How to choose a labour market analytics platform

"Labor market data" is really three separate products sold under one label: what companies are hiring for, what they pay, and how many people they employ. A comp team benchmarking salaries, an investor sizing up a competitor's hiring, and an economist tracking a monthly employment trend are all shopping in this category, but they need entirely different tools. If you just want to check one salary figure before a job offer, the free consumer lookups several of these vendors publish will answer that without a platform purchase.

Decide which side of the market you're measuring

• Hiring demand. Lightcast, LinkUp, and Revelio Labs all track job postings and workforce changes to answer "who is hiring, for what, and how fast is that changing." They differ mainly in sourcing (below) and in whether the output is raw data, a workforce dashboard, or a skills-and-education tool.
• Compensation. Levels.fyi, Payscale, and Salary.com answer "what does this role pay," through some blend of self-reported and employer-submitted survey data, packaged into benchmarking software for HR teams.
• Macro employment trend. ADP Research Institute is narrower and different in kind from the other six: a free monthly indicator of US private-sector employment and pay growth, built from ADP's own payroll-processing data, watched as an early signal ahead of the government's official jobs report.

Where the underlying data actually comes from

This is the question that matters most in this category, because none of these vendors observe every employer directly, and the gap between what a tool measures and what you assume it measures is where bad decisions happen.

• Payroll-verified. ADP Research Institute's reports are derived from anonymized, aggregated data from ADP's own payroll-processing business — audited transaction data, not a survey, though limited to the employers who run payroll through ADP.
• Self-reported by individuals. Levels.fyi's core database is built from employees voluntarily submitting their own pay and level, with some entries verified via offer-letter or paystub upload; Payscale's consumer-facing salary survey works the same way. Volume helps smooth outliers, but figures reflect what people choose to report, not audited records.
• Employer or HR-submitted survey data. Payscale's and Salary.com's enterprise products supplement self-reported data with data submitted directly by employer HR teams, which is generally more reliable for benchmarking a specific role than crowd-sourced figures alone.
• Public records and scraped postings. Lightcast and LinkUp both build from job postings — Lightcast from employer and job-board sites broadly, LinkUp specifically by crawling employer career pages directly to reduce duplicate or stale listings. Revelio Labs goes further, compiling public employment records, professional profiles, and layoff announcements into company-level workforce metrics like headcount and attrition. None of this is a company self-reporting its own numbers — it's an external, alternative-data view built without the company's cooperation, which is exactly the point for an investor or competitor researching from outside.

Ask directly how a vendor sources its data before you trust a number from it. "Compensation data" from crowd-sourced self-reports and "compensation data" from audited payroll are not the same claim, even when the dashboard looks identical.

Free consumer tool vs. enterprise platform

Three of these vendors — Levels.fyi, Payscale, and Salary.com — run a free public salary-lookup tool alongside a separate paid enterprise product for HR and comp teams. If you're an individual checking one number, the free tool is the whole answer. If you're building a compensation structure, running merit cycles, or auditing pay equity across an organization, you need the enterprise side — Payscale's Ascent and Paycycle, or Salary.com's CompAnalyst Max and CompXL — which is a materially different purchase with its own quote.

Who ends up using each tool

HR and compensation teams live in Payscale and Salary.com. Education institutions and public workforce agencies aligning programs to labor demand use Lightcast. Investors and corporate strategy teams researching a company from the outside — sizing up a competitor's hiring or attrition without access to its internal data — reach for Revelio Labs or LinkUp. Economists, policymakers, and journalists track ADP Research Institute's free monthly releases for a real-time read on the labor market. Job seekers and recruiters check Levels.fyi.

How pricing scales

ADP Research Institute is entirely free, published research funded by ADP's core payroll business. Levels.fyi, Payscale, and Salary.com are freemium: free for an individual salary lookup, quote-only for the enterprise platform. Lightcast, LinkUp, and Revelio Labs are all quote-only data and software subscriptions, typically scaling with the breadth of company or geographic coverage and the number of users, with no public price list to anchor expectations from.

A shortlist by situation

• You're benchmarking pay and running comp cycles for your own company. Payscale or Salary.com — compare on whether you need pay-equity auditing (both offer it) or a job-architecture tool that fits your existing HR stack.
• You're a job seeker or recruiter checking tech-industry pay. Levels.fyi's free consumer tool.
• You're aligning training or education programs to real hiring demand. Lightcast.
• You're an investor or competitor tracking a company's hiring or headcount from outside. Revelio Labs for broad company-level workforce metrics; LinkUp if job-postings volume and freshness matter most to your signal.
• You want a free, payroll-verified read on the overall US labor market. ADP Research Institute.

Questions to ask vendors

1. Is this figure self-reported, employer-submitted, payroll-verified, or scraped from public postings — and how does that match my tolerance for noise?
2. What's the coverage — which industries, company sizes, or geographies are underrepresented in the underlying data?
3. How current is the data, and how often does the vendor refresh it?
4. If I need this for HR decisions like pay equity, does the vendor's methodology hold up if challenged internally or externally?
5. What does the enterprise product cost beyond the free consumer tool, and does pricing scale by seats, company coverage, or data volume?

Common mistakes

Treating a self-reported salary figure as precise rather than directional, especially for a role or company with few submissions. Buying an enterprise comp platform when the free consumer lookup would have answered the actual question. And using job-postings data as a direct measure of hiring, when it measures postings — which can lag or overstate actual hires, especially if a listing stays live after a role is filled.

For head-to-head detail, see Payscale vs Salary.com and Lightcast vs LinkUp, or browse every tool in this category.