software category taxonomy

The hierarchical classification each marketplace or directory assigns products to - genres, categories and nested groups.

Taxonomies differ per platform (Capterra's 1,025 categories vs G2's 2,239), so mapping between them is a standard preprocessing step.

In this catalog it appears concretely: - capterra-software-directory — "86,267 product profile pages across 1,025 category pages". - g2-software-categories-product-pages — "2,239 category pages across 43 top-level groups". - chrome-web-store-extensions-apps — "category taxonomy of 2 top-level groups with 14 observed subcategory slugs". - google-play-store-apps-kaggle-lava18 columns — "Category ... Genres".

A label on a listing is not a deliverable. Teams that license on the strength of a product-name match routinely find the shipped files cover a narrower slice than they assumed, and backfilling history afterwards costs more than the license ever did.

The failure mode is concrete: the label appears in a listing, the delivered files tell a different story, and the gap surfaces mid-project when fixing it is most expensive.

You rarely have to take a vendor's word for it. 82.4% of the 1,744 datasets Datadory catalogs are free to access, and capterra-software-directory lets you inspect the real artifact before any budget is committed.

Treat every claim of this attribute as testable:

1. Open capterra-software-directory and confirm its record — "86,267 product profile pages across 1,025 category pages" — against the files you actually receive.
2. Open g2-software-categories-product-pages and confirm its record — "2,239 category pages across 43 top-level groups" — against the files you actually receive.
3. Open chrome-web-store-extensions-apps and confirm its record — "category taxonomy of 2 top-level groups with 14 observed subcategory slugs" — against the files you actually receive.
4. Pin down update cadence in writing. Across this catalog, 22.6% of 1,744 datasets refresh daily and 64 still arrive only through a manual request form, so ask exactly how fresh each release is.
5. Check whether definitions are verified at all. Field definitions are verified for 1495 of 1,744 datasets (85.7%), and any source you license should meet that bar.
6. Price the delivery route before the license. In this catalog bulk download is the most common access method (725 datasets) ahead of official APIs (574), and 379 sources still require scraping — a maintenance cost that lands on you, not the vendor.

See the term applied to real records: application-software data.

Adjacent concepts worth reading next: - app metadata - verified review data