Software demo evaluation checklist

For a self-serve demo or sandbox, where you have the keyboard and nobody is presenting. It takes about an hour. Work through it in order: the early sections are cheap and tell you whether the later ones are worth doing.

The boxes tick on screen and the page prints as a worksheet. Nothing you tick is stored or sent anywhere; it clears when you reload.

Before you open the demo

Ten minutes here decides whether the hour is an evaluation or a browse.

Write down the one task this software has to do for you. A real one, with a name: "receive a part-shipped purchase order", not "inventory".
List three things that would make you stop considering it. Deal-breakers decided now cannot be argued away later by a good-looking screen.
Read what the demo says about your data. Is the workspace private? How long is it kept? Does it send email? If it does not say, assume the worst.
Prepare a few invented records to enter. Realistic in shape, not real. See demo data and privacy.
Open a blank page for notes with two headings: Saw, Could not test.

The first ten minutes

Do not take the tour yet. You get one chance to see the product the way a new colleague will.

Note the time, then try to start your task without reading anything. How long until you found the right screen? Would you have found it without knowing the vocabulary?
Check whether you are in real software or a click-through tour. Type something unexpected into a field. If nothing changes, nothing is running.
Look at the sample data and say what business it describes. If it is not a business like yours, the product may not have been built for one.
Now take the guided tour, if there is one, and note what it shows first. The first thing a tour shows is what the vendor believes the product is for.

Do your own task

This is the center of the evaluation. Everything before it was preparation.

Carry your task from start to finish with your invented records. Count the screens and the clicks. Note every point where you had to guess.
Do it a second time. The second pass is closer to daily use. Is it quick now, or is it the same number of steps?
Find the record you just made from a cold start. Search for it, filter for it, find it from a related record. Can you get back to your own work?
Change something after the fact. Edit a quantity, a date, an owner. Does the software keep what it was before, and who changed it?
Look for the detail your business has that most do not. The partial delivery, the split batch, the customer with two billing addresses. Is there a place for it?

Break it on purpose

You will make every one of these mistakes in real use within a month. Make them now, while it is free.

Enter something plainly wrong: a negative quantity, a date in the past, a missing required value. Were you stopped? Did the message say what was wrong and where?
Enter the same thing twice. Does it warn about the duplicate, merge it, or quietly keep both?
Do a step out of order. Close something that is not finished; ship something that was not received.
Delete a record that other records depend on. Is it blocked, is it reversible, and what happens to the things that pointed at it?
Use the back button and reload in the middle of a form. Did you lose the work?
Open it on a phone. If anyone on your team works standing up, this is their whole experience of the product.

Other people

You are the administrator of your demo. Almost nobody on your team will be.

Add a second user with the narrowest access available.
Sign in as that user in a private window and write down what they can see. Prices, other teams' records, settings, exports. Compare it with what you would want.
Find the audit trail and check that your earlier edits are in it, with a name and a time.

Getting out

Export everything the product lets you export, and open the files. Is the history there, or only current values? Are attachments included?
Look for an API or a documented import and export format. You may never use it. Its existence tells you whether your data can leave.
Find the documentation and look up one thing you got stuck on. Was the answer there, and was it written for a user or for a developer?

Before you close the tab

Fill in "Could not test" honestly. Volume, integrations, your real data, your real users. What a demo hides is the full list.
Turn each of those into one written question for the vendor.
Check your three deal-breakers. Did any of them happen?
Write two sentences on what you would tell a colleague, today, while it is fresh.

Reading the result

A completed sheet does not give you a score. It gives you three piles. Things you watched the software do are settled. Things on the "could not test" list are open, and each needs a different kind of evidence: a question on a sales call, a reference customer, or a proof of concept. Anything that tripped a deal-breaker ends the evaluation, which is a good result for an hour's work.

If you are comparing products, run the same sheet with the same invented records against each, and carry the piles into a scorecard. To see the sheet filled in against a real demo, read the worked example.

Last reviewed 2026-10-09