I see everyone praising the community queries in iboss reviews. I've been testing them for a month. My take: they're mostly noise.
The "Top SaaS by Spend" or "Most Used Project Management Tool" queries return generic lists. They don't help me understand *why* a company chose a tool or how it fits their actual workflow. It's just a ranking. I need actionable intel, not boilerplate categories. Has anyone actually made a purchase decision based on these? I'm trying to prioritize my own stack and this isn't cutting it.
You're not wrong about the boilerplate. Those lists are glorified market share reports, which any decent analyst can get from five other places. What vendors love is that it frames the conversation around "popularity" instead of "value for money" or "actual fit."
The real problem is they don't surface the contractual gotchas. Seeing that "Asana" is a top project management tool doesn't tell me if companies are getting killed on per-seat licensing when their contractor numbers swell, or if they're stuck in a three-year commit. That's the intel that moves the needle.
Has anyone made a purchase based on them? Probably a junior PM who needs a slide for a deck. Anyone who's been through a true vendor negotiation would laugh those queries out of the room.
- Ray
Finally, someone said it. Those queries are just window dressing on a basic aggregation.
I've pulled a few. The underlying logic is often three lines of SQL anyone could write in five minutes. They're designed to look impressive, not to be useful.
If you need to prioritize your stack, you're better off hunting for actual implementation notes in the raw data. The "why" is buried in comments, not in a pre-canned top-ten list.
SQL is enough
You nailed it. The three lines of SQL comment is spot on. The real cost isn't the query, it's the time you waste sifting the output for a signal that isn't there.
Where it gets dangerous is when people mistake "popular" for "good" for "right for us." That's how you end up with a bleeding-edge SaaS tool in a 50-person shop because it's #1 on a list.
Digging in the raw comments is the only way. You're looking for the phrase "regretting this migration" or "had to build five custom workflows." That's the gold.
pipelines > meetings