Salesforce Marketing Cloud Social Studio (retiring) vs. Sparkcentral (discontinued)

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Salesforce Marketing Cloud Social Studio (retiring)
Score 5.9 out of 10
N/A
Radian6 was acquired by Salesforce.com in 2011 and - along with Buddy Media - became Salesforce Social Studio. The product is slated to be retired in November 2024.
$1,000
Per Org Per Month
Sparkcentral (discontinued)
Score 9.9 out of 10
N/A
Sparkcentral was a social customer care solution and cloud-based customer engagement platform that catered specifically to customer care teams within large enterprises, enabling them to deliver real-time social customer service. Sparkcentral was acquired by Hootsuite in January 2021. The product has since been discontinued.N/A
Pricing
Salesforce Marketing Cloud Social Studio (retiring)Sparkcentral (discontinued)
Editions & Modules
Basic
$1,000.00
Per Org Per Month
Pro
$4,000.00
Per Org Per Month
Corporate
$12,000.00
Per Org Per Month
Enterprise
$40,000.00
Per Org Per Month
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Salesforce Marketing Cloud Social Studio (retiring)Sparkcentral (discontinued)
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Salesforce Marketing Cloud Social Studio (retiring)Sparkcentral (discontinued)
Top Pros
Top Cons
Features
Salesforce Marketing Cloud Social Studio (retiring)Sparkcentral (discontinued)
Listening/monitoring
Comparison of Listening/monitoring features of Product A and Product B
Salesforce Marketing Cloud Social Studio (retiring)
8.5
10 Ratings
11% above category average
Sparkcentral (discontinued)
-
Ratings
Boolean keyword searches7.09 Ratings00 Ratings
Filtering out noise/spam7.09 Ratings00 Ratings
Sentiment analysis10.08 Ratings00 Ratings
Broad channel coverage10.010 Ratings00 Ratings
Publishing
Comparison of Publishing features of Product A and Product B
Salesforce Marketing Cloud Social Studio (retiring)
8.5
10 Ratings
7% above category average
Sparkcentral (discontinued)
-
Ratings
Content planning and scheduling10.010 Ratings00 Ratings
Audience targeting8.09 Ratings00 Ratings
Content optimization8.08 Ratings00 Ratings
Workflow management8.010 Ratings00 Ratings
Engagement
Comparison of Engagement features of Product A and Product B
Salesforce Marketing Cloud Social Studio (retiring)
7.6
9 Ratings
6% below category average
Sparkcentral (discontinued)
-
Ratings
Automated routing and prioritization9.99 Ratings00 Ratings
Customer interaction histories9.99 Ratings00 Ratings
Bulk actions3.19 Ratings00 Ratings
Marketing
Comparison of Marketing features of Product A and Product B
Salesforce Marketing Cloud Social Studio (retiring)
5.5
9 Ratings
33% below category average
Sparkcentral (discontinued)
-
Ratings
Lead generation5.08 Ratings00 Ratings
Content marketing5.09 Ratings00 Ratings
Paid media management6.07 Ratings00 Ratings
Campaigns and promotions6.08 Ratings00 Ratings
Channel coverage/integration
Comparison of Channel coverage/integration features of Product A and Product B
Salesforce Marketing Cloud Social Studio (retiring)
8.1
10 Ratings
5% below category average
Sparkcentral (discontinued)
-
Ratings
Twitter9.010 Ratings00 Ratings
Facebook10.010 Ratings00 Ratings
LinkedIn10.08 Ratings00 Ratings
Google+6.86 Ratings00 Ratings
Instagram8.07 Ratings00 Ratings
Pinterest6.54 Ratings00 Ratings
YouTube6.76 Ratings00 Ratings
Reporting/analytics
Comparison of Reporting/analytics features of Product A and Product B
Salesforce Marketing Cloud Social Studio (retiring)
8.6
9 Ratings
9% above category average
Sparkcentral (discontinued)
-
Ratings
Campaign success analytics8.99 Ratings00 Ratings
Real-time tracking7.09 Ratings00 Ratings
Competitor analysis9.97 Ratings00 Ratings
Account management
Comparison of Account management features of Product A and Product B
Salesforce Marketing Cloud Social Studio (retiring)
9.5
9 Ratings
15% above category average
Sparkcentral (discontinued)
-
Ratings
Role-based user permissions & privileges9.08 Ratings00 Ratings
Mobile access9.99 Ratings00 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Salesforce Marketing Cloud Social Studio (retiring)Sparkcentral (discontinued)
Small Businesses
Publer
Publer
Score 9.8 out of 10
Simplify360
Simplify360
Score 7.8 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Social Suite by Reputation.com
Social Suite by Reputation.com
Score 9.3 out of 10
Emplifi Social Marketing Cloud
Emplifi Social Marketing Cloud
Score 8.9 out of 10
Enterprises
Social Suite by Reputation.com
Social Suite by Reputation.com
Score 9.3 out of 10
Emplifi Social Marketing Cloud
Emplifi Social Marketing Cloud
Score 8.9 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Salesforce Marketing Cloud Social Studio (retiring)Sparkcentral (discontinued)
Likelihood to Recommend
8.9
(51 ratings)
10.0
