We read the repository, not the press release.

What we actually do

When a project claims to replace a piece of software people pay for, the interesting question is not whether it looks like the original. It is what is implemented. So for each project we work through four artefacts, in this order:

1. The README. It states the licence, the platforms, the install path, and — in the better projects — a "status" line that says how finished it is. That status line is the single most useful sentence in the repository, and it is usually the one a press article leaves out.
2. The source tree. Directory names, crate dependencies and file sizes tell you what is real before any feature list does. A file-format importer that is 300 lines long does not open your files; it opens a subset of them.
3. The issue tracker. Open issues are a public list of what does not work, written by the people who tried. A project with more open issues than stars is telling you something specific.
4. The roadmap, if there is one. What the authors have queued but not built is the honest gap between the pitch and the product.

What we do not do

We do not compile these projects, run them on our machines, or benchmark them. Anyone who tells you a review is "hands-on" is claiming a lab they may not have. We would rather be explicit: this site is a source-level review, not a product test.

That limits us in ways worth naming:

• We can tell you a feature is implemented. We cannot tell you it feels good to use.
• We can read the issue tracker. We cannot reproduce the bug in it.
• We can see that a format importer exists. We cannot tell you how faithfully it round-trips your specific file.
• We are wrong when the source is misleading — and source can be misleading, because a function can exist and never be called.

How claims are marked

Three marks do the work on every page:

Dates and versions

Software in this category changes weekly. Every project page carries the date we read it and the commit or release we read. If a page is more than a month old and the project has shipped since, assume the page is stale until we say otherwise.

Money

There are no sponsored reviews, no paid placements, and no affiliate links on review pages. If that ever changes, the change will be announced on the page it affects, above the content, not in a footer.

Corrections

If we got something wrong, the correction is published on the same page with the date and what changed. We do not quietly edit a claim and hope nobody notices; the whole value of a site like this is that you can check us.