Scoring standard
The rubric
Every product covered on our reviews title is scored against these seven criteria, at these weights, whoever writes the review and whenever it is written.
Scores are published broken down by criterion. We never reduce a product to a single number and leave it there.
The criteria
| # | Criterion | Weight | What it measures |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Modelling capability | 20% | How much of a real process the model can represent: routing, resources and shifts, queueing, batching, statistical distributions and control logic. |
| 2 | Ease of learning | 20% | How long it takes to reach a first useful model. Onboarding, templates, and how much scripting the product makes unavoidable. |
| 3 | Results, analysis and experimentation | 20% | Depth of reporting, bottleneck analysis, scenario comparison, repeated runs, and structured experiments. |
| 4 | Pricing transparency and total cost | 15% | Whether a price is published at all, what training, renewal and hosting add to it, and what the free tier really allows. |
| 5 | Visualization and stakeholder communication | 10% | Two and three dimensional views, animation, and how well a finished run persuades people who do not build models. |
| 6 | Platform and deployment | 10% | Which operating systems are supported, whether it runs in a browser, and how teams share and govern work. |
| 7 | Learning resources and support | 5% | Documentation, training, an active community, and academic access. |
| Total | 100% |
How a score is arrived at
Each criterion is scored against evidence we can point at, and the weights above turn those seven readings into an overall one. The breakdown is always published alongside it. Where a capability cannot be established from a published source, the entry reads not stated. We do not guess, and we do not record missing evidence as a missing feature.
Why visualization is on the list
A model that cannot be shown to the people who have to act on it has not finished its job, so how a product presents a finished run is scored on its own. It carries ten per cent rather than more, because a persuasive animation is no substitute for a correct model. Products that score well elsewhere sometimes score badly here, and we publish that rather than quietly leaving the criterion out.
Why the weights sit where they do
The first three criteria carry sixty per cent between them because they decide whether a product can answer the question a buyer bought it to answer. Cost carries fifteen per cent because most vendors in this category do not publish a price, and that silence is itself worth scoring. The remaining three matter, but they rarely decide a purchase on their own.
Changes to this rubric
This is version 1, published in August 2026. Moving a weight would make two reviews written months apart incomparable, so a change means a new version number and a note saying what moved and why. Reviews carry the version they were scored under.