Our Top Security Vendor Methodology

We gather information from a range of IT industry sources for our top security products articles. Our most frequently used sources have been analyst firms Gartner and Forrester, testing organizations MITRE and Cyber Ratings, and user review sites Gartner Peer Reviews and G2. We interview company officials and scour data sheets. We interview users and impartial experts. We aggregate all information to best inform our content, and you, our guest.

We analyze security and threat-blocking ability, performance, ease of implementation, ease and richness of management, technical support, and customer satisfaction, among other features. The evaluation criteria vary depending on the product area. We then score each product, typically giving more weight to security performance and incident response abilities.

We usually limit the list to eight to 10 products but in particularly strong markets we’ve included more. There are products outside our list that merit consideration, of course, and we’ve sometimes included those as honorable mentions.