Independent testing of evidence-synthesis software
Choosing screening software is a decision with a real cost. Pick a tool that misses relevant records and you damage the review. Pick one your budget cannot renew and you lose the project mid-screening.
The information you would need to decide well is scattered. Vendor pages describe features but not performance. Academic papers report performance, but on datasets and metrics that differ from one another. Prices change without announcement. This site tries to hold those three things in one place — and, deliberately, to keep them separate rather than blended into a single misleading score.
Benchmark results and recommendations are independent of monetization. A free or non-affiliate product must rank first whenever the prespecified evidence shows it performs best.
Start here
Systematic Review Software Selector
Enter your corpus size, team, budget and workflow needs. It applies a published rule set and shows you which tools were eliminated and exactly why.
Pricing & Feature Tracker
Current plans, prices and stated limits, taken only from vendor pages, each with the date it was checked. Includes the trial limits that decide what can actually be tested.
How we test
Our pre-registration, published before we run anything: the three evidence layers, why an unmeasured cell stays empty instead of being estimated, why a single simulation run is never published, and the limits of what we measured.
Why an empty cell is the point
Most "best screening software" pages compare marketing copy and fill every cell. We would rather publish a smaller table with an honest boundary drawn around it. Where a tool's trial limits prevent a full run under our protocol, its performance cell stays empty and saysNOT DIRECTLY TESTED, with the reason. That is not an omission — it is the finding.