Deepak Gupta

POC Scorecard

Score a vendor POC against fourteen weighted criteria, see the shape rather than just the total, and export a defensible summary.

Runs in your browser

No signup. No network calls. Nothing is stored.

Candidate

Criterion	Wt	Candidate
Failure behaviorOperational · 5 = Degrades safely, alerts on its own outage, documented failure modes	8
Alert qualityOperational · 5 = Signal per alert high enough that the team still reads them at week four	8
Integration frictionOperational · 5 = Connected to your identity provider and SIEM without vendor engineering	7
Weekly human costOperational · 5 = Under two hours per week of maintenance once tuned	7
Performance at your volumeOperational · 5 = Tested at peak rather than average, with headroom stated	6
Upgrade behaviorOperational · 5 = An upgrade observed, or a public record of clean releases	6
Multi-tenancy and scopingOperational · 5 = Permissions model matches your org structure without workarounds	6
Observability of the tool itselfOperational · 5 = You can tell whether it is working without asking the vendor	6
Claim substantiationEvidence · 5 = Every security claim resolves to evidence you can read	7
Documentation depthEvidence · 5 = Error semantics, limits, and migration paths documented	6
Support responsivenessEvidence · 5 = Real engineer, real answer, inside the stated window	6
Reference comparabilityEvidence · 5 = Two references at your scale and stack, produced within a week	6
Exit costCommercial · 5 = Open-format export, removal estimated under four weeks	8
Pricing at 3x scaleCommercial · 5 = Cost curve modelled and acceptable at three times current volume	7

Candidate

0 / 470

0 of 14 scored

Benchmarks behind this tool

Every figure this tool uses for context resolves to a card with a named source, a sample size, and a hand-verification date.

58%

of organizations run more than 25 security tools

Wiz · August 28, 2026

How this calculates

Every assumption the model makes, and the things it cannot see. Current as of August 28, 2026.

The instrument weights operational behavior at 60% of the total, evidence and support at 25%, and commercial and exit terms at 15%. Capability is not scored at all: if the product cannot do the job, the evaluation ends before scoring starts, and capability is the dimension a vendor controls most tightly during a trial.

Why these weights. The failures that make security teams regret a purchase are cumulative and operational: alert fatigue at month four, rule maintenance at month eight, an upgrade that breaks an integration at month eleven. A thirty-day trial cannot observe any of those directly, but it can observe their leading indicators, which is what the operational group measures.

How to read the output. The total is less useful than the shape. Any operational criterion scoring 1 or 2 is a veto candidate regardless of the total, because a tool the team stops reading is a subscription rather than a control. Above 380 with no operational criterion under 3, buy it. Between 320 and 380, buy it if the gaps sit in evidence and support, which improve with account attention, and do not if they sit in operations, which do not.

Score the incumbent too. The tool lets you run two columns for this reason. Without a baseline, every evaluation carries a structural bias toward change, because the new thing gets measured and the current thing gets assumed.

What it cannot see. Whether your champion stays in the role, and whether the vendor gets acquired. Neither is scoreable and both decide outcomes after signature.

Common questions

What should a security POC actually be scored on?: Operational behavior rather than capability. Capability is what the vendor configured and demonstrated, so it carries little information. Weight failure handling, alert quality, integration friction, and weekly maintenance cost at roughly 60% of the total, because those dimensions predict how a tool behaves at month twelve.
Does the POC Scorecard send my evaluation anywhere?: No. The tool is client-side JavaScript that makes no network requests and uses no storage APIs. Vendor names, scores, and notes stay in the browser tab and are discarded when it closes. Export produces a CSV generated locally.
Why score the incumbent tool as well as the challenger?: Because without a baseline every evaluation is biased toward change. A challenger scoring 390 looks compelling until the tool you already run scores 375 and switching costs a quarter. Running both columns is the single cheapest correction to that bias.