Badges
Awarded on the numbers, and taken back when they change.
A job runs against every listed product on the same rules and awards what each one has earned. There is nothing to apply for, nothing to buy, and a badge goes away again when a product stops meeting the rule behind it.
How a badge is earned
- 1
The product is listed
Either we wrote the listing, or the company claimed it and keeps it current. Nothing about being listed earns a badge on its own.
- 2
People review it here
Badges are calculated from reviews collected on this site and moderated before publication. Ratings imported from anywhere else are excluded from the maths entirely.
- 3
The job awards, and revokes
It runs across the whole catalogue on the same rules, so a badge is never a decision about one product. If the numbers fall below the bar, it is taken back.
Available badges
This is the artwork itself, rendered by the same code that serves the embed, with a placeholder name where yours would go. What you see here is exactly what appears on your site.
Best Value
Rated 4.0 or higher and offers a genuinely free plan.
Lasts 12 months, then re-earned
Leader
Among the three highest rated in its category.
Lasts 6 months, then re-earned
Rising Star
Rated 4.0 or higher on a small but growing number of reviews.
Lasts 6 months, then re-earned
Top Rated
Average rating of 4.5 or higher, from at least five reviews.
Lasts 12 months, then re-earned
Users Love Us
More than ten reviews from verified reviewers.
Lasts 12 months, then re-earned
What a badge does not mean
It is not a review of the product
A badge summarises what reviewers said, and nothing more. It is not our verdict on whether a tool is any good, and a product without one is not a product we think badly of - it usually just has too few reviews yet.
It cannot be bought or asked for
There is no application, no partner tier and no upgrade that produces one. Vendors who ask are told the same thing as everyone else: get reviewed, and the job will find you.
It is not permanent
Each award has a term and has to be re-earned, and the same job that grants a badge revokes it when a product falls below the bar. The embed stops rendering at that point rather than carrying on making a claim.
It is not based on imported ratings
Only reviews collected on this site count towards a badge. Figures aggregated from elsewhere are excluded from the calculation deliberately, because we cannot stand behind numbers we did not collect.
What a badge is worth
Most directory badges are a sticker with a year on it. These differ in four specific ways, and each one is checkable rather than asserted.
It carries its own evidence
Every award freezes the numbers that earned it, so the badge can say "ranked 2 of 40 in Developer Tools" rather than just naming itself. A reader can check the claim instead of taking it.
It cannot be minted by anyone else
The embed only renders for a product that holds a live award. Requesting a badge you have not earned returns nothing, so the image cannot be copied onto a site that has no right to it.
It stays true after you take it
A badge that never expires is a claim about a moment presented as permanent. These are re-earned on a term, and revoked between terms if the numbers fall, so what is on your site now reflects what is true now.
It comes from reviews, not from us
No editor decides these. A job applies the same rule to the whole catalogue, which is why the badge means the same thing on every product carrying it.
See what your product has earned
Every listing has a badge page at softwr.com/badges/your-product, showing what it currently holds and the embed code for each one. If a product holds nothing, the page says so rather than offering you something to display anyway.
Recently awarded
No badge has been awarded yet. Badges are earned from reviews collected on this site, and the award job runs against every product on the same rules, so this fills up as reviews come in rather than when somebody asks. Nothing here can be bought.
What a Softwr badge means
- Can a badge be bought?
- No. We do sell a sponsored slot, and buying one awards, restores or protects nothing: the badge job cannot see who is advertising, and a sponsored panel never carries a badge. Badges are awarded by a job that runs against every listed product on the same rules. There is nothing to apply for, which is the only reason one is worth displaying.
- Where do the numbers behind a badge come from?
- Reviews collected on this site and moderated before publication. Ratings imported from elsewhere are explicitly excluded from the award calculation, so a badge reflects what people told us rather than what an aggregator told us.
- Why does my product have no badges?
- Almost certainly because it has too few reviews yet. Every rating-based badge carries a floor on review count, because a single five star review should not make anything Top Rated, and that floor is the thing keeping the scheme worth something.
- Can a badge be taken away?
- Yes, and this is the part most schemes skip. The award job revokes as well as awards, so a product whose rating falls below the bar loses the badge, and the embed on their own site stops rendering rather than continuing to make a claim under our name.
- Do badges expire?
- Each one has a term and then has to be re-earned. Rising Star lasts six months, because the whole claim is about a moment rather than a standing, and a product still described as rising two years later is not rising.
- What does the embed actually check?
- That the product holds a live, unexpired, unrevoked award for that exact badge. Requesting a badge a product has not earned returns nothing at all, so the image cannot be used to display a claim that was never made.
Where badges fit
A badge is one signal. These are the rest of them.
- Browse by categoryEvery category, and what sits in each one.
- The full directoryFilter the whole catalogue by platform, price or category.
- Head to headTwo tools on the same fields, with a straight answer.
- Best ofA shortlist per category, and why each one made it.
- AlternativesWhat people move to, and what they give up doing it.
- Pricing, in fullWhat each tier actually costs, tier by tier.
Something missing here?
Anyone can submit a tool. A person reads every submission, checks the pricing against the vendor’s own page, and nothing is published until it passes.