FrontRunners is a 100% data-driven assessment, positioning the top scoring products based on usability and user recommendations, published on Software Advice. Scores are largely based on end-user reviews across all Gartner Digital Markets sites.

What Is the FrontRunners Quadrant?

FrontRunners uses real reviews from real software users to highlight the top software products. The goal is to help businesses make more informed decisions about what software is right for them. That’s why FrontRunners was engineered.

To create this report, they evaluated over 525 Project Management products. Only those with the top scores for Usability and User Recommended made the cut as FrontRunners.

What’s the Difference Between the “Small Vendor” and “Enterprise Vendor” Views?

Small and Enterprise refer to the size of the software vendor company—not necessarily the size of customers they serve.

They break vendors into two groups for two reasons: It’s a more equal comparison of products, and software buyers have told us it’s helpful.

To determine who’s Small and who’s Enterprise, we look at how many employees the vendors have. All products in FrontRunners, whether Enterprise or Small, are evaluated using the same process.

Each graphic shows the top 10-15 performers for each the Enterprise and Small vendor categories. You can read more in the full FrontRunners methodology here.

How Are FrontRunners Products Selected?

Products Are Scored Based on User Reviews. The gist is that products are scored in two areas—Usability and User Recommended—based on actual user ratings.

To be considered at all, products must have at least 20 reviews published within the previous 18 months, and meet minimum user rating scores. They also have to offer a core set of functionality—for example, the core features of project management tools include task management, collaboration, project planning and project tracking.

From there, user reviews dictate the Usability and User Recommended scores. Usability is plotted on the x-axis and User Recommended on the y-axis.

You can download the full FrontRunners for Project Management Software report here. It contains individual scorecards for each product on the FrontRunners quadrant.