Two different products, not two versions of the same one
Sortlist is a marketplace. It describes itself as "the marketplace to find and hire expert teams", and its help centre says companies "connect with vetted providers in less than 48 hours". You tell Sortlist what you need, and it introduces you to providers that match.
Agency Review Guide is an editorial directory. We research and publish agency profiles ourselves, score ranked agencies against a published 100-point methodology, and attach a source link to the facts we publish. Nobody is introduced to you; you read, shortlist and contact agencies directly.
That difference decides which one is useful to you. If you want a shortlist handed to you quickly, a marketplace does that. If you want to see the reasoning and the evidence behind a recommendation, an editorial directory does that.
How each side makes money
This matters more than any feature list, because it shapes what you see.
Sortlist publishes its provider pricing openly. A provider profile is free — Sortlist's pricing page lists a free tier at €0 that lets an agency create a profile, show work and collect reviews. Above that sits Sortlist+, listed at €129 per month, which adds a certification badge and profile promotion. Sortlist also sells an Opportunity module, where an agency tells Sortlist what kind of buyer it wants and pays only for the introductions it chooses to take, and a Visibility module for profile promotion.
So on Sortlist, an agency can pay for visibility and pay per opportunity. To Sortlist's credit, it draws a line: its help centre states that the Trusted Partner badge "has to be earned: an agency cannot buy it, request it, or have it assigned."
Agency Review Guide does not sell placement, rankings or introductions, as our sponsorship policy sets out. Agencies cannot pay to be listed, ranked higher or featured. Any sponsored or affiliated relationship — the same standard we applied when comparing Clutch and DesignRush — is labelled on the page it appears on.
Our own disclosure, since this is a comparison we wrote about ourselves: Agency Review Guide is published by the team behind The Branded Agency, which is itself listed here. That is disclosed on its profile, and it is scored under the same methodology as everyone else. You should weigh this article knowing that.
Scale and coverage
Sortlist publishes its own numbers on its about page: more than 120,000 companies use Sortlist each year, a global network of 98,000 providers, and $860M worth of projects annually. These are Sortlist's self-reported figures, not independently audited ones, and they cover a far larger network than ours.
Agency Review Guide covers a deliberately narrower set: agencies we have researched and can source, across Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, Singapore and South Africa. Breadth is the trade-off we made for evidence.
How agencies get in
On Sortlist, providers apply to join and build their own profile — the agency's DNA, its work, its client reviews and its preferences for the kind of opportunities it wants. Sortlist's help centre documents its own selection and its Trusted Partner checks.
On Agency Review Guide, we add agencies through research. Someone can submit an agency, but it only gets published once we can verify the facts from the agency's own site or a named, reputable source. An agency owner can claim a published profile and correct it, but they do not control the editorial assessment.
Reviews
Both sites collect client reviews. Sortlist lets providers gather reviews on their profiles as part of the free tier.
On our side, reviews are held for moderation, we ask for verification consent, and we publish the reviewer's role and company without exposing their contact details. Ratings never override the methodology score.
Which one should you use?
- **Use Sortlist if** you want a fast, guided shortlist, you're comfortable that some visibility is paid for, and speed matters more to you than seeing the working.
- **Use Agency Review Guide if** you want to read sourced profiles, see how a ranking was scored, and know that no agency paid for its position.
- **Use both if** you're running a real procurement process. Get introductions from a marketplace, then check each name against independent research before you send a brief.
What we could not verify
Sortlist does not publish, in a place we could check, the full price of every visibility campaign or the per-opportunity cost — those are quoted per agency and per market. We have marked those as not published rather than estimating them. We also did not attempt to verify Sortlist's self-reported traffic, network or project-value figures; we report them as its own claims.