"Give me a comparison matrix" - highly useful for speccing out tech products and stacks

Hi everyone!

I thought I would share a prompt snippet that I have been using a lot lately to very good effect.

I use ChatGPT intensively for what you might call stack research. By this I mean attempting to find new or better tools for software that I’m developing.

Last week, for instance, I asked ChatGPT to help me find an accounting software that was a good fit for my (small) business.

My prompts tend to be very detailed but might go something like this:

Please provide a list of accounting software that meets all of the following criteria:

- SaaS / cloud hosted
- Supports expense capture
- Supports invoicing and receipt generation
- Has a subscription for less than $100 per month
- Leverages some AI features

My workflow then usually goes something like: ChatGPT makes suggestions and I provide the odd nudge like: “nice job, but try to find tools that are more suited to a digital consultancy like mine. I don’t require inventory management, but a native integration with Google Workspace for client management would be very helpful.”

Usually after a bit of back and forth I end up with a pretty decent shortlist which I copy into Obsidian.

But as that can be quite the ream of text, my latest “hack” is prompting this:

Please generate a comparison matrix comparing the 5 products on our final shortlist. Please output this matrix to raw markdown.

GPT will then put together a basic comparison matrix as a markdown table (I specify this as the output format again because I’m capturing these outputs into Obsidian for later reference).

Without further specification, GPT will self-determine the best columns to put into the comparison matrix/table. But you can also give it a list of things to include or not.

I might prompt:

Please generate a comparison matrix for the shortlist we have identified. Include the following: price, free tier limits, Fedora Linux support. 

One final variation that’s often very useful is asking for a simple tick presentation to avoid the problem that the comparison table becomes another ream of text.

For that, I might prompt:

Please generate a comparison matrix for the shortlist we have identified. Include price and free tier limits. Also include whether the platform has a native Linux GUI. If it does, indicate that with a tick symbol. If it doesn't, use an x symbol.

Hope that helps - it’s effective and reliable!