G2 vs Capterra: Which Review Site Should B2B Software Brands Invest In, and What AI Engines See

A buyer who asks ChatGPT for the best CRM gets an answer assembled from other people's pages, and review sites are among them. Earning a place in those answers is the work of answer engine optimization. This guide covers the review-site part of that work, with every price and rule checked against the platform's own pages in October 2026.

Key Takeaways

• One owner, two storefronts: G2 agreed to buy Capterra, Software Advice, and GetApp on 29 January 2026, and Gartner's annual report records the sale closing on 5 February 2026.
• Only G2 publishes a current plan price: its Starter plan costs $299 a month or $2,999 a year in year one, rising to $599 a month or $6,000 a year in year two. Capterra publishes no current PPC rate. Its own 2015 guide said bids started at $2 per click.
• The incentive rules differ by platform: G2 caps an incentive at $100, Gartner defines a nominal gift as $25 or less, and Capterra defers to "applicable law".
• Review sites carry broad software questions: in an Ahrefs Brand Radar pull of US software-comparison questions, learn.g2.com and capterra.com were the two most-cited review-platform domains.
• The result worth noticing: G2's most-cited property was its editorial blog, not its review profiles. In named business categories, the top four publishers out-cited every review platform.

G2 vs Capterra at a Glance

The Short Answer

The verdict: pick by how your buyers arrive. If your buyers browse and compare on their own, the G2 profile and the Capterra network listing are now two doors into one company's audience. If they want a person to shortlist for them, Software Advice's advisor model is the one built for that.

The Capterra vs G2 question in one table: every value below comes from the platform's own pages, read on 5 October 2026. Where a platform publishes no price, the table says so rather than estimating.

What Changed in 2026

The deal: G2's co-founder and CEO Godard Abel posted G2's acquisition announcement on 29 January 2026. "G2 has formally agreed to acquire the software discovery and recommendation platforms Capterra, Software Advice, and GetApp from Gartner," it reads. G2 says the combined network will reach "200+ million annual software buyers", which is G2's own figure.

The close: Gartner's 2025 annual report states, "On February 5, 2026, we completed the sale of Digital Markets for approximately $110.0 million, prior to customary purchase price adjustments." Capterra's pages now describe it as "Part of the G2 ecosystem". Gartner Peer Insights was not part of the sale and stays with Gartner.

How Each Platform Works: Audience, Listings, and Vendor Pricing

G2: A Free Profile, Then Paid Tiers

Free tier: a profile, review syndication, and a non-incentivized Review Collection Page, per G2's vendor plans page as of October 2026. G2 describes its audience as "100M+ buyers". That number is G2's claim, and this article could not check it independently.

Starter: $299 a month with no contract, or $2,999 a year, aimed at small businesses, which G2 defines as 1 to 100 employees. A footnote adds that year-two pricing "increases to $599/month or $6,000/year." Starter unlocks G2-run review campaigns and replies to reviewers.

Professional and Enterprise: no published price. They add Review Refresh Campaigns, larger gift card credits ($500 and $1,000), and Profile Visitor Data. G2 also lists an AI Visibility Dashboard on these tiers. Buyer Intent data is an add-on.

Capterra: Free to List, Paid per Click or per Lead

The model: "Capterra makes money through referral fees from software and service providers who sign up for sponsored profiles or sales lead qualifications," according to Capterra's transparency page. Setting up a profile is free, and the catalog covers "more than 100,000 software and service providers". The page was published in May 2024, before the sale, and is still live in October 2026.

Pay-per-click: a campaign covers clicks on capterra.com, softwareadvice.com, or getapp.com. To start, a vendor "must upgrade to a Sponsored Profile, activate a PPC Campaign, and receive approval from a G2 Digital Markets representative." Fees follow tracked clicks, within a budget you set. The current service description gives no rate. A Capterra PPC guide published in 2015 said bids started at $2 per click and could be increased in $0.25 increments. That is a historical figure, not a current starting price.

Where Paid Placement Shows and Where It Does Not

On G2: G2 Clicks buys "limited ad rotation on Category, Competitor, Alternatives pages" on every tier. Paid Promotions on Professional and Enterprise are ad buyouts "limited to 3 spots per placement." The Grid is a separate matter: "Do I have to pay to be on a G2 Grid? No way. G2 is not a pay-to-play ranking system."

On Capterra: "sponsored profiles may appear first on our product or service listings," with sorting and filtering to reorder them. Capterra says payment "never impacts our methodology or providers' placement in ranking reports." So both platforms sell visibility on browse pages and keep their ranked reports outside the sale.

