G2 vs. Capterra for SaaS: Are Software Marketplaces Still Worth the Ad Spend?

For SaaS companies, Google Ads is usually one of the first channels considered when there is existing demand for the product.

But Google is not the only place where people actively look for software.

Platforms such as Capterra and G2 put SaaS companies in front of buyers who are already comparing software solutions. Historically, this made software directories an interesting acquisition channel, particularly for SaaS companies selling internationally.

We have run Capterra campaigns for many of the SaaS companies we have worked with, especially companies selling globally. We have also followed how G2 has developed as both an organic software discovery platform and, more recently, a paid acquisition channel.

Our view today is more cautious than it was five or seven years ago.

Software marketplaces can still be worth testing. But we would no longer assume that simply because someone is browsing a software directory, the economics will work.

Why Capterra used to be an attractive SaaS advertising channel

Five to seven years ago, Capterra had a fairly unique position within SaaS advertising.

As an advertiser, you could choose the software category you wanted to appear in, select the country you wanted to target and decide how much you were willing to pay per click.

That created a lot of control.

If a SaaS product was relevant in Germany, the UK and the US, for example, campaigns could be managed differently across those markets. If one category produced customers and another did not, budget could be moved accordingly.

The advertiser had direct control over the CPC and could work backwards from the acquisition economics.

That made Capterra particularly interesting for global SaaS companies.

The volume was usually lower than Google Search, but that did not necessarily make it a worse channel.

Capterra leads could be more expensive — and still make financial sense

One mistake when comparing SaaS advertising channels is to look only at cost per lead.

Historically, Capterra was often more expensive than Google on a lead basis.

But that was only the beginning of the funnel.

Across several SaaS accounts, we saw Capterra produce a reasonable cost per MQL, even where the initial cost per lead or trial was relatively high.

In some cases, the people who eventually purchased also appeared to have stronger purchasing power.

There is a logical reason for this.

Someone browsing Capterra has already decided that they are looking at software. They are navigating software categories and comparing potential solutions.

A Google search does not always carry the same signal.

Some Google searches have extremely high commercial intent. Others might come from someone researching a topic, a student, an existing customer or someone who is still far away from actually purchasing software.

Capterra therefore had an interesting trade-off: less traffic and often a higher cost per lead, but potentially stronger software-buying intent.

Once the comparison reached cost per MQL or cost per paying customer, the difference between Capterra and Google could become much smaller.

That is ultimately the comparison that matters.

A SaaS company should not optimize its advertising for the cheapest form submission. It should optimize toward acquiring economically valuable customers.

What changed with Capterra?

The problem is that the Capterra of today is not the Capterra we were buying traffic from five or seven years ago.

The change happened gradually.

Originally, advertisers had substantial control over CPC bids.

Capterra later introduced minimum bid levels, which made it more difficult to bring acquisition costs down to the levels required by some SaaS companies.

The platform has subsequently been moving further toward automated bidding, leaving advertisers with less direct control over how individual clicks are bought.

From an agency perspective, that matters.

Automation is not automatically bad. Google Ads itself has moved heavily toward automated bidding.

But automation works best when the platform has enough useful conversion data and when the advertiser can trust that the algorithm is optimizing toward something commercially meaningful.

With smaller software marketplaces, the available traffic is naturally more limited.

If prices rise at the same time as advertisers lose bidding control, the channel has to produce correspondingly better customers to justify the investment.

In our more recent SaaS campaigns, Capterra has generally been harder to make work than it was historically.

That doesn't mean Capterra cannot work.

It means we would no longer assume that it will.

Software discovery has changed as well

There is another issue that has little to do with Capterra's advertising interface.

The way people discover software has changed.

Software buyers today have considerably more ways to research products than they did several years ago. Traditional software directories still play a role, but they are competing for that research activity with search engines, communities, social platforms, review content and newer ways of finding and comparing products.

Our experience is not that software-directory demand disappeared.

