Add various ratings

[darkvadd7]

Maybe it can be useful for beginners to add ratings for every solution. For exemple for usabilty (easy to use), privacy, security... This can help to choose between solutions.

[IkelAtomig]

I think and recommend not to do this. The site recommends software and suggestions on a overall threat model.

Using this might misled the visitors based on the rating and might break the Threat model.

[TommyTran732]

Not something we can do. We can explain the nuances and pros and cons of each approach, we can't deduce it to just stars.

[darkvadd7]

Okay. But, not considering the threat model, some options are easier to use, some others are more secure or more private, no?

[nourkagha]

I believe privacytools.io did this at some point if I'm not mistaken.

There is no objective or sufficiently accurate criteria to base this on as it's very subjective and depends on use-cases and threat models. For example, a 5 star solution for someone might be a 3 star solution for someone else.

This would also cause a lot of unnecessary debating and wasted time and effort trying to accurately determine ratings compared to an objective list of criteria. There is no standard metric for security and no such thing as absolute or maximum security since it depends on threat modeling apart from potential vulnerabilities, so realistically nothing would objectively be 5 stars. As for privacy, it's similar and entirely depends on who or what parties you're looking to keep things private from. Usability also depends on the person and how much accessibility they need and how advanced or simple and minimalist they like the software to be.

There are a lot of nuances and factors to consider and designing a proper and standard rating system like this would be an impossible task unless it uses a predefined set of subjective criteria, which would as a result make the site a more biased and opinionated resource rather than simply providing the information and leaving the judgement to the user.

It's best that we continue to list the pros and cons of each recommendation and leave it to the user to make an informed decision based on their needs rather than reduce the recommendations to a star system that more closely resembles PC Mag.