(16 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
8.8
(38 ratings)
8.7
(4 ratings)
Usability
9.0
(9 ratings)
10.0
(1 ratings)
Availability
9.6
(5 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Performance
8.4
(5 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
9.0
(8 ratings)
10.0
(3 ratings)
In-Person Training
10.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Online Training
7.6
(6 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
9.8
(6 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Salesforce Marketing Cloud Social Studio (retiring)Sparkcentral (discontinued)
Likelihood to Recommend
Discontinued Products
If you're tasked with publishing content to social on behalf of your organization then this tool is certainly worth considering. You have quick and easy capability to schedule across multiple platforms with drag-and-drop simplicity. It ties into Salesforce's real strength of its CRM platform so you can quickly tie social activity and leads to those already in your database. And it does a good job at monitoring and analyzing brand and competitor content across multiple media types. Having said that, if you're into deep-dive and full functionality SaaS tools then this might not be for you as it covers three areas adequately, but not in enough detail or strength to make it a star performer
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Discontinued Products
Sparkcentral has an extremely dedicated customer service team The platform UX is brilliant Reports are very detailed & easy to export The system is stable more than 98% of the time Queue management is extremely easy They need to work on a mobile app / making the website mobile friendly The ability to add more social media channels is essential
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Pros
Discontinued Products
  • The amount of the information that radian6 can pull from multiple social platforms is absolutely phenomenal. Its just not only the pull but the way the information can be presented in dashboards was way good. It helped us understand in various aspects of our social presence.
  • Multiple profiles helped us to break down the Big/Huge social buzz cloud to smaller and more manageable pieces. This helped us concentrate on the lows and helped us to plan better on turning them to highs.
  • Radian6 allowed us to follow thru the crowd trends with the latest information presented in a single view. This also helped us to collect the social opinion on the product releases.
  • The ease of use, one need not be an expert to start using this platform. The interface is easily understandable by anyone.
  • A keyword can be edited quickly to tailor the needs and the results were quick.
Read full review
Discontinued Products
  • The biggest advantage of the Sparkcentral platform is its "inbox zero" philosophy. With this, our customer support requests are queued within the app, and agents need to work down the queue to keep it empty.
  • The app is designed from the ground up for customer care - instead of taking a generic social platform, and sprinkling in some customer care tools. Everything about Sparkcental is designed for helping our customers.
  • Sparkcentral allows us to do much better CRM. We can make customer notes, see recent interactions, determine who helped the customer (and when).
Read full review
Cons
Discontinued Products
  • Instagram Social Listening - it currently does not offer much social listening in terms of Instagram.
  • Instagram Owned - It currently stops pulling once an update is "old" by their standards, even if it receives recent comments. They can force pull, but you have to work with their tech team to do so.
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Discontinued Products
  • In the beginning our team had the option to see what another user was typing as they responded to a post. With the latest update, this was taken away. That feature was key for us to shadow agents remotely who are still in training to provide real time feedback.
  • Our company has a number of different brands that we manage. Having a truly unified queue would be a great addition for us!
  • The bulk resolve should allow the option to select on the posts that you wish to resolve instead of selecting a time frame for bulk resolve. Often we find that marketing posts generate more volume in the evening. However, there are sometimes posts where the customer needs assistance during that time. So, if we were to bulk resolve for a certain number of evening hours we would potentially miss a customer's concern through that option as it is currently. But, if the option was to go through and select on all marketing posts and then bulk resolve you would ensure that you are not missing a post where a customer needs assistance.
