Editorial policy
How we review, how we score, and what we will not do.
A review site is only as defensible as its method. This page is the method. It is the same for every product, including our owner's.
Principles
- One rubric, applied identically. Every product is scored on the same seven dimensions with the same weights. We do not adjust the rubric per product or per category.
- Every score cites its evidence. A number without a basis is an opinion; we publish the basis with the number.
- An honest gap beats a confident guess. When we could not evaluate something, the review says so and the score is withheld for that dimension.
- Facts live in one place. Pricing, ownership, founding dates and app availability come from a single cited fact file, never from memory or prose.
- Real people only. Every byline is a real, named person with a real history. No personas, no generated headshots.
The scoring rubric
Rubric version 1.0, frozen 2026-08-28. Weights sum to 100. Each dimension is scored from 1 (poor) to 5 (excellent). The composite is Σ (score ÷ 5 × weight), giving 0–100. The rubric does not change once scoring has begun; a change would be a new version, announced here, with every prior review re-scored.
| Dimension | Weight | What it measures |
|---|---|---|
| Core functionality | 20% | Does the product do the category job well — dues and assessments, violations, architectural requests, work orders, documents, meetings — without workarounds. |
| Accounting & financial controls | 20% | Ledger quality, bank reconciliation, audit trail, separation of duties, dual approval on outbound money, reserve-fund handling, and exportable statements a CPA will accept. |
| Ease of use for volunteer boards | 15% | Boards are unpaid volunteers, not trained operators. Can a new treasurer close a month without a consultant? How much setup is required before first value? |
| Resident experience | 15% | Mobile apps, online payments, notices, directory, amenity booking and two-way communication — measured from the homeowner side, not the admin side. |
| Security, permissions & data ownership | 10% | Multi-factor authentication, role-based permissions, activity logs, published security posture, and whether an association can export its own data and leave. |
| Pricing & contract transparency | 10% | Published pricing scores higher than "call us." Also: contract length, cancellation terms, implementation and payment-processing fees, and whether the total cost is knowable before a sales call. |
| Support & onboarding | 10% | Documented help center, migration assistance, response channels and hours, and whether onboarding is included or billed. |
| Total | 100% |
Score bands
1 — the product does not meaningfully do this. 2 — it does it with significant workarounds or gaps. 3 — competent; meets the category norm. 4 — better than the category norm in ways a board would notice. 5 — best we have seen in the category on this dimension. Bands are anchored to the category, not to an ideal.
Provisional composites
If any dimension is marked not evaluated, the composite is re-normalised over the evaluated weight and labelled provisional. A provisional composite is shown on the page for transparency but is never emitted as a rating in structured data, never used to rank a product in a roundup, and never quoted without the word “provisional.”
Why these weights
Core functionality and financial controls carry the most weight because they are why an association buys software at all, and because money-handling failures are the category's defining risk. Ease of use and resident experience are weighted equally: boards are volunteers and residents are the people paying. Security and data ownership is a distinct dimension because account takeover and data lock-in are real, recurring harms in this market that accounting scores do not capture. Pricing transparency is weighted at 10% — enough to reward vendors who publish, not so much that a published price outranks the product working.
Evidence rules
Every dimension score names exactly one evidence type:
- hands-on — Hands-on session with the product (dated)
- documentation — Vendor documentation, help center or published materials
- public-reviews — Public user reviews on a linked third-party site
- not-evaluated — Not evaluated — no score assigned
- A hands-on score must carry the date of the session. We do not claim testing that did not happen, and we do not describe documentation-based scores as testing.
- A documentation score links the page it rests on. If the vendor's own material is the only evidence, the review says so.
- A public-reviews score links the third-party review page and states the sample it draws on. We do not aggregate ratings from other sites into our own.
- Where we have no evidence, the dimension is not evaluated. We do not fill gaps with inference from a competitor's product or from the category norm.
Vendor facts
Every factual claim about a vendor — price, billing basis, parent company, founding year, headquarters, app availability, acquisitions — lives in a single fact file with a source URL and a verified on date. Articles render facts from that file; they do not restate them in prose. A fact with no citable source is shown as “not verified,” not estimated.
The roster currently holds 22 vendors and was last reviewed for completeness — renames, acquisitions, exits — on 2026-08-28. Pricing is re-verified before any article that cites it is published or refreshed, and roundups are refreshed on the schedule stated on each roundup.
Process
- Facts are collected into the fact file from vendor pages and primary sources, each with a date.
- The reviewer scores each dimension against the rubric, recording evidence type and basis.
- The editor reads the draft, checks every citation resolves and supports the claim, and signs off on the score. Nothing publishes without that sign-off.
- Vendors may be sent factual claims for correction before publication. Vendors do not see, approve or influence scores or verdicts.
- Published pieces carry the publish date, the evaluation date and any update date separately.
Conflicts of interest
HOA Tech Report is owned by HOA Wiz, Inc., which makes HOA Wiz. We cover its competitors. The rules we apply to that conflict are on thedisclosure page; in short: the same rubric, an inline disclosure on every page where HOA Wiz appears, the editor's sign-off on every score, and no roundup or comparison that includes HOA Wiz without saying who owns the publication.
We accept vendor press access — demo accounts, briefings, image kits — because it produces better evidence. We do not accept payment, affiliate commissions, placement fees or travel from any vendor, and we do not run sponsored content.
Corrections
Send corrections to corrections@hoatechreport.com. A factual error is corrected on the page with a dated note stating what changed. A score does not change on request; it changes when new evidence is added to the record, and the page says so. We do not remove published pieces because a vendor objects to them.
Drafting tools
We use software, including AI writing tools, to draft, structure and check copy. Every published piece is edited and approved by a named person on the masthead who is accountable for it. No score, fact or quotation is generated by a tool: scores come from the rubric process above, facts from the cited fact file, and quotations from a linked source.
What we never publish
- Claims of hands-on testing that did not happen.
- Invented user quotes, testimonials or case studies.
- Rubric scores presented as the output of a survey, a panel or a user base.
- Bylines, bios or headshots for people who do not exist.
- Vendor pricing or feature claims without a citable source.
- Paid placements, affiliate links or sponsored rankings.