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 1,603.
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
Commodity, moat-protected, or compliance-bound. Keep buying, and buy cheapest.
Buy now, build later
Differentiating but not yet buildable. Buy and extend.
Stop paying
Commodity you may be overpaying for; it already exists elsewhere. Stop paying.
Own it
Differentiating and buildable. Own it, and keep this list short.
The Project Management scorecard
Collaboration · People & Workplace. Everything below is the complete Pro record for this one category.
Small teams should keep buying. For everyone else the case for paying is eroding.
$50-500K/yr for task tracking most teams underutilize.
Lean PM tools (Linear/Plane, Type B) + AI agents that auto-generate tasks from meetings, track progress, and surface blockers (Type C). Premium PM suites are overpaying.
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 most likely call 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.
Typical buyers use 20-40% of PM platforms — boards and task tracking are active while portfolio management, resource planning, time tracking, and reporting modules gather dust.
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).
PM SaaS is cheap with AI bundled ($8-25/user/month), but AI-assisted development materially cuts the effort to build narrow internal PM tools, and mature OSS bases (Plane, OpenProject) reduce build to deploy-and-extend. Build is starting to win 2-3x for narrow workflows; vendor pricing has not spiked. An emerging, not decisive, divergence.
The read
Task and project tracking is one of the most widely bought and most widely underused categories in software. Jira, Asana, and Linear are excellent at what they do, but organizations routinely pay tens to hundreds of thousands a year for capabilities a fraction of the team actually touches. The case for buying is real. Shared visibility, mature integrations, and a format people already know, and it's strongest where coordination across many teams is the actual problem.
What complicates the picture is how light the underlying workflow is, and how good AI has gotten at the generic version of it. Status rollups, planning, and updates are increasingly automated, and lightweight or internal alternatives are more viable than they were. So the question is whether you're buying genuine coordination value or paying a per-seat tax on a commodity workflow, and what the category looks like once AI absorbs the busywork it was sold to manage.
Representative vendors & pricing
- Asana $11-25/user/month
- Jira (Atlassian) $8-16/user/month
- Linear $8/user/month
- ActiveCollab
- Aerotime
- ALLO
- Appfluence Priority Matrix
- Atlassian
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 1,603 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 1,603 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.