Small companies get sold enterprise thinking. The evaluation criteria that matter at 5,000 people are close to irrelevant at 50, and following them leads to expensive, over-configured software nobody uses.
- ›The four criteria that actually matter under 100 people
- ›What to deliberately ignore during evaluation
- ›Questions that separate real fits from good demos
- ›How to run a two-week evaluation
What matters
Time to useful. Can your team do real work in it this week? Software that requires a consultant to become useful will not become useful, because you will not hire the consultant.
Breadth over depth. At your size, one person covers three functions. A system that handles sales, projects, and people adequately beats three excellent tools that person has to context-switch between all day.
Pricing that does not punish growth. Per-seat pricing means every hire increases your software bill. Look for pricing tied to value delivered rather than headcount.
A believable exit. Can you export everything, in a usable format, without asking permission? This single question de-risks the entire decision.
What to ignore
Enterprise compliance features you have no requirement for. SOC 2 matters if your customers ask; it is not a differentiator otherwise.
Deep configurability. The ability to model any process sounds good and mostly produces half-configured systems. Prefer sensible defaults you can live with.
Feature-count comparisons. Every vendor's comparison table is drawn to make them win. Test your own workflows instead.
Roadmap promises. Buy what exists. The feature shipping next quarter ships next year at best.
Questions for the demo
Ask these and watch how the answers land.
Question five is the useful one. A vendor who names a real weakness is telling you the truth about the other four.
Tip: Do the evaluation with your actual data, not the demo data. Demo data is arranged to make the software look good; yours is messy in the ways that matter.
Running a two-week evaluation
Week one: import a real subset of your data, configure one department end to end, and have two or three people use it for actual work. Not a pilot project, real work.
Week two: try the things that go wrong. A bulk edit, a permissions question, an export, a mistake you need to undo. How software behaves when things go sideways tells you more than the happy path.
At the end, answer one question: did the team ask to keep using it? Enthusiasm from the people doing the work outperforms any scorecard.
The AI question
Any system you buy now will claim AI. The distinguishing questions are whether it can act or only advise, whether it sees across departments or only within one module, and whether you can see and undo everything it did. See AI agents for business for what to expect from each answer.
FAQ
Should a 10-person company use a business OS or spreadsheets?
Spreadsheets genuinely work under about 8 people with simple operations. The signal to switch is when someone becomes the human integration layer between documents, or when you cannot answer basic questions without a manual pull.
Is free software good enough for real business?
It depends what "free" means. A crippled tier designed to force upgrades is not; a complete product with usage-based pricing on the expensive part is. Brainis includes all 11 modules on every plan and charges only for AI work.
How much time should we budget for evaluation?
Two weeks of part-time use by real users. Longer evaluations do not produce better decisions; they produce delayed ones.
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