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Likelihood to Renew
Discontinued Products
I spent a lot of time researching the right platform for me and our organisation (thanks to the other reviews on TrustRadius also). Having used other platforms when I found frustrations getting my everyday work done, I knew exactly what I wanted and this is why I chose Social Studio. While there have been a few hiccups, the quarterly update releases and the outstanding tech support have kept me more than happy.
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Discontinued Products
Sparkcentral has never given us a good reason to consider any other option. Aside from all the positive points I mentioned in previous areas of this review, something else that has really impressed us is their customer service (makes sense, they're a customer service company after all!). Any time we have a question or concern, we send them an email and we get a response almost instantly.
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Usability
Discontinued Products
• Would rate this a 6. The User Interface is pretty intuitive, but the platform was still considered pretty intimidating by our non-technical staff when they first saw it. It took a while to get used to it and feel comfortable. There was quite a lot of setup work in the beginning (for example, we had to build our own reports using a canned report as a template, and this was not simple). Although it took a while to get it setup correctly, it’s quite intuitive once that work has been done.
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Discontinued Products
The system meets all my expectations.
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Reliability and Availability
Discontinued Products
The platform is rarely down
Read full review
Discontinued Products
No answers on this topic
Performance
Discontinued Products
No issues with performance.
Read full review
Discontinued Products
No answers on this topic
Support Rating
Discontinued Products
As mentioned previously, it can be hard to get through to people who can help you. On occasion when I have spoken to customer service/tech support, they all seem nice and try to be helpful, however instead of admitting the system cannot do certain things, they will persist it saying that it can, which results in many wasted hours overall.
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Discontinued Products
Incredible customer service team that replies back very quickly, follows up on the reported issue till it's resolved in a very timely manner.
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Online Training
Discontinued Products
• We initially received dedicated online training for our team which was delivered by our account rep. This was pretty effective since it happened after our data had been loaded into the system and it had been configured for specific needs our organization. The training was perhaps a bit shallow though, as it was only an hour long. Online videos are available to be taken individually, and these have been useful.
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Discontinued Products
No answers on this topic
Implementation Rating
Discontinued Products
Implementation was pretty simple. Just a matter of giving the account rep a list of our search terms and having him set the system up to pull the data we wanted to see. Once this had been done, we tweaked it with his help. Process was pretty smooth, although there was some back and forth until it worked the way we wanted.
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Discontinued Products
No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
Discontinued Products
Compared to Radian6, I found Meltwater Buzz, Simply Measured, and Sprout Social to be much more user friendly. Meltwater Buzz and Radian6 are very similar products with many of the same functionalities but Buzz presents your analytics in a way that is much easier to understand. I did a two week trial with Sprout Social and absolutely loved the product but our company needed the capability to connect to Salesforce, which is available on R6 and Buzz. Simply Measured is my all time favorite but I have only used the free version so I am not completely sure how it stacks up to Radian6
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Discontinued Products
Sparkcentral does what it has offered to do, where other software made empty promises, Sparkcentral delivers. They also inform us, anytime they are undergoing maintenance or when Twitter or Facebook has an API change, where in previous cases we would have to discover this ourselves.
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Return on Investment
Discontinued Products
  • Monitoring social brand awareness is not something you can consider to have a meaninful impact in your business ROI short term, however it's a must for taking care of long term relationships and customer intimacy.
  • Radian6 connects with other analytical tools like webtrends, Google Analytics, etc..however it's not directly linked to a revenue driven platform, you can´t see the immediate ROI generated in the tool.
  • If you bet for social relationships you should consider this tool, no question on that. Social Commerce might be of course impacted postively by the proper use of this tool.
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Discontinued Products
  • Customers appreciate fast responses to the things they post on social media. This tool allows that to happen.
  • The dashboard allows us to keep up with how many are waiting in our queue so we can keep up with how busy we are during the day and manage it.
  • Customer satisfaction has seemed to increase while using this tool.
  • Being able to add notes with the customers address and phone info is awesome as well.
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ScreenShots