vendor-evaluation

name	vendor-evaluation
description	Evaluate vendors or tools against requirements, total cost, security, operational fit, contractual constraints, and switching risk.

Vendor Evaluation

Use before purchasing or standardizing on an external product, service, contractor, or platform.

Procedure

1. Define mandatory requirements, desirable capabilities, budget constraints, scale, and decision horizon.
2. Identify viable candidates without allowing a vendor's feature list to define the requirements.
3. Compare total cost, implementation effort, support, security/privacy posture, integration fit, reliability, portability, and exit costs.
4. Validate critical claims from primary documentation, trials, references, or contracts where possible.
5. Identify lock-in, renewal, data-export, SLA, and dependency risks.
6. Score candidates transparently and explain any weighting that materially affects the result.
7. Recommend a choice, shortlist, or no-purchase decision with conditions.

Quality gate

The evaluation should reveal tradeoffs and switching costs, not just count features.