How Stackranked scores tools

Methodology, v3 · updated November 8, 2026 · applies to all 1,412 tracked tools and 28 published rankings

The short version: we buy the plans, run the same brief through every tool in a category on live accounts, and publish the scores with the cons included. Positions cannot be bought, and every rank movement is logged in the public changelog.

Scoring weights

Criterion	Weight	What we actually do
Hands-on testing on real campaigns	40%	The same category brief executed in every tool, on live accounts with real budgets, by the named reviewer.
Real pricing at real usage volumes	25%	Scored on what you would pay at realistic volume, not the teaser tier. Pricing is marked approximate and re-verified each cycle.
Output quality vs. the category leader	20%	Blind side-by-side comparison of output against the current #1.
Support, docs and speed of fixes	15%	Real tickets, real response times, docs tested against the brief.

The rules

Every score is re-tested quarterly. Stale reviews are the industry disease — ours expire. Last full re-test: November 2026.
Every move is logged publicly in the changelog, with the reason.
Vendors can respond, never pay. No sponsored slots, no affiliate-weighted order, 0 paid placements.
Every verdict names who should not buy. Each ranked tool carries an honest limit; each ranking lists three tools we'd skip, with reasons.
No fabricated ratings. We publish our own editorial scores only — no invented review counts, no aggregate star schema.

Who does the rating

Mara Levin

lifecycle & retention lead

Mara has run lifecycle programs for DTC brands for ten years — email, SMS, loyalty and referral stacks on live Klaviyo, Postscript and Smile.io accounts. Before Stackranked she led retention at two eight-figure Shopify stores. Every score she publishes comes from flows she built and bills she paid.

June Park

social & creator lead

June runs creator and social programs end to end — discovery, briefs, short-form production and the reporting behind them. She has shipped over five hundred creator briefs and manages live accounts across Instagram, TikTok, X and LinkedIn. Her ratings are earned on real calendars, not demo accounts.

Alexis Romero

B2B demand-gen lead

Alexis builds B2B pipeline: ABM programs, webinar engines, outbound and the CRM plumbing underneath. They have administered HubSpot and Salesforce instances, run 6sense and RollWorks budgets, and sat through enough QBRs to know which dashboards survive one. Scores reflect live pipeline impact.

Nika Sorren

ecom growth lead

Nika grows online stores — CRO testing, review and loyalty stacks, affiliate and referral programs. She has managed growth for Shopify brands from launch to eight figures and runs every tool on stores with real traffic and real margins before scoring it.

Dana Okafor

analytics & CRO lead

Dana is a former agency analytics director who now owns measurement and experimentation at Stackranked — attribution models, GA4 and warehouse pipelines, and A/B programs with enough traffic to mean something. Dana scores analytics tools on the honesty of their numbers, not the beauty of their dashboards.

Corrections and vendor responses

Factual errors get fixed and logged in the changelog. Vendors can dispute a score with evidence. Disputes change scores only when re-testing does.