Why start from the reason you are leaving?
A shortlist built from a general ranking tends to reproduce the decision you made last time. A shortlist built from the specific reason you are leaving puts the right criterion first. If you are leaving because you cannot see a price before a call, pricing transparency should carry more weight than it would in a first purchase. If you are leaving because readiness work landed on your team, switching help should.
Our alternatives finder and switch planner do exactly this: they triple the weight of the criterion tied to your reason and re-rank the rest.
Which criteria should a switcher weigh?
- Who does the switching work: a named expert, a partner network or a support desk.
- Framework coverage, and whether controls are mapped once and reused across frameworks.
- The integrations you rely on, checked by name, not by total count.
- The audit route: in-house, a partner auditor network, or your own auditor.
- What the vendor publishes about price and plan limits.
- Trust center and security questionnaire tooling, including any published allowance.
- Named AI features, read as features, not as performance claims.
How do you cut the list to three?
Drop any platform that does not name the framework you need next. Drop any platform whose published plan limits you already exceed, unless you are ready for its higher tier. Then rank what remains on your weighted criteria and keep the top three.
Keep one platform on the list that is strong on a different criterion from the other two. It gives you a reference point in demos and stops a shortlist of three near-identical options.
What should you ask in the demos?
- Which of our current integrations do you support by name?
- What will you import from our current platform, and in what format?
- Who on your side does the readiness work, and how often do we meet?
- How does the audit work: your auditor, a partner, or ours?
- Which plan fits our headcount and frameworks, and what are its limits?
How do you keep the comparison fair?
Ask every finalist the same questions in the same order and write the answers down the same day. Note what each vendor shows you live and what it only describes. Our pair pages show how any two platforms compare on public material, which is a good starting sheet for your own notes.