The most neutral buyer help that you will find!

We had a halted CASB implementation due to Covid crisis, once the project started again, we had a license agreement disussion with the vendor, so I, as the new responsible for the implementation, had to assess the solution and alternative vendors to generate a report for confirmation (or replacement) of the selected solution. Even do I didn't make the decision, my report was took into account for Information Security director who confirmed the 'half-implemented' solution.

Pricing in advanced is difficult for many categories since [it] is not a commodity piece by piece market, and some vendors have weird pricing policies that do not help (for instance, one vendor once offered me a lower total price for 30k licenses than for 20k), but I understand that technology is more about services and solutions, and when you have a good fit, pricing will tend to solve itself.

For me, the main difference is that TrustRadius is the most 'user based' of its kind. Their perspective and neutral opinions give me valuable insights of people like me, but on a global scope, something that otherwise I would have to consult with my local network, where companies of our specific size, industry, or possible scenarios may not be a good fit for a good analysis.

In specific fields where I have no previous experience at all, those rakings are helpful to understand some niche players that I may not be aware of. But in general they don't really add much value, since always the same companies tend to rule over specific topics and we end up talking with the same major vendors.

As mentioned before, they are mostly used for input over radar the biggest player on a specific topic. They can present a new or niche vendor that you may no be aware of, but for sure I won't just pick one solution based on that ranking, the solution fit to your pain points cannot be resumed in just a brochure.

Vendors will tell you what they think it will work, powerpoint presentations or success cases generally don't work, and for my own experience, the only thing that really work are proof of concept or short deployments/demo to help us to imagine how the solution fits our needs. The problem with this approach is [how] brutally time consuming it can be, but our decisions are mostly based on those PoC, so provides that are more willing to them, have better chances of success in my opinion