Act-On Software vs. Descript vs. Ion Interactive

We often have quick turnaround time requests, and Act-On's new composer is great because it is easy to make an email look great in desktop or mobile views. This has been a huge time-saver for us! We have benefited from using Act-On for many years and are accustomed to where everything is and how to use it. For the new accounts we train, we will sometimes hear that the organization of where things are could be improved.

Incentivized

Descript is well-suited for fast editing of training videos, tutorials, podcasts, and screen recordings, where transcript-based editing and quick cleanup save time. It works best when you need a simple workflow to record, transcribe, remove filler words, tighten sections, and apply basic enhancement tools like noise cleanup.
It is less appropriate for high-stakes projects where losing edits would be very costly, or when you need strong guarantees around long-term project history, backups, and recovery. Based on our experience, if you are doing many hours of edits and expect to revisit projects months later, you may want an additional export/archive process outside the platform.

If you want to choose a quick start template and fill in the fields with your content, Ion will be fantastic for you. We've done this with whitepapers and quizzes and it's been great and extremely easy to use. If you have an exact idea of what you want, and a background in web development, you may get frustrated. Ion has some quirks that make it tricky to fully customize - everyone once in a while I really just want to go into the HTML and make some changes, but can't. If you are looking to reuse a piece of content for specific targeting (industry or account-specific), Ion is great. The dynamic substitutions are great and very helpful.

Incentivized

• The templates are easy to use and set up campaigns.
• It's simple to use, and the email editor features a drag-and-drop interface.
• It's easy to set up a drip campaign or a series of scheduled emails.
• It has the flexibility of having a variety of scheduling options and the use of user experience automation.

Incentivized

• Removing filler words is a click of button and get rid of 'ums' and 'a's"
• Fine tune your edited script in a timeline to adjust timing
• Import and export Final Cut Pro or Premier XML video speeding up the editing process

Incentivized

• Quick Starts make it so easy to get started.
• Real-time updates are awesome and save a ton of wasteful process.
• The combination of user friendliness for simple things and the flexibility to do more complex things is great.
• Chat support is excellent and deeper-dive support has been super helpful.
• The ability to use these tools in the cloud or embedded has given us tactic flexibility.

Incentivized

• The designer tools, especially for emails, were often difficult to use. The formatting of the text would be all over the place and change / refuse to change at random. Moving boxes around was shifty and sometimes nearly impossible. It just wasn't customizeable enough. No "undo" functionality either.
• The only way to collect information expansively over time (there's a term Act-On uses for it, I can't recall) where it adds questions to the form each time a user fills it out, is if the person were to fill out the same form multiple times. I know this does happen for some websites/resources, but as a company that wanted to collect new information each time someone filled out any form, regardless of the resource or the URL, that was simply not an option, and that doesn't really make a lot of sense. I know it's not really possible to track someone but if they filled out the first part of the form and then it added new questions to answer, and then they submitted and got through the gating, that would actually be helpful.
• There was no "trash can" of sorts in case you deleted something by mistake. This could be so stress-inducing if it was a major project. My coworker did this once, contacted Act-On, they couldn't even recover it.

Incentivized

• UX Performance. Because it's synced to the cloud, there can be some delay or lag in the UX when editing.
• Editing Transcriptions. Machine-based transcriptions always need some post-editing. While Descript makes it pretty easy, I still think there is some room for improvement. For instance, I would like to be able to automatically update for all occurrences of a word after fixing it in the transcript.
• Automatic importing of YouTube and hosted video files. I often have to download a video from YouTube to be able to import it into Descript. Would be nice to be able to just paste in the URL to the video and have Descript automatically import it.

Incentivized

• Ion University, while stacked with a wealth of information, is difficult to navigate from a troubleshooting perspective. The tutorial videos are all very helpful, but they are also very long. Sometimes I would want to search for how to address a particular issue I was struggling with and it would be a two-minute segment buried in a 45-minute video.
• Again, getting back the self-guidance side of things. I think a lot of the tutorials are set up in a way that makes sense to Ion, but not as much to the end user.
• I think the controls admins use when creating new users could be a bit more straightforward.

Incentivized

It's my single biggest asset in my current role. With limited resources, its enabled Anachron to punch well above our weight marketing wise and although we're still at the beginning of our journey I know the system can scale with us

We use it for every landing page and we plan on only doing more dynamic content creation. We dont see that option coming in-house any time ever in the future. ION has a very robust platform for us to work with that really allows us to do more for our customers in regards to having the one-to-one conversation.

Incentivized

It's a great tool for our business, and we get a fantastic ROI on it every year based on wins for customer service and automation responses. It's save projects, repaired salesperson/customer relationships and generated new sales and interest yearly. We really wouldn't hesitate to recommend this platform at all.