It simply has not strengthened enough to make rising acquisition costs irrelevant.

For SaaS advertisers, that makes the economics more difficult.

A platform with relatively limited traffic can still be excellent if the customers are valuable enough. But if traffic remains limited while CPCs increase, advertisers eventually reach the point where another channel deserves to be tested.

G2 historically worked differently from Capterra

G2 and Capterra both help buyers discover and compare software, but historically their mechanics were quite different.

Capterra was much more directly pay-to-play.

An advertiser could select several categories and bid for visibility within them.

This could be useful from an advertising perspective, but it also created a weakness in the marketplace.

A product could potentially pay to appear prominently in several categories even where its relevance became progressively weaker.

Reviews were useful, but they were not necessarily required to buy visibility.

G2 historically placed much more emphasis on the organic strength of the product within its category.

You could not simply choose ten categories, put money behind each one and buy your way to the top.

Your position depended much more heavily on things such as your category and the ratings and reviews the product had accumulated.

That created a different incentive for SaaS companies.

If you wanted stronger visibility on G2, it was worth investing in getting actual customers to review the product.

And if you chose the wrong category, advertising could not easily compensate for the mistake.

From a buyer-quality perspective, we considered that one reason G2 could be a particularly interesting software marketplace.

Category selection matters more than most SaaS companies think

Before spending money on either platform, we would first look at where the software is actually positioned.

Being listed on G2 is not enough.

Being listed in the right category matters.

If buyers are searching for e-signature software, for example, appearing prominently in an adjacent but substantially less relevant software category provides limited value.

The same principle applies well beyond G2.

One of the most common mistakes in SaaS advertising is trying to expand the addressable audience by making targeting progressively less relevant.

You can usually create more traffic that way.

You do not necessarily create more customers.

A strong software marketplace category should closely reflect the problem the buyer believes they are trying to solve.

That also makes the category itself an interesting signal for a SaaS marketing agency evaluating whether G2 or Capterra deserves advertising budget.

G2's newer paid placements make the platform more interesting

G2 has also moved toward paid visibility.

That makes the platform more similar to Capterra than it was historically, but there is an important difference in the implementation we find interesting.

Paid placement can give an advertiser a prominent sponsored position within a relevant category without simply replacing all the highest organic results.

In other words, the marketplace can retain some of the organic signals that made G2 useful while also giving advertisers an opportunity to buy additional distribution.

From an advertising perspective, that is worth testing.

It potentially creates access to buyers who are actively comparing a category of software, even where the advertiser has not yet accumulated enough reviews to organically occupy one of the strongest positions.

We would not claim that this automatically makes G2 better than Capterra.

We have not seen enough data from the newer advertising model to make that conclusion.

But it makes G2 a channel we would currently be interested in testing for the right SaaS company.

G2 vs. Capterra vs. Google Ads

It is tempting to ask which of these platforms is the best SaaS advertising channel.

We don't think that is the most useful question.

They capture different parts of existing demand.

Google Search

Google usually has considerably more volume.

It allows a SaaS company to capture people searching directly for its product category, competitors, problems and relevant use cases.

But the intent behind different searches can vary substantially.

Capterra

Capterra visitors are already inside a software marketplace.

Historically, we saw this produce lower traffic volumes and often higher initial acquisition costs, but potentially stronger downstream lead quality.

Our concern today is that increasing costs and decreasing advertiser control have made those economics harder to achieve consistently.

G2

G2 also reaches buyers in an explicit software discovery and comparison environment.

Historically, its stronger dependence on categories, reviews and organic product strength differentiated it from Capterra.

Its newer paid placements now make it more interesting as a direct SaaS acquisition channel as well.

None of this means one platform should automatically replace another.

The question is whether each additional channel can acquire paying customers at acceptable economics.

When would we test G2 or Capterra for a SaaS company?

We generally recommend testing rather than trying to predict the answer entirely beforehand.

There is a limit to what market research can tell you.

