When in doubt, TR Buyer's Guide pulled out
July 23, 2019
When in doubt, TR Buyer's Guide pulled out
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with TrustRadius for Buyers
I am a consultant hired by other companies and organizations to help provide vendor evaluation and selection guidance. I discovered TrustRadius's Buyer's Guide on LinkedIn and use it as external, supplemental research in addition to other research conducted on the vendors' sites, RFPs, review sites, internal research, word-of-mouth, etc.
I assist with mostly HR management software evaluation and selections. I help project manage implementations. I help with the research and liaison between vendors. I work with fellow colleagues; we exchange thought capital.
I assist with mostly HR management software evaluation and selections. I help project manage implementations. I help with the research and liaison between vendors. I work with fellow colleagues; we exchange thought capital.
- To understand my options (i.e. build my short list or long list)
- To find evidence to support my recommendation to colleagues or my client
To understand my options (shortlisting/downselecting): the guide helped me understand what options were available and never discovered before.
To find evidence to support my recommendation to colleagues or my client
To find evidence to support my recommendation to colleagues or my client
- Rather than use the buyers' guide to confirm my decision, I used the buyers' guide to confirm, reject, or suspect my presumptions about a vendor.
- The tables with the number of ratings, scores, research frequency, target client size, etc. helped provide evidence of research conducted to support my teams' decisions.
[The review information I look for is:]
- Quantitative scores with categories
- # of reviews
- Search activity
- Recent reviews (relevancy)
- Size of clients
- Length of implementation
I think the buyer's guide is most useful in the beginning part of the downselection process when my consulting team (and the client) is interested in narrowing down the number of vendors to send RFPs to. Love the testimonials - maybe if there was a word cloud for the guide, that would be helpful rather than me sifting through review after review. After I downloaded the guide, I went through the most helpful/recent reviews left by HR users and read the thorough ones that provided a pros/cons list of the software (implementation, post-implementation, hypercare, actually using the tool).
- Seemingly unbiased
- Great user interface
- Plentiful categories and scores and reviews
- Hard to search reviews
- Need more information on methodology of how reports are created - the buyer's guide focused more on the "how to buy" rather than methodology.
- Lack of review summaries (like a word cloud or common themes)
I also went on the vendors' sites, dug through PDFs and RFPs. It would be great to have reports or a repository that linked to each vendors' page, like a wikipedia for vendors. I am a fan of TrustRadius because I want lots of information fast and efficiently. TrustRadius's reviews come from the core users themselves. The reviews are sometimes brief and not helpful, but for the ones that you do find, they are plentiful. I wish TrustRadius came out with more reports. I use Gartner and am a fan of their "Magic Quadrants." Also I use Nucleus Research; they provide an honest pros and cons summary for each vendor which I wish TrustRadius also did.
TrustRadius relies on the users' reviews and appears credible. Great site interface, search functionalities are easier to use. Seems less scientific compared to Nucleus and Gartner though.