparing independent sources gets harder to practise by accident.
How are the rankings actually made?
Differently per site, but the ingredients are the same three: user ratings, review counts and search interest. Capterra’s Shortlist reports score products on ratings and popularity; G2’s Grid plots satisfaction, drawn from its verified reviews, against market presence, which leans on review volume and web data; Software Advice’s FrontRunners and GetApp’s Category Leaders apply similar blends. Sponsored placements sit alongside, labelled but present, and vendors can run review-generation campaigns that legitimately inflate their counts (many reviews on these platforms are incentivised with small rewards, which the platforms disclose).
Two structural biases follow. First, volume favours vendors with thousands of small customers, which in this market means US SMB tools; an enterprise AMS with eighty large society clients will always look “smaller” than a $60-a-month product with twenty thousand clubs. Second, the “association management” category blends full AMS platforms with event tools, club software and community products, so the ranking compares things a professional body would never shortlist against each other.
What do they miss for a UK professional body?
Almost everything this readership weights hardest. Gift Aid, Direct Debit and VAT handling do not appear as review dimensions. The review base skews North American, so a platform’s UK partner strength (or absence) is invisible. Pricing signals distort toward self-serve tiers, because enterprise buyers under NDA rarely leave reviews. And the category pages rarely distinguish a chartered institute’s workflows (CPD, designations, regulatory returns) from a hobby club’s, which is how our UK ranking ends up ordering the same vendors differently from the directories’ default sort.
Ownership change is the other blind spot, and it is topical: a product’s review history can span three owners, and the reviews do not reset when the roadmap does. Our ownership map of the AMS market is the companion read here.
How should you actually use them?
Four habits, in order. Build the longlist there and stop there; a directory is a census of what exists, not a verdict on what fits. Read the three-star reviews, which are where users describe real trade-offs; five-star reviews tell you the vendor asked, one-star reviews tell you somebody had a bad migration, three-star reviews tell you how the product behaves on a Tuesday. Filter by organisation size and country before reading anything, and check review dates against ownership events so you know which version of the company earned the praise. Then leave the directory and do the sector work: ask MemberWise’s network, read the methodology behind any ranking you lean on (ours included), and make the finalists prove UK compliance in a scripted demo.
Where do they sit against analyst research?
A layer below, and differently biased. Gartner’s enterprise research rarely touches the association niche at all, which is its own problem (we cover it in reading Gartner on the AMS market). The directories cover everything but flatten it; the analysts understand depth but skip our market; sector networks know the market but publish few systematic comparisons. A competent procurement uses all three for what they are, and lets none of them make the decision.
- Software review sites are a longlisting tool only: their rankings measure review volume and ratings, not fitness for a UK professional body.
- Since January 2026 the four largest discovery platforms have been converging on one owner (G2); treat their shortlists as a single source, not four.
- Procurement decisions should rest on sector evidence, scripted demos and a published rubric, with directory ratings used only to spot failure modes in three-star reviews.