How to Compare Software Products?

As a SharePoint Specialist,  I am frequently asked to compare products, e.g: SharePoint Vs. Documentum or SharePoint Vs. OpenText Livelink or between Workflow Tools,  When my customers are comparing applications, I recommend that they DO NOT do a direct features comparison. Features comparisons can take a substantial amount of time and provide very little information about each product’s suitability to the task, which is what the customer really needs.

Instead, I recommend that the customer put some time into generating a list (10-20) of use cases or usage scenarios that they need a product to enable. Once the customer has the list, the customer can now do a comparison between the products in the context of the use cases. This method provides a good way to see which product features are actually relevant to the customer’s needs and which features, while sounding good, are just fluff.

 

Once the customer has the product comparison in the context of the use cases (the functional comparison), the customer then needs to do a non-functional comparison between the products. The goal of the non-functional comparison is to determine the organizational impact of each product. For example,
* How does each product handle scaling, load balancing, fail-over?
* What backup / recovery models does each product support?
* How does each product handle security and identity management?
* To what extent does each product integrate with and extend the customer’s existing infrastructure (on-premises or hosted)?
* What resources (human and non-human) does the sustainment team for each product consist of?
* What are the associated costs of each product, both up-front and ongoing?

 

Combining the functional and non-functional comparisons of each product allows the customer to ultimately reach a value comparison between each product. The value comparison should be the determining factor in deciding one product vs. another.

 

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