The B4 Index · Sample Scorecard
One complete scorecard.
On the house.
The rest of the site shows you how to think about building versus buying, then asks you to pay for the answer. This page is different. Here's one category, scored in full — the verdict, all five dimensions with the reasoning, and exactly where it lands. No paywall, no email gate.
It's the whole thing you'd otherwise unlock in Pro, on a single category, so you can see what you'd be buying across all 1,850.
How a scorecard is built
Two axes decide the call. Five dimensions, scored 1 to 5, do the deciding. The full framework goes deeper — this is the short version.
X-Axis
Strategic Differentiation
How much does owning this matter to your business? The blend of how specific it is to you and how much competitive edge it carries.
Y-Axis
AI Feasibility
Buildability: could a competent team build and run a good-enough alternative with today's AI and mature open source? Scored only on documented production self-builds — never on vendor demos.
Keep buying
Low differentiation, hard to build. This may be commodity infrastructure or a category with significant compliance and operating demands. SaaS exists for many good reasons. Choose the best fit at a sensible total cost, and check that those reasons still apply to you.
Buy and extend
The category differentiates you, but the evidence doesn't support building the whole capability for your needs. Buy the platform and build the parts that make your business different. Buy and extend can be the right long-term answer.
Test the alternatives
Beware is a warning that you may be overpaying for something that already exists. A focused build or a capability inside a tool you already pay for could replace what you use. Test the replacement, its full cost, and the migration before canceling anything. What's the difference between Beware and Build? It's differentiation.
Consider owning it
The category differentiates you competitively, and the evidence makes building a scoped capability realistic. Test the business case and your capacity to run it. Teams should build the software that gives them competitive advantages.
The Project Management scorecard
Collaboration · People & Workplace. Everything below is the complete Pro record for this one category.
At low AI maturity, keep buying. Teams with more capacity can test the replacement scope and economics.
Test whether the subscription earns its cost through coordination, integrations, and operating support for the workflow you actually use.
Lean PM tools and custom automations can cover narrower workflows. Compare that scope with your coordination needs before replacing a premium suite.
X · Strategic Differentiation
2.5 / 5
Low. Not where you win.
Y · AI Feasibility
4 / 5
High. A team could build a good-enough alternative.
An axis counts as high only above the line, so in practice at 4 or above. That puts the leading scenario share at BEWARE, a lean call. The shaded band above is the rest of where it could sit.
The five-dimension scorecard
Project management patterns are mostly generic — tasks, milestones, dependencies, boards — and vendor defaults cover the large majority of teams. Custom workflows exist but add modest differentiation to what is fundamentally the same job everywhere.
Multiple independent teams run self-hosted PM in production: OpenProject is the strongest enterprise-grade choice with named public-sector deployments (City of Chemnitz, City of Cologne, and German public administrations); Plane claims 50,000+ teams with named replacements of Jira/Asana/Monday (FortyAU, Foxsense, GobbleCube, Groupthink Labs; VATES growing past 100 knowledge workers) and ships Docker/K8s/air-gapped deployment; Redmine remains the proven, extensible workhorse. Self-hosting covers ~80%+ of the core for real teams and is a documented mainstream choice, even though most of the market buys.
Measure which PM capabilities your team uses and which outcomes depend on them. Boards and task tracking may dominate one team’s usage, while portfolio planning and reporting matter to another. The rating is a category-level assessment, not a measured utilization percentage for your organization.
Emerging strategic value: project and velocity data increasingly feed capacity-planning AI, and owning the workflow model matters somewhat more than it used to — but PM itself is not a competitive weapon. Sits with Work Management (3), above PPM (2).
Compare the current subscription with a scoped internal tool or a maintained open-source deployment. Include migration, integrations, support, and operating time. The category rating reflects potential divergence; it does not establish a general 2–3x cost advantage.
The read
Self-hosting a platform like Plane or OpenProject is worth testing when your measured usage is narrower than the platform you pay for and the alternative covers the features that matter. Include migration, integrations, permissions, backups, and an operating owner. Low feature utilization alone does not show that replacement will save money.
Buying earns its keep when coordination across many teams — not just task tracking — is the real problem. Jira's integration depth with CI/CD systems, Linear's developer-friendly sprint workflows, and Asana's cross-functional project visibility are all genuinely hard to replicate in a lightweight alternative. Shared visibility across non-technical stakeholders, mobile clients that actually work, and native integrations with Slack, GitHub, Confluence, and Salesforce are real value that takes months to build. Commercial PM tools have also gotten meaningfully cheaper: most now bundle AI features at $7-20/user/month, which reduces the cost gap that once justified building. Buying is the right call when coordination across many stakeholders is the bottleneck and not just task management for one team.
Representative vendors & pricing
- acteamo
- Acunote
- Advension
- Asana $11-25/user/month
- Blossom
- Casual
- factro
- Flytime
The full vendor field for every category, with pricing and positioning, is part of a B4 subscription.
That scorecard, on every category
You just read one complete record. A B4 subscription gives you the same depth across all 1,850 categories — the verdict, the five-dimension scorecard, the full vendor field, the Continuum, and a live MCP your own AI can query.
The Verdict
Build, Buy, Bridge, or Beware on every one of the 1,850 categories. The call the public Index holds back.
The 5-Dimension Scorecard
Specificity, AI feasibility, vendor value, strategic control, and cost trajectory, each scored 1 to 5 with the reasoning behind it.
11,031 Vendor Files, With Pricing
The full vendor field for each category, with pricing and positioning, well past the two names everyone else sees.
The Continuum
A live, longitudinal read on how far AI has come in each part of the software market. Where the ground is moving, how fast, and why.
A Live MCP Server
Query the Index from Claude or your own tools. Re-scores flow straight in, so your agents always get the current call.
API, SDK, and Export
Pipe B4 into your stack, or pull the whole index to CSV and JSON whenever you need it.
Get the call on every category
From $49/month for the whole index in your browser, $199/month to put it inside your agents. Every verdict, the full scorecard, vendor pricing, the Continuum, and the MCP. Cancel anytime.
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The Build Report
Bi-weekly analysis of software categories through the B4 Framework. What to build, what to buy, and how to use AI to make better decisions for your company.