How We Run Comparisons, and Why You Should Hold Us to It

Nobody trusts a vendor's comparison page, and nobody should. The genre is marketing wearing a lab coat. The home team wins every row, the competitor's best feature is quietly missing from the table, and the verdict was written before the evaluation started.

We publish comparisons anyway, because advisors evaluating software deserve better raw material than the genre usually provides. The category is genuinely confusing right now: platforms, CRMs, planning engines, and meeting tools all get flattened into one "advisor software" bucket, and practices burn real evaluation cycles discovering distinctions a decent table would have shown them in a minute.

So here are the rules we hold ourselves to. This page exists so you can check whether we followed them.

Every claim is a row, not an adjective

Our comparisons are built from structured data before they are written as prose: spec tables, a feature checklist, pros and cons for both products. No claim gets to hide inside an adjective.

If we say a competitor lacks native meeting capture, that is a specific cell in a table you can go and falsify in ten minutes. A statement that cannot be proven wrong cannot be trusted either, so we try not to make any.

The competitor's wins are printed with equal weight

Every comparison we publish contains rows the other product wins, marked exactly like the rows we win. Wealthbox's integration directory is deeper than ours and it ships a client portal we do not have. Jump's integration count and its installed base are larger than ours. Conquest's planning depth in its own specialty is the reason advisors buy it.

This one is a publishing gate, not an aspiration. If we cannot find rows a competitor genuinely wins, it means we have not understood their product yet, and the comparison is not ready to go out.

Every fact gets checked before it ships, and the corrections are on the record

Each comparison goes through an independent verification pass before publication. Someone who did not write the draft checks its claims against public sources: the vendor's own pricing and product pages, their press releases, independent industry surveys, and practitioner reviews.

That pass changes things, and pretending otherwise would be its own kind of dishonesty. Three examples from the first comparisons we published under this methodology:

• A draft called Wealthbox's integration directory "the largest in the category." That is an unverifiable superlative and probably false, since Redtail is independently reported to carry more native integrations. It shipped as the sourced fact instead: a deep marketplace of more than 150 connections.
• A draft attributed a 35,000-advisor figure to Jump's February 2026 Series B. Jump's own release reported 27,000 advisors at that point, with 35,000 being the later mid-2026 number. The timeline was corrected rather than left flattering to nobody in particular.
• A draft rounded Jump's growth to "roughly 2,000 advisors a month." Their own stated range is 1,500 to 2,000. We publish the range.

None of those corrections favored us. That is rather the point of running the pass at all.

We quote published prices, and we say when ours is not one

Where a competitor publishes list pricing, we quote it and date it, because a real number is more useful to you than a vague gesture at cost. Where pricing is only available on request, we say that instead of guessing.

That produces an asymmetry worth naming out loud: several competitors publish a per-seat price and Advisor Terminal currently does not, so our own pricing row reads "available on request" while theirs carries a figure. A reader comparing transparency should score that against us, and we would rather point at it than hope it goes unnoticed.

We never describe ourselves as doing something we do not do

One house rule governs every comparison, every changelog entry, and every product page we write: Advisor Terminal produces recommendations and the paper trail behind them. It never executes trades and never holds custody. The advisor places every trade through their own custodian or dealer platform.

Rebalancing comparisons are exactly where a vendor is most tempted to blur that line. We state it explicitly in the row and again in the prose, in every comparison where trading comes up.

Comparisons are dated, and they get revised

We compare against the competitor as it ships today, not as it shipped when we first drafted the piece. Every comparison carries its publication date prominently, because a two-year-old feature table presented as current is just a lie with better manners.

Products in this category move quickly. When a competitor closes a gap we described, that is a revision to the article, not a fact we let quietly rot into falsehood.

Corrections get published

If a vendor or a practitioner shows us a row that is wrong, we fix the article and note the correction. A comparison that cannot survive contact with its own subjects is marketing, and the entire point of this format is to be the other thing.

How to actually use these

Read the verdict last.

Start with the checklist and find the rows that describe your practice's real constraints. Data residency requirements. Whether your book includes corporations and trusts. Whether you already own a planning tool you like. Weight those rows heavily and ignore the rest, because a row we win that your practice does not care about is decoration, not evidence.

Then read the section on where each product genuinely shines, which is usually more informative than the table, and finish with the verdict once you already know what you think.

And if you find a row that is wrong, tell us. The correction promise at the bottom of every comparison is not ceremonial. Every fixed row makes the format more worth publishing, and the format is the product here.