By providing two distinct perspectives on the market, the annualWindows IT Pro Editors' Best and Community Choice award programs offer a unique way to recognize the hottest products among the past year's offerings. Our Editors' Best program highlights products that Windows IT Pro editors and contributors believe are worthy of recognition, whereas our Community Choice program lets our readers decide which products are the best.
For the Community Choice program, we didn't just present a predefined list of products and services that limited your selection. Instead, we let you nominate your favorites, built the voting survey from there, and let everyone participate in the final voting phase.
For our Editors' Best program, we also reached out to readers to find out how the Gold winners help you do your jobs. We spoke to real users about real experiences, and we hope these testimonials benefit you in your environment.
In these pages, you'll find our Gold, Silver, and Bronze Editors' Best winners directly adjacent to the Community Choice winners in each category. Sometimes our editors and readers agreed on favorite products and services in a given category, but more often they didn't.
Choosing favorites from such a competitive field can be a challenge, but this year's winners show an uncommon breadth of functionality and originality.
Do you agree with our editors' choices? Or do our readers' picks carry more weight? Let us know!
Regardless of whether the winners were chosen by editors or readers, you can be sure that all these products are worth serious consideration if you're in the market for a new tool.
Editors' Best & Community Choice Award Categories
- Best Active Directory and Group Policy Product
- Best Antivirus/Anti-Malware Product
- Best Auditing and Compliance Product
- Best Backup Software Product
- Best Cloud Computing Product or Service
- Best Deployment/Configuration Product
- Best Hardware: Appliance
- Best Hardware: Laptop
- Best Hardware: Networking
- Best Hardware: Server
- Best Hardware: Storage
- Best Hardware: Workstation
- Best High-Availability/Disaster-Recovery Product
- Best Interoperability Product
- Best Management Suite
- Best Messaging Product
- Best Microsoft Product
- Best Mobile and Wireless Product
- Best Network-Management Product
- Best Patch-Management Product
- Best Scripting Tool
- Best Security Product
- Best SharePoint Product
- Best System Utility
- Best Systems Monitoring Product
- Best Task Automation Product
- Best Training and Certification Product or Service
- Best Virtualization Product
- Best Free or Open-Source IT Tool
