Compared with the alternatives you are actually weighing.

Why we compare against categories, not named products

You will not find a page here comparing MjFour to a specific competitor by name. Two reasons, and neither is squeamishness.

First, what a named product does changes without telling us. A comparison table accurate in March is quietly wrong by September, and the person it misleads is the reader who trusted it.

Second, misstating a rival's features damages our credibility far more than theirs. Anyone evaluating both will spot it immediately, and at that point every other claim on this site is in question too.

So the comparisons are against the four things businesses here actually weigh us against: spreadsheets, paper registers, imported cloud software, and software built to order by a developer.

Every page names where the alternative wins

That is not modesty, it is the only way a comparison is worth reading. A page where the alternative never wins is an advert, and readers can tell.

So the spreadsheet page says plainly that a one-person operation billing a handful of invoices a month should keep its spreadsheet. The paper page says a very small single-campus school will not get much from software and that the transition costs real time during a term. The foreign software page says that if you consolidate across countries or need a deep integration ecosystem, an international platform is the right answer. The bespoke page says that a genuinely unusual core process deserves a bespoke build.

If one of those describes you, you have saved yourself a call.

How to read the tables

Each row is a criterion rather than a feature, phrased as something you can test rather than something we can assert. "Two people working at once" is checkable. "Powerful multi-user architecture" is not.

Where a row states a limit of the alternative, it is a structural limit rather than a temporary gap: a spreadsheet cell that changes leaves no record of what it was, and no version of a spreadsheet fixes that.

What is not in the tables

Price is not compared, because the alternatives are not priced comparably. A spreadsheet is free and costs you reconciliation time. A bespoke build has a capital cost and then a maintenance retainer. Our own price is published on the pricing page: PKR 1,000 a month per register or per school of up to 200 students, PKR 15 per employee per month for payroll.

The comparison we cannot make for you

None of these pages can weigh switching cost, and switching cost is usually the deciding factor.

Moving off a spreadsheet costs you an afternoon of import and a harder conversation about what your opening position actually is. Moving off paper costs a term of parallel running in practice, whatever the plan says. Moving off a bespoke system costs whatever it costs to get your data out of it, which depends entirely on how it was built.

Those numbers are specific to you and we would be inventing them if we published them.

What to do with these pages

Read the one that describes what you use now, and read the section naming where it wins. If that section describes your situation, stop there. You have your answer and it is not us.

If it does not, the table above it tells you what changes, and the pricing page tells you what it costs. Then bring twenty minutes and your own data, which settles more than any comparison table can.

A note on honesty in comparisons

Every claim about an alternative on these pages is a structural property rather than a temporary shortcoming. A spreadsheet cell that changes leaves no record of its previous value. Paper cannot be queried. A dollar price moves with the exchange rate. A bespoke build has one person who understands it.

None of those are fixed by the next release of anything, which is why they are safe to state and why we have not listed features a competitor might add next month.