How we score

Every platform on this site is scored 0–100 on five factors. The factors are weighted, the weights are fixed, and the same formula is applied to every platform — including the one we own.

The formula

The overall score is a weighted average:

Overall = (Lead Quality × 30 + Affordability × 25 + Lead Volume × 20 + Ease of Use × 15 + Innovation × 10) ÷ 100

Every factor score on a platform page is shown, so you can run this yourself and check that our arithmetic matches our claim. If a factor has not been scored for a platform, it is excluded and the remaining weights are renormalised, so a partially-scored platform is neither rewarded nor penalised for the gap.

The five factors

Lead Quality — 30%

Contact-detail accuracy, demonstrated buying intent, and above all whether the lead is exclusive to you or resold to competing agents in your market. This carries the most weight because it is the factor that most determines whether spend converts, and the factor vendors are least forthcoming about.

Affordability — 25%

Published entry price, the realistic cost to compete in a contested market, setup fees, and what the contract commits you to. A platform that is cheap to start and expensive to leave does not score well here.

Lead Volume — 20%

How many leads a typical single agent receives per month at the entry price point, and how broad the coverage is. Audience size drives this heavily.

Ease of Use — 15%

Time from signup to first lead, dashboard and mobile app quality, CRM integrations, and how quickly support responds when something breaks.

Innovation — 10%

Rate of meaningful product improvement, quality of routing and matching technology, and whether the platform is actively developed or merely maintained. Weighted lowest because it predicts future value more than present value.

Where the inputs come from

Factual fields — pricing, contract terms, exclusivity, coverage — are taken from each vendor’s published materials wherever those exist, and the source is linked on the platform page. Where a vendor does not publish pricing, we say so rather than guessing, and the platform page carries a “Pricing not independently verified” flag.

Scores are editorial judgement, not measurement. They are our assessment of publicly documented business models, applied consistently. They are not the output of a controlled study, and we do not claim they are.

What we do not do

• We do not accept payment for a score, a ranking, or placement in the comparison table.
• We do not adjust our own platform’s score to improve its rank.
• We do not weight the factors in a way chosen to produce a particular winner. The weights were set once and apply to everyone.
• We do not remove a negative reader review because it is about us.

Challenging a score

If you operate a platform we cover and believe a factual field is wrong, send us the correction with a source. We will fix errors of fact promptly and note what changed. Differences of editorial judgement we will discuss, and sometimes we will disagree with you in public — but the facts underneath should always be right.