by Steve Van Lieshout
July 28, 2021
Gartner’s stated goal for Peer Insights is to be “The undisputed leader for enterprise technology reviews.” But Gartner has struggled to keep pace with G2, TrustRadius, and IT Central Station in category coverage simply because Peer Insights review markets are tied to existing markets for which Gartner published a Magic Quadrant or Market Guide.
Starting in Q4 2021, Gartner will phase in new categories that are NOT tied to published analyst research. Based on their August list, new categories are already being pushed out. Peer Insights team leaders Anatoli Olkhevets and Shannon Wedding said these new categories will derive inclusion criteria from “the best [sources] of what’s available,” including primary research and vendor input. Analysts will be consulted, primarily to maintain continuity between PI markets and Gartner research markets, but for the most part the criteria decisions sit with the Peer Insights team.
Peer Insights currently covers 395 markets, compared to G2’s 1,700 markets, TrustRadius’ 582, and IT Central Station’s 697. Spotlight expects to see Peer Insights grow substantially throughout 2022 and beyond as it introduces this new market expansion strategy. Gartner Digital Markets sites like Capterra and SoftwareAdvice cover 700+ categories, which is where Spotlight expects Peer Insights to wind up in the coming years.
Based on feedback from vendors, Gartner changed a policy limiting users to one review per market. Now, reviewers are able to leave reviews for multiple products from the same vendor within a single market.
This solves a problem for a number of vendors who sell multiple products aligned to a single category, in which reviewers were limited to reviewing a single product despite having experience with multiple products.
Gartner shared the example of a market in which Peer Insights tracked 99 products across 74 unique vendors, with as many as six products coming from one vendor.
In the future, users will not be limited to a single review per vendor – there is still a limit of one review per product, but this change should allow for more comprehensive review coverage.
For more information about Peer Insights and other peer review websites, start with Spotlight’s Guide to Peer Reviews Sites for AR Professionals. Got a question? Let us know!
