Capterra Reputation Management

Capterra, GetApp, and Software Advice were long run by Gartner Digital Markets as one connected review ecosystem. That changed in 2026: G2 announced its acquisition of all three on January 29, 2026, and the deal closed February 5, 2026. The three sites now operate together as "G2 Digital Markets" (GDM), still sharing the same review catalog and the same Community Guidelines — so a review published on Capterra is also eligible to appear on GetApp and Software Advice, and vendor disputes now route to a G2 Digital Markets email address rather than a Gartner one.

Every review goes through the same verification pipeline regardless of which of the three sites it was submitted on. Capterra confirms reviewer identity through a combination of manual checks and enrichment services, backed by more than 30 human quality-assurance moderators and more than 20 control checks per review. Technology is used specifically to flag generative-AI content and plagiarism, and reviewers who can't provide sufficient proof of genuine product use are never published and are permanently removed from the community.

The star rating shown on a product's Capterra page behaves like a plain average of its published, verified reviews — Capterra's own "Best of" badge methodology qualifies products using straightforward "average review rating" language with a 4.5-out-of-5 floor. That's a different calculation from Capterra Shortlist, a separate ranking product that takes ratings data and explicitly normalizes it for recency and volume of reviews, scales it into a 1–50 "Ratings" score, and combines it with a "Popularity" score to stack-rank the top 5 products in a category. In plain terms: the number on your profile is math you can reason about; Shortlist standing is a further, additionally-weighted calculation on top of that number.

Unlike some review platforms, Capterra does not ban incentivized reviews outright — it regulates them. Its Community Guidelines permit a vendor to offer a nominal-value incentive (typically a gift card) for a review, but only under specific conditions: the incentive must be offered equally to all eligible participants regardless of the rating given, distributed exclusively through the approved incentive link inside Capterra's Vendor Portal, and disclosed on the published review itself via a "Reviewer Source" tag. Vendor employees, competitors, and anyone with an undisclosed conflict of interest are excluded from eligibility, and solicitation — incentivized or not — has to reach a fair, unbiased, broad cross-section of a vendor's actual users rather than a hand-picked group expected to leave five stars.