Tool Evaluation

How I decide what to buy or which tool to use – classic issue tree: "what tool should I get for X?" breaks down cleanly.

Rough description: what do you actually want (e.g. "a social media posting tool"). A little research usually turns up the actual market category or name for it.
What tools are there: the candidate list.
Criteria: what actually matters to you – cost, quality, a specific feature. Keep a core set of three to five max, plus secondary features. Too many criteria and the exercise stops being useful.
Weighting: how important is each criterion to you. Cost might matter a lot; a specific feature (e.g. scheduling across many channels) might matter more than price.
Weighted assessment: grade each candidate tool against the weighted criteria.
Recommendation: usually one tool, with a backup.

If you want to be more thorough, actually trial the top one to three candidates – most tools offer a free version or trial for a week or two. Start with the one you most recommend: if it's good, just go with it; if not, try the next. Even a rushed version of this (an hour, not a week) is worth doing – can you actually get it to work, can you do the thing you need to do. This is also where weak criteria or job stories show up: if you said you needed to export your data or get certain analytics, the trial is where you actually check that, rather than assuming.

Once you've spent real time in the top candidate(s), a short screen recording walking through what you found is often the best way to actually convey the comparison to someone else – a picture is worth a thousand words, a video maybe ten thousand, especially once you already have some hands-on experience with the tools rather than just a first impression.