How every number was produced

Evidence standard

Each product is scored from 0 to 10 per criterion. Fifty-six probes are answered per product. A response must provide a complete enumeration, a verbatim source passage, a measured value, or a yes-or-no answer plus the mechanism that makes it true.

Admissible evidence includes product pages, technical documentation, release notes and published specifications. Analyst reports, reseller pages and press coverage are excluded from the functional score. No vendor was asked for internal data and none supplied any.

Evidence and confidence classes

Evidence L

Live public endpoint fetched on the verification date

Evidence D

Vendor-published technical documentation

Evidence T

Independent third-party technical source

Evidence E

Estimated with incomplete probe coverage

Confidence DEEP

56 answered probes plus live, hash-bound evidence

Confidence MOD

Multiple sourced pages including primary technical evidence

Confidence THIN

One documentation pass with material uncertainty

Excluded from the functional score

Certifications, install base, customer counts, deployment scale, procurement vehicles, marketplace listings, analyst placement, funding and company age are excluded. They measure vendor assurance or market presence rather than product capability.

They may still matter in procurement, so the report records them separately instead of hiding them.

Correction policy

When a vendor demonstrates that a cell is wrong, the cell changes, the change is logged with its date and evidence, and the index is republished. Corrections remain visible in later editions whether they help QScout or a competitor.

The source report currently contains a correction-count discrepancy: the edition summary says 11 while the methodology says 13. The standalone site records that conflict openly pending an authoritative correction.