Incentivized

It's pretty user friendly, has a easy-moderate learning curve. However during updates they do change the features in different panes / sections that make them harder to find. The text editor is near perfect, some of the other tools such as colour, templates, audio etc. are arranged in a slighlty less intuitive manner

Incentivized

Usability is straightforward, with extensive documentation and tutorials provided to ensure landing pages are built to specifications and can be optimized for performance. Built-in platform funnels give insight into customer dropoff, success/failures, and conversions (at a glance). Setting up a landing page can be done quickly and easily, with numerous integrations (CRMs like SalesForce, for instance) supported

Incentivized

I have always found them quick to respond to my query by web inquiry. In those instances when I call, I have always reached help quickly. They are conscientious and skilled in discussing my concern and finding a solution to my problem. Other tech organizations should use Act-On as a model for top-notch customer service.

Great for the most part. Sometimes there are little lags, but that's likely because I'm requesting to see a lot of data at one time.

Sometimes the editor can be a little slow.

Since we start using Act-on for ourselves and our clients, we have been supported very well. Often we need to integrate with legacy systems and we find the support team on our side during the whole endeavor. Always asking if they can help us further, always willing to do a better job. The support of Act-On is one of the main differentiators

We had a very frustrating experience with Descript and their support.

We used Descript to record and edit several videos. The edits were done around May, mainly using the web app. When we opened those same projects in December, many of them looked like raw recordings again. Cuts were missing and effects were missing.

Support and engineering told us they checked their logs and only saw “creation → recording → transcription,” and they said they could not find proof the edits were ever made. That explanation does not match what we saw in the app. The affected videos show two project backup files. In Descript, backups only appear after you start editing (the app even says so). But when we checked other projects that we know are raw, those do not show any backup files. We asked a simple question: if backups appear only after editing, why do the “raw” affected videos have two backups while truly raw videos have none? They did not answer this clearly.

One rep also said they noticed a spike in network errors in May. That is exactly when the edits were done, which makes it very likely the edits did not save or sync correctly. Instead of admitting this could be the cause, support kept pointing to “no logs of edits” and that it was our fault.

They refunded one month, but called it a “courtesy.” That was disappointing. We also stopped using Descript while they were investigating because we did not feel it was safe to keep working in the platform. If that one-month refund was meant to cover the time we could not use the service during the investigation, that still does not address the real damage. We lost many hours of work, we paid our editor hourly, and we paid for the subscription for convenience and reliability. For the amount of inconvenience and loss we experienced, one month is clearly not enough.

The ION support team is amazing. There has not been a single issue they they could not solve for me. If there is a feature or request that they do not have, they have even, on occasion, created custom scripts for our team. *Update 6/5/17 - ION has continued to delight on multiple occasions. I appreciate their attention to detail and ability to solve whatever issue I have. After 3+ years of use and support, ION still has my full endorsement.

Incentivized

Dan D. was great. He took the time to understand how I needed the program to run, and was very flexible to our special CRM setup.

Act-On had a lot of resources, and their staff was great at answering any questions I had to make sure we got started on the right foot. Looking back, I would have preferred some additional training sessions since we didn't have any previous experience with Marketing Automation and best practices.

They offer a great amount of online training, videos, articles, etc. There is usually an answer available if you run into an issue. I would recommend taking advantage of the online training they offer. I wish I would have done it sooner.

Incentivized

What impressed me most is that Act-On showed full committment in making our implementation successful, even when it required additional support from their team. This gave me a lot of warm and fuzzy feelings. Most other software software vendors are not anywhere close to being this responsive and effective

There were a lot of things we learned about the tool once we really got in and got our hands dirty. Being hands-on was essential for our team to be able to utilize ION in the most effective manner.

Incentivized

Act-On is easier to use than Marketo, but not as visually appealing and user-friendly as HubSpot. It's much better than Pardot, as Pardot feel clunky every step of the way. SharpSpring is comparable because of its price point but surpasses Act-On in its tools and intuitive interface. We selected Act-On because of the pricing model and thought all things would be close to parity with other options. It depends on the team you have. If you have developers and a marketing team that knows some html/css, you can get by with Act-On.

Incentivized

Descript is by far superior to the other editing software you can get on Apple computers. It's able to do a lot more and really save us tons of time. Other Adobe apps are great, but take a while to learn. Descript is very user-friendly, making it easy to start from day one with very little training.

Incentivized

I was not the decision maker to choose this over Uberflip, but the UI is much more appealing to me. It's incredibly easy to use, clean, and from a backend standpoint, it requires little to no tech savvy'ness. Our team has really enjoyed using it and has required no training what-so-ever.

Incentivized

Before I feel like I need more features, the Act-On customer service reps are contacting me telling about new features as part of my account.

Separate client portfolios enable scalability, however, some elements are still grouped for all accounts so it's difficult to scale for an ad agency with multiple clients. Would prefer totally separate sections of the platform for all clients with each element housed separately.

Incentivized

• With the Automated Series, we were able to put in place campaigns that generated revenue that took no time to continue running once set up. This was a positive feature allowing employees to work on another project while the campaign ran on their own.

Incentivized

• I can get video completed much more quickly and cheaply
• We can produce more video content because of the speed with which we can have a finished product
• We can have shorter