How we source and verify Irish software data

Each vendor profile carries a Last verified date stamp. On that date, an automated verification pass re-checked the vendor's public website and pricing page and re-confirmed the structured fields the profile is built on. Editorial copy (the verdict, pros and cons, the long-form overview) is reviewed separately on a slower cadence and is not re-stamped by the weekly pass.

We re-verify every vendor's pricing and compliance signals every week. An automated check compares each vendor's live website against our stored data and flags any drift. Every change is reviewed by a human before publication - no field is updated unattended.

The fields covered by the verification pass are:

• Pricing. Entry-level price, pricing model (per-user, flat, usage, contact), currency, and whether euro pricing is guaranteed. Checked against the vendor's public pricing page.
• Irish compliance booleans. Revenue Online Service integration, PAYE Modernisation support, Irish bank feeds, SEPA Direct Debit, Irish IBAN support, VAT handling, Irish-business-hours support. Checked against the vendor's feature pages and Irish documentation.
• GDPR data residency. Whether customer data is stored in the EU, the US, or both regions.
• Free trial availability. Whether a free trial is offered and the terms attached to it.
• Legal entity. CRO number, status, and registered address for Irish entities, refreshed on a separate weekly basis via the official CRO API.

Where a value cannot be verified from the vendor's public surface, the profile carries a Data estimated or Data pending verification chip and we say so. We do not infer Irish compliance status for a vendor that does not publish it.

A head-to-head comparison page draws its data from two underlying vendor profiles. Each profile carries its own verification date, so the comparison is only as fresh as the older of the two. The "Last verified" stamp on a comparison page reflects the older date - if BrightPay was re-verified yesterday and Sage on the first of last month, the comparison reads as verified to the older Sage date.

This is deliberately conservative. A reader looking at a comparison should be able to trust that every field shown has been checked at least as recently as the date they see.

Some vendor profiles carry a Market momentum reading - a 0 to 100 score that tracks whether a tool is gaining or losing ground. It is mechanical: there is no editorial opinion and no AI in the figures. The score is computed from public signals we measure on a recurring schedule.

Three signals can feed the score. Hiring demand is the number of Irish job postings that mention the vendor, from Adzuna. Web popularity is the vendor's position in the Tranco web-popularity ranking, where a rank that falls towards 1 means a site is climbing. Uptime (90d) is the count of incidents the vendor published on its own public status page over the trailing 90 days, where fewer incidents reads as steadier reliability. Each signal is scored on its direction of travel against the previous reading - a flat reading sits at 50, an improving one scores higher, a declining one lower - and the ready signals are averaged.

The uptime signal is read from the vendor's own public status page (Statuspage or Instatus). We do not ping vendor endpoints ourselves or use any paid monitoring source - we only count what the vendor publishes. Where a vendor has no public status page we can confirm, the uptime reading is left absent rather than guessed. Each vendor with a tracked status page carries a reliability timeline listing every published incident, one citable anchor per incident.

We never show a number we have not measured. Until a vendor has two readings for at least one signal, the module says so rather than inventing a score, and each reading carries the month it was taken. The series are append-only: a revised figure overwrites the month it corrects and the change is logged. We are rolling this out to one cohort first and widening it as the data accumulates.

Pricing changed, a compliance flag is wrong, or a vendor has gone out of business in Ireland? Use our contact form with the vendor name, the field, and a public-source link if you have one. Corrections from vendors and from readers are treated the same - we cite the source, we date the change, and the profile carries the new "Last verified" date once the update merges.

Vendors who want to take ownership of their profile (and add product detail beyond the structured fields) can claim it. Claiming a profile does not change the verification rules - claimed profiles are held to the same evidence standard as the rest of the dataset.

Every vendor profile and pillar page also carries a provenance footer with the source URL checked during the last verification, the relevant Irish regulator for the software category, our operating entity, and a link to the live Irish compliance matrix. If you want to inspect the raw evidence behind any field, that footer is where to start.

Methodology last reviewed: 2026-05-12.