Vendor Evaluation

---
name: vendor-evaluation
description: Evaluate vendors or tools against requirements, total cost, security, operational fit, contractual constraints, and switching risk.
---
# Vendor Evaluation

Use before purchasing or standardizing on an external product, service, contractor, or platform.

## Procedure
1. Define mandatory requirements, desirable capabilities, budget constraints, scale, and decision horizon.
2. Identify viable candidates without allowing a vendor's feature list to define the requirements.
3. Compare total cost, implementation effort, support, security/privacy posture, integration fit, reliability, portability, and exit costs.
4. Validate critical claims from primary documentation, trials, references, or contracts where possible.
5. Identify lock-in, renewal, data-export, SLA, and dependency risks.
6. Score candidates transparently and explain any weighting that materially affects the result.
7. Recommend a choice, shortlist, or no-purchase decision with conditions.

## Quality gate
The evaluation should reveal tradeoffs and switching costs, not just count features.