G2 vs Capterra for SaaS Vendors: Listing Costs After the 2026 Merger

What changed in 2026, and why it matters to your listing budget

On January 29, 2026, G2 announced an agreement to acquire Capterra, Software Advice and GetApp from Gartner. The deal closed on February 5, 2026, for roughly $110 million. G2 describes the combined business as holding about 6 million verified reviews, reaching around 200 million software buyers a year, and serving roughly 10,000 vendors.

Four of the review sites a B2B marketer would normally treat as separate bets now sit under one roof. G2's guidance through mid 2026 has been that the properties keep separate dashboards, separate sales teams and separate pricing, so you still get two invoices and two logins. What you no longer get is diversification. If your category ranking strategy was "cover G2 and Capterra so we are not dependent on one platform," that plan quietly stopped working in February.

This is the practical reason to keep at least one listing outside that group, and it is why a software directory listing on a smaller site has gone from a nice to have to a reasonable hedge.

How the main options compare for a vendor

Read that table as a sequencing guide rather than a ranking. The platforms at the top have the buyers. The platforms at the bottom have the prices a pre Series A company can actually clear with a credit card and no procurement call.

How much does it cost to list on G2?

G2 does not publish a list price for vendor plans. Listings start free: you can claim a profile, add product details and collect reviews without paying. The paid tiers unlock competitor comparison data, buyer intent signals, lead routing and the badges vendors put on their pricing pages, and those are quoted annually by a salesperson based on how many products you list and which add ons you take.

Vendr, which tracks negotiated SaaS contracts, puts G2 starter plans in the low thousands of dollars per year and enterprise packages into the tens of thousands. Treat that as a range to negotiate against, not a rate card. The number you are quoted will depend on your category, your product count and how badly the rep needs the quarter.

How much does Capterra cost per click?

Capterra's published pay per click terms set a floor of $2.00 per click, and the practical minimum monthly budget vendors report is around $500. Actual cost per click depends entirely on your category. Quiet niches sit near the floor. Crowded ones, CRM and ERP being the usual examples, run well past $10 and into the $20s per click because every competitor is bidding on the same category page.

The trap with a click auction is that you pay for the click whether or not the visitor was ever a fit. A $500 monthly test at a $5 average cost per click buys you 100 clicks. If your trial to paid rate is 3 percent and your average contract value is $1,200 a year, that is roughly break even before support costs. Run the math with your own numbers before the first invoice, not after the third.

Is G2 worth it for a small SaaS?

Claiming the free G2 profile is worth it as soon as you have real customers who will write a review. Paying for a G2 plan usually is not worth it until you are competing for deals where a procurement team reads category reports, which in practice means enterprise or upper mid market.

The reason is simple. G2's paid value is concentrated in intent data and category placement, and both only pay off when there is enough search volume in your category for placement to matter. A vertical tool with 300 potential US buyers does not have a category page worth bidding on. A horizontal tool selling into every company with a sales team does.

Do software directory listings help SEO?

They help in a narrower way than most founders expect. The link itself is often worth less than assumed, because several of the largest review platforms mark outbound vendor links nofollow. What a listing reliably gives you is a page you do not own but do influence, ranking for the searches buyers run right after they hear your name: "your product reviews", "your product pricing" and "your product alternatives".

Those branded comparison searches are the ones that decide deals. If you do not have a page ranking for them, a competitor's comparison page will. That is why an alternatives page tied to your listing is usually more valuable than the listing itself, and why it is worth checking whether a directory generates one for every product it lists.

A listing is also not a content strategy. It puts one page in the index. Ranking for the category terms your buyers search still means publishing your own comparison and use case pages, and the teams that win here are the ones that keep publishing category content on a schedule rather than shipping four posts in a quarter and stopping.

Which review site should a new SaaS list on first?

Work in this order, and spend nothing until each step is done.

1. Claim every free profile you qualify for. G2, Capterra and the niche directories in your space. This costs time, not money, and it stops someone else from owning your branded search results.
2. Get your first ten reviews from real customers. A profile with two reviews converts worse than no profile. Ask the customers who already renewed, not the ones you are still onboarding.
3. Buy placement where the price is published and fixed. A flat fee listing on a smaller directory is a known cost with a known deliverable. Start there while you learn what a listing visitor is actually worth to you.
4. Only then test a click auction. Once you know your listing visitor to trial rate from a fixed price channel, you have the number you need to decide whether $5 per click is a bargain or a donation.

Most vendors do this backwards. They buy the expensive auction first, get 60 clicks and no pipeline, and conclude that directories do not work. What actually happened is that they tested the most expensive version of the channel before they knew their own conversion rate.

What a smaller directory listing gets you

On this site, a free submission enters the moderation queue and a priority submission is $49 one time. That buys a product page that collects user reviews, an alternatives page generated for your product, placement inside your software category, your own description rather than a rewrite, and a dofollow link to your site. Boosted placement runs $299 for a week or $999 for a month, and the full breakdown sits on the advertise your product page.

The reason to start here is not that a smaller directory beats G2 on traffic. It does not. It is that $49 buys you a fixed, published outcome, and a quarter of Capterra clicks in a competitive category does not. When you are deciding where your first listing dollar goes, a known deliverable beats an auction you have never run.

The short version

G2 and Capterra are one company now, so treat them as one bet rather than two. Claim the free profiles today, collect real reviews before you pay anyone, buy fixed price placement while you learn what a listing visitor is worth, and hold the click auction until you have a conversion rate to defend it with. The listing that matters most is the one ranking for your own brand plus the word "alternatives", and that page is cheap to own long before it is expensive to lose.