Software markets
How PPM products show up to buyers.
OpenDecision Research · · 6 min read
Read the way a buyer reads them, most project and portfolio management product sites publish a price and documentation. The price rarely arrives alone, and the questions that come later in a purchase get fewer answers.
One market, read from the outside
Before a buyer ever speaks to a vendor, they read. Pricing pages, documentation, security pages, plan comparisons. Whatever a product's site answers, the buyer carries into the shortlist; whatever it leaves out becomes a question, a delay or a reason to move on.
For this article we read the public pages of every product site in the market and asked the questions a buyer asks. Every figure below is a share of product sites, so it describes the market rather than any one vendor.
Most sites answer the first questions
The pages buyers look for first
- Has a pricing or plans page
- 72%
- Publishes documentation or help pages
- 69%
- Publishes a security or trust page
- 43%
72% of product sites have a pricing or plans page we could read, and 62% show an actual price on it. Documentation or help pages appear on 69%. Those are the questions the market has learned to answer: what does it cost, and how does it work.
Only 3% of sites keep pricing entirely behind a sales conversation. The sales-led model is alive, but in this market it usually sits beside a published price rather than replacing it: half of all pricing pages carry contact-sales language somewhere.
A published price is rarely the whole price
Per-seat pricing appears on 57% of pricing pages and annual billing on 56%, so the number a buyer compares is usually a monthly figure for one person on a yearly commitment. AI credits or usage now appear on 19%, a new line that did not exist on most of these pages a short while ago.
The later questions get fewer answers
Questions that come later in a purchase are answered less often. Only 43% of product sites publish a security or trust page, so a team that needs those answers usually has to ask for them.
What vendors can take from it
A product that answers a buyer's question on its own site is easier to shortlist and easier to match accurately. The gaps above are also openings: a price that says what it covers, a plain statement of how seats are counted, a page that answers what a reviewer will ask. Each is a question a competitor probably leaves open.
OpenDecision follows the whole market in one place, and Juukbox shows what buyers ask for in their own words. Vendors who want to see their category the way buyers do, and where they stand in it, can reach us through the contact page.
What buyers can take from it
Start with the questions the pages leave open. Write down how you would be billed, who needs a paid seat and what a trial has to prove, then ask each vendor for the answers in writing. Juukbox keeps those requirements beside every product in a decision, so the unanswered ones stay visible until someone answers them.