# Feature-gap breadth across software companies — 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 40,937 Capterra-derived feature-gap records present in BigIdeasDB at query time; 13,302 distinct represented companies. No date restriction. Normalize the feature-category label with lowercase and surrounding-whitespace removal, mapping blank/null to unknown. Group by that label, count records and distinct companies, sort by record count descending and label ascending, retain the first 15 groups. Company share = companies in label / 13,302 * 100.

## Interpretation
Reporting has 2,900 records across 2,827 companies: 21.25% before rounding to 21.3% in prose. Companies may have several labels; do not sum company counts across groups. Labels such as reporting, reporting tools, and reporting and analytics are NOT merged. The published list is the top 15 by record count, not a semantic ranking of all needs. Derived feature-gap records are not distinct reviews or evidence that current vendor versions lack a feature. Coverage does not establish willingness to pay or market size.

## CSV fields
category: normalized stored label; records: processed records with that label; companies: distinct represented companies in that group; company_denominator: all represented companies; company_share_percent: companies/denominator*100, rounded to two decimals; snapshot_date: query date.

## Source page
https://bigideasdb.com/market-gap-analysis#original-research