G2 vs Gartner Peer Insights

The choice between G2 and Gartner Peer Insights is not either-or, because both let a vendor list for free. Gartner's Peer Insights vendor portal calls the platform "a complimentary enterprise review platform." Vendors can list products "without a Gartner license."

Who Reads Peer Insights

Enterprise IT buyers: Gartner calls Peer Insights an enterprise review platform, and its reviews cover IT software and services. Reviewer anonymity: a reviewer profile shows job title, role, industry, and company size. Per the Peer Insights FAQ, it "does not include the reviewer's actual name or company name."

How Peer Insights Connects to Gartner Research

The research link: Gartner states that its "Magic Quadrants incorporate Peer Insights reviews to enrich objective research." Gartner adds that its Customers' Choice distinction "independently recognizes excellence." In the FAQ's own words, reviews are "a new source of information, to be considered along with a variety of other factors" by analysts.

The limit: the same portal says reviews "should not be construed as statements of fact, nor do they represent the views of Gartner or its affiliates." A strong Peer Insights profile is one input to analyst research, not a placement you can buy.

Incentives and Review Age, Side by Side

G2 vs TrustRadius

Ownership and Business Model

Ownership: TrustRadius launched in 2012 and "were acquired by HG Insights in 2025," per TrustRadius' about page. HG Insights' Customer Voice pricing page now reads, "TrustRadius is now HG Customer Voice, part of HG Insights' Revenue Growth Intelligence platform." It lists Free, Customer Voice Package, and Customer Voice Premium, with no price on the paid plans.

Ads vs No Ads

The stated line: "No ads. No pay-to-play. Vendors can't skew results, period." That is the sharpest difference between G2 and TrustRadius on paper, since G2 sells both pay-per-click ads and paid promotion spots. TrustRadius does run incentivized reviews. Its review FAQ says incentives "can never be contingent on a particular response or sentiment," and discloses them on the review. We found no published incentive cap.

What it means for a budget: on our reading, the paid packages sell program features rather than ad placement. Ask what the package includes before you compare it with a G2 tier.

Capterra vs Software Advice

One Owner, Two Buyer Paths

Same company, same account: "Software Advice is part of G2 Digital Markets," states Software Advice's vendor page, and vendor billing runs through a G2 Digital Markets account. So the difference between Capterra and Software Advice comes down to how buyers arrive. Capterra is a self-serve directory. Software Advice leads with advisors who shortlist software for buyers. The network's transparency page says that advisor service is "fully covered by the referral fees" vendors pay.

Clicks vs Advisor Leads

Clicks: the pay-per-click program described above covers clicks on all three sites.

Advisor leads: the pay-per-lead service works through advisors who "deliver leads tailored to Vendor based on a structured needs analysis and qualification process." Vendors can "bid for leads by market and size band." Software Advice describes the output as "Qualified Leads, all BANT verified." For advisor-booked meetings, "An additional fee may apply." No lead price is published as of October 2026.

Where Your Reviews Show Up

One collection, three domains: under Capterra's community guidelines (last updated 4 May 2026), vendor outreach must tell customers that reviews "may be published publicly on affiliated websites, including www.Capterra.com, www.SoftwareAdvice.com or www.GetApp.com." A review program on the Capterra side can surface on all three storefronts.

Which Review Sites Do AI Engines Cite?

What We Pulled and How

We pulled Ahrefs Brand Radar's Cited Domains report on 5 October 2026: country United States, Ahrefs' own prompts, engines ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini. We kept questions containing "software" plus "best", "vs", "alternatives", "compare", or "top". The broad set includes consumer software, such as antivirus and photo editing. So we also cut a B2B set limited to ten business categories, from CRM and accounting to payroll and applicant tracking.

Results by Engine

Review platforms across all three engines: learn.g2.com was cited in 914 responses, capterra.com in 667, g2.com in 481, and softwareadvice.com in 455. Gartner Peer Insights pages appeared in 203, getapp.com in 99, and trustradius.com in 32. Counts overlap, so they cannot be added together.

The engines disagree: ChatGPT put three review domains in its top four. Gemini's top 15 held no capterra.com, softwareadvice.com, or g2.com at all. In Gemini's top 15, G2 appeared only through learn.g2.com.

Business Categories Tell a Different Story

Publishers lead the B2B cut: pcmag.com (102 responses), technologyadvice.com (91), forbes.com (88), and nerdwallet.com (86) came first. The first review-platform property was learn.g2.com at 71, then capterra.com (38), g2.com (33), and softwareadvice.com (30). getapp.com appeared in 5.

The reading: across the ten named categories, the engines here drew more often on the leading publisher roundups than on any review platform. A review budget alone does not buy that answer.

