G2 vs Capterra on cost and buyer traffic and which one to pay for first

Choosing between G2 and Capterra used to be a choice between two companies. It is not anymore. G2 announced on 29 January 2026 that it would buy Capterra, Software Advice and GetApp from Gartner, and the deal closed on 5 February 2026 for roughly $110 million according to Gartner's 10-K filing. If you are deciding where a B2B software marketing budget should go this quarter, that single fact changes the maths, because the two invoices now go to the same place.

G2 owns Capterra now, so what actually changed

Capterra, Software Advice and GetApp were Gartner Digital Markets, and Gartner had owned them since around 2014. The divestiture moved all three to G2, which now markets the combination as roughly 6 million verified reviews reaching about 200 million software buyers a year across around 10,000 vendors.

The practical effect for a vendor is less dramatic than the headline. The two properties still run as separate products with separate commercial models, separate profiles and separate review collection. Your G2 reviews do not appear on Capterra and your Capterra reviews do not appear on G2. What has changed is negotiating leverage: the account manager pitching you a G2 package and the one pitching you Capterra clicks now work for the same employer, so the old tactic of playing them against each other has a shorter life expectancy than it did in 2025.

It also means the "which one should we be on" question is increasingly answered with "both, at different intensities". The useful decision is not which brand to pick, it is which one gets the paid budget and which one gets a free listing plus your review collection effort.

How much does G2 cost?

G2 sells Brand Packages on an annual subscription. These figures come from G2's own FY26 external pricing guide.

Two details in that table are worth more than the prices. First, Starter carries a restriction in G2's own footnote: it is available only to new G2 customers with 1 to 100 employees and fewer than 7 profiles. If you have more than a hundred people or a broad product portfolio, $299 a month is not available to you and your real entry point is a Professional quote. Second, the free package does not include review display widgets, so a free G2 listing cannot legitimately put your G2 stars on your own website.

That second point is where a lot of budget gets spent for the wrong reason. If the only thing you want from a paid tier is the ability to show your rating on your pricing page, you are paying a review site subscription for a piece of front end. A G2 review widget from a third party does that job, and it can pool your G2 rating with Google and Trustpilot in the same block. The deeper entitlements, including the read API, are gated much higher: we broke that down in G2 API pricing and reviews API access, where the short version is that reading your reviews back out is an Enterprise line item with no published price.

How much does Capterra cost?

Capterra runs the opposite model. The listing is free: you claim a profile, fill in your product details and collect reviews without paying. The paid layer is an advertising auction, and it is pay per click rather than a subscription.

Capterra's own PPC service description, which is the primary document rather than an agency blog post, is notably quiet on numbers. It confirms the campaign runs across capterra.com, softwareadvice.com and getapp.com collectively, that fees are based on Capterra's tracking of your campaign, and that you are responsible for all fees resulting from the budget you set and the click activity that follows. It also sets one operational rule worth knowing before you commit: any budget modifications or campaign pauses take effect at the start of the following month, so you cannot kill a campaign mid month when the cost per lead goes sideways.

What it does not publish is a minimum bid or a minimum monthly budget. Agencies and comparison blogs commonly cite a $500 a month floor and bids starting around $2 per click, rising well past $20 in contested categories. Treat those as secondhand, because Capterra does not state them in its own terms, and the number your account manager quotes is the one that counts.

G2 vs Capterra on the points that matter

The reach row is the underrated one. A Capterra PPC campaign is not a Capterra campaign, it is a Gartner Digital Markets campaign that now belongs to G2, and your budget is distributed across three properties. That is good for coverage and awkward for attribution, because a lead from Software Advice looks nothing like a lead from Capterra in your CRM unless you tag the source properly at the start.

Which should you pay for first?

Start with the deal size. If your average contract value is a few thousand dollars a year and your buyer is a business owner comparing five tools on a Tuesday afternoon, Capterra's free listing plus a small click budget gets you in front of that person for a controllable amount of money, and you can turn it off. If your average contract value runs into five or six figures and your buyer builds a shortlist that a procurement committee will scrutinise, G2 is where that shortlist gets built, and the grid placement and intent data are what the subscription actually buys.

If the budget only stretches to one, there is a sequencing argument for reviews before ads in either case. Paid clicks into a profile with four reviews and a 4.1 rating convert badly, and you will conclude the channel does not work when the real problem was the landing profile. Collect thirty or forty reviews on the free tiers of both, then decide where the money goes with real conversion data behind it. Before you set a bid in a contested category it is also worth seeing which ads your competitors are already running, because the auction price in software categories is set by whoever is bidding hardest that quarter, not by the rate card.

Do you need both listings?

Most B2B software companies end up on both, and that is reasonable, because the free tiers cost nothing but the effort of maintaining them. The mistake is treating them as two more subscriptions rather than two more sources of proof you already own. Reviews you paid to collect are an asset, and leaving them sitting on someone else's domain is leaving the asset unused.

The practical move is to pull your ratings from every profile you maintain into one block on your own site, so a visitor who never goes near a review site still sees the aggregate. That is a different job from listing management, and it is the one that compounds: your G2 score, your Capterra score and your Google rating in a single widget carry more weight together than any of them alone. Our guide to the best customer review platforms covers which profiles are worth maintaining beyond these two, and adding G2 reviews to your website walks through the embed itself.

The honest summary

G2 is the more expensive commitment and the more transparent one, in the narrow sense that it will at least print two numbers. Capterra is cheaper to start and harder to forecast, because a click auction can quietly triple in a competitive quarter and the pause does not take effect until the first of the following month. Now that both belong to G2, the question is no longer which company to back. It is how much of one company's ecosystem you want to fund, and how much of your proof you want to own outright on your own pages.