You can evaluate category relevance, estimated traffic, CPCs, competition and the strength of a SaaS company's profile.

What you cannot reliably know before running the campaign is what kind of customer will actually come through it.

This becomes especially important when a SaaS company already has a working advertising channel.

Imagine a company spending €10,000 per month on Google Ads.

If Google can continue absorbing another €5,000 while maintaining approximately the same customer acquisition cost, increasing the Google budget may be the obvious decision.

But advertising channels rarely scale linearly forever.

Eventually, additional Google Ads budget may mean increasing bids for the same searches, moving into lower-intent keywords, entering less attractive countries or expanding into progressively broader audiences.

That is where diminishing returns begin.

At that point, testing another high-intent channel such as G2 or Capterra can make sense.

The question becomes: can this new channel produce an additional paying customer more efficiently than the next euro spent on the existing channel?

That is a much more useful way to evaluate SaaS channel diversification.

Why SaaS companies should avoid putting all acquisition into one channel

There is also a strategic reason to test additional acquisition channels even when one platform is currently performing well.

Putting all acquisition into one advertising platform creates concentration risk.

• Algorithms change.
• Bidding systems change.
• CPCs increase.
• Competitors enter the auction.
• Tracking changes.
• The type of traffic available on the platform changes.

Capterra itself is a good example.

A channel that gave advertisers extensive manual control several years ago has gradually moved toward minimum bidding requirements and greater automation.

A SaaS company that depended entirely on that acquisition source would have had relatively little control over those changes.

Channel diversification does not mean spending money everywhere.

It means finding more than one channel capable of acquiring the right customer at economically sustainable costs.

Don't judge G2 or Capterra only by cost per lead

For both G2 and Capterra, we would look beyond the first conversion.

A test should ideally answer several questions:

• How much does a qualified lead cost?
• What company sizes are coming through?
• Are these companies part of the actual ICP?
• How many become sales opportunities?
• How many eventually become paying customers?
• What is the contract value of those customers?
• How does the final customer acquisition cost compare with Google Ads and other channels?

This is particularly important because marketplace leads may look expensive at the top of the funnel.

If they convert to customers at a higher rate or produce larger contracts, that higher CPL can be completely acceptable.

Equally, a channel producing inexpensive leads can still be a poor acquisition channel if very few of those leads ever progress through the sales funnel.

Our current view on G2 vs. Capterra for SaaS advertising

Five to seven years ago, we were considerably more comfortable recommending Capterra as part of the advertising mix for globally selling SaaS companies.

The platform gave advertisers a level of control that made it possible to manage individual markets and categories around the required acquisition economics.

Today, we would be more cautious.

Capterra can still generate software buyers, but our more recent experience has been less positive as minimum bids increased, bidding became more automated and the wider software discovery market changed.

G2 is interesting for a different reason.

Historically, category relevance and customer reviews played a larger role in determining visibility. Its move toward sponsored placements now gives SaaS advertisers another way to reach buyers without completely abandoning that marketplace structure.

For the right SaaS company, we would test it.

But we would treat both platforms in the same way we treat any new SaaS advertising channel: start with a controlled budget. Measure what happens beyond the lead. Compare the resulting customer acquisition cost with the marginal cost of scaling your existing channels. Then decide whether it deserves more budget.

There is no universal SaaS advertising playbook where Google, G2, Capterra, LinkedIn or Meta always wins.

The job of a SaaS marketing agency is not to pick a favorite platform.

It is to understand where the company's buyers are, identify where relevant demand can be captured, test the economics and move budget toward the channels that ultimately produce valuable customers.

Looking for a B2B SaaS marketing agency?

Kraftvertising is a B2B SaaS marketing and advertising agency working across Google Ads, LinkedIn Ads, Meta, software marketplaces, landing pages, creative and conversion tracking.

We test new acquisition channels with controlled budgets, measure what happens after the lead and move spend toward the channels that produce paying customers at sustainable economics.

Discuss your SaaS acquisition channels with Kraftvertising.