# Directionality in processed software comparisons — methodology

Snapshot queried September 5, 2026. Publisher: BigIdeasDB. These files contain aggregate research results only, with no customer or reviewer identities, raw review text, or internal row identifiers. Exact counts are supplied for reproducibility; article prose uses rounded counts. Percentages are calculated from exact counts. This is an observational convenience corpus, not a representative sample of the entire market. The query date is not the date of every underlying observation. No trend, causality, purchase intent, or current vendor capability is established by these tables.

## Population and computation
All 29,169 Capterra-derived competitive insight records present at query time, without a date restriction. Treat a switching field as positive only when greater than zero; null, zero, and negative values are not positive. Assign each record to exactly one group: both directions, from only, to only, neither positive. Count records and distinct focal companies per group. Count records with at least one element in each advantages/disadvantages array. Array presence is a coverage check, not verification of the text.

## Key calculation
20,344 / 29,169 = 69.75%, rounded to 69.7% from the unrounded ratio. These records have positive counts in both fields. The data does not identify unique customer-level migrations; product pairs can recur and counts can summarize prior observations. Do not sum the switching fields into market flows, infer a winning vendor, or calculate churn from this table.

## Coverage limitation
Disadvantage arrays have no elements across all four groups. This is a missing-data limitation, not proof of no disadvantages. An advantages-only comparison cannot support a balanced scorecard. Companies can appear in several direction groups, so their counts are not additive. Other field completeness does not prove that reported switching was independently verified.

## CSV fields
direction_group: mutually exclusive positivity pattern; records: processed comparison records; companies: distinct focal companies; with_advantages and with_disadvantages: records with nonempty arrays; record_denominator: all 29,169 records; record_share_percent: records/denominator*100; snapshot_date: query date.

## Source page
https://bigideasdb.com/competitive-landscape-analysis#original-research