How we research vendors

What a researched profile answers

Is it a fit?

The peer group the platform belongs to, who it is sold to, when it is a strong fit, when to be careful and when to rule it out.

What does it do?

Each capability finding, with its label and the sources behind it.

Where does it break?

The conditions under which the platform stops being the rational choice: what triggers it, what it costs, who owns it and when to walk away.

Who runs it?

The setup effort, who runs the platform after go-live, and how much routine change your own team can make.

What does it really cost?

Cost in five layers: subscription and usage, setup and switching, year-two running cost, cost when things go wrong, and cost to change or leave.

How do I prove it?

Tests to run with your own data before you sign, contract terms to ask for, and the questions the research could not settle.

Where does this come from?

Every source, who published it, and when it was read.

How each finding is labelled

Independently confirmed

At least one source the vendor does not control supports it, and nothing we found contradicts it.

Vendor-documented

The vendor's own documentation says so. It shows what the vendor offers; how it runs in your operation still needs proof.

Vendor claim

Only the vendor's marketing says so.

Our analysis

Our reading of documented facts. Setup effort, staffing and services findings stay at this label unless independently confirmed.

Not yet confirmed

The evidence does not settle it either way. It becomes something to ask the vendor to prove, and it never counts as a weakness.

Which sources count

• Vendor documentation, pricing pages, release notes and status pages, which show what the vendor says and offers.
• Sources the vendor does not control: regulators' records and filings, status page incident history, material customers publish themselves, practitioner communities and independent reporting.
• Our own tests in trial or developer environments, where one is open to anyone.

What never counts

• Reseller, distributor, partner program and affiliate material.
• Sponsored content and paid placements.
• Review site ratings and reviews, which are never used as evidence.
• How a vendor is sold. Who implements and supports the platform is in scope, because it changes what you own.

How a vendor is completed

1. Research. The platform is researched from its own documentation and from independent sources, one vendor at a time.
2. Challenge. A separate pass looks for evidence that contradicts each material finding. Every search is recorded, including the ones that find nothing.
3. Audit. The vendor's research is checked against a completion checklist before it can publish.
4. Sign-off. A person reviews every rule-it-out finding, every critical break, every published price and a sample of everything else.
5. Revisit. A vendor is researched again when something material changes: an acquisition, a major release, a pricing change, or new evidence that contradicts a finding.

Peer groups

Each platform is compared only with platforms that do the same job, in its peer group. The site publishes no scores, ranks or tiers. Ratings stay unpublished until a peer group has at least three vendors researched under the current method and checked against each other.

• Full enterprise suites. Run the whole contact center, voice and digital, on one platform with deep administration and operations.
• Build on cloud services. Build and own the contact center on cloud building blocks, APIs and integration platforms, with your own team owning more of the design.
• Phone system plus contact center. Add a contact center to the cloud phone system you already run.
• Regional and data sovereignty. Meet a country's or region's hosting, data and sector rules first.
• Moving off an existing system. Move off an installed contact center with less risk, running old and new side by side.
• Inside Microsoft Teams. Run the contact center inside Microsoft Teams, with Teams as the agent desktop and the phone system.
• Standalone for mid-size centers. Run a full voice and digital contact center for a mid-size operation, without tying it to a phone system.
• Outbound and dialing compliance (provisional). Run outbound-heavy operations where the rules on dialing decide the choice.

Method versions

Research Method 2, from 1 October 2026

Adds the evidence labels above, the record of every challenge search, where a platform wins, who runs it, the five cost layers and the admin change test.

Research Method 1, from September 2026

The method the first vendors were researched under. Each one is being re-audited under Method 2; until then, the foot of its page says so.