How to Read These Numbers

What learn.g2.com is: G2's Learn Hub, its editorial site. Its most-cited pages in this pull were "best X software" lists, such as best accounting software (25 responses) and best construction estimating software (20). For the brands listed on them, those roundups are third-party pages, which is why off-site beats on-site when an engine assembles an answer.

The limits: Ahrefs builds its prompts from Google's People Also Ask plus semantic fan-out, so they model questions rather than log real chatbot sessions. Its methodology post (updated 26 February 2026) calls the metrics "directional indicators, not exact traffic counts" and adds, "We don't estimate actual AI usage by country." Claude and Grok are not in this pull. Your category will differ, so build your own baseline with AI citation tracking.

How to Get More G2 Reviews, Step by Step

Before You Ask Anyone

Fix the profile first: reviews land on whatever categories your profile sits in, and G2 lets you request category changes from the free profile. A wrong category can put your reviews next to products your buyers never compare you with.

The Steps

Here is how to get more G2 reviews inside G2's community guidelines, as of October 2026:

1. Claim the free profile and correct its description, categories, and pricing fields.
2. Start with the free Review Collection Page. It collects reviews without gift card incentives.
3. Ask a broad cross-section of users. G2 prohibits "collecting reviews by any method that segments out potentially negative reviews or exclusively targets positive reviews."
4. Share links in closed channels only: customer-only forums, direct email, and private groups. G2 warns that public sharing gets links "compromised" by people farming gift cards.
5. Incentivize through G2-run campaigns (Starter and above) and stay under the $100 cap. G2 labels each one as incentivized.
6. Refresh older reviews. G2 rejects reviews "based on an experience that is not within the past two years," and Review Refresh Campaigns sit on Professional and above.
7. Reply to reviews. Responding to reviewers starts at Starter and is not on the free profile.

What Gets Reviews Removed

On G2: "If G2 finds evidence of a seller soliciting only positive reviews, we will remove the reviews." Conditioning an incentive on a positive review, or offering one without telling G2, also breaks the rules.

On the Capterra network: a vendor "must not coach or direct customers on the content of their reviews or host review collection processes outside of the Site." Incentives go through the Vendor Portal link. Under the FTC's review rule, an incentive can never require a particular sentiment; the detail sits in our guide to online reputation management.

How to Choose: A Decision Framework by Company Stage

Take a hypothetical Series B B2B SaaS company with a mid-market sales motion. Its product marketing team owns one review budget line and has to decide where it goes this year.

Early Stage: Claim and Fix

Start with the free tiers: a G2 profile, a Capterra listing, and the non-incentivized collection page. Capterra reviews may also appear on Software Advice and GetApp. None of it costs money. Accurate categories and recent reviews come before any ad spend.

Growth Stage: Volume Where Your Buyers Read

Self-serve buyers: fund the G2 and Capterra network footprint, now one owner with two vendor accounts. In the pull above these were the most-cited review domains for broad software questions. Advisor-led buying: where buyers want a shortlist from a person, Software Advice pay-per-lead fits better than clicks.

Enterprise Stage: Analyst-Adjacent Proof

Enterprise IT buyers: Peer Insights earns its place because Gartner analysts may use its reviews as one input to Magic Quadrant research, and it costs nothing to list. Ad-free proof: TrustRadius sells no ads and says every reviewer is verified through a multi-step process, a fit when your buyers distrust paid placement. Committee buyers check these sources too, and their third-party status gives them a role a vendor’s own pages cannot fill.

Mistakes That Waste Review Budget

• Buying ads before fixing recency: an ad pointing at a profile full of two-year-old reviews sends buyers to stale proof.
• Gating reviews to happy customers: G2 and the Capterra network both prohibit it, and G2 removes the reviews.
• Budgeting for G2 and Capterra as rivals: since February 2026 they are one company's network, and a Capterra review can surface on three of its sites.
• Ignoring publishers: in named business categories, publisher roundups out-cited review sites in this pull.

Where Klarivo Fits Once Your Review Profiles Are Live

Choosing a platform is the first decision. The harder one is whether those profiles show up in the answers your buyers read. Klarivo's FAQ lists "Trusted review presence on platforms such as G2 and Trustpilot" among the four areas its service works on, alongside communities, publications, and reputation signals.

Measurement fills the gaps in this pull. Klarivo Monitor tracks five engines: ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, and Grok. It reports the Top 10 Citation Sources as domains, "updated on a schedule you control." A team can check whether review domains appear in its own category's answers, including on Claude and Grok, which the Ahrefs data above left out. Review work is one part of the wider program. What AEO services include sets out the rest.

Klarivo Monitor shows the domains the engines draw on for your category. Book a Klarivo discovery call to map where your review budget should go. Fifteen minutes, at a slot you choose.