What we do not do
- No products of our own. IMC Institute owns no platform, agency or service listed here.
- No partnerships. We have no partnership, reseller, referral or integration-for-fee relationship with anyone listed.
- No affiliate income. Links to vendor sites are plain links. Nobody is paid when you click, sign up or buy.
- No paid placement. Nobody can pay to be listed, featured, scored, ranked, reviewed or removed. Nothing in the directory is pinned; the default order is alphabetical.
- No sponsored content. Learn pieces are written or syndicated for their usefulness, with sources. Syndicated pieces are labelled and attributed.
How it is enforced
- The directory filters by policy. Only independent listings can reach a public page, Find your stack, the public API, the sitemap, search or the language-model index. A record with any other relationship stays in the editorial system and cannot be published.
- The engine cannot read relationships. The ranking reads your answers and each listing's recorded facts, nothing else. Ties break on how much of a listing has been checked, then alphabetically.
- A test proves it. The automated tests relabel every listing with every possible relationship and fail if a single ranking changes.
- Every claim has a source. Listings and articles carry their sources. A fact we could not source is left out rather than estimated.
Editorial rules
- Facts, not opinions. Listings describe what a product documents; they never say which product is best.
- No invented numbers, logos or testimonials. Pricing is shown as models and dated official examples, never our own averages.
- Unverified is a state. A source confirmed only from a search excerpt is marked "to re-check".
- Three states for every check: met, not met, or not assessed. Not assessed is never read as a failure.
Agencies, consultancies and freelancers
The team lists platforms only. Agencies, consultancies and freelancers are listed only when the community submits them or they claim a profile, and a moderator checks the submission first. Nothing about an agency is invented.
Vendors
Vendors and agencies are welcome in the community: they can send corrections and evidence like anyone else and are asked to say who they are. A correction is weighed on its source, not on its author. Being listed is an editorial decision and never depends on cooperation.
If this ever changes
If a partnership, affiliation or other commercial arrangement ever starts, it will be documented on this page before it takes effect, labelled on every affected listing, and kept out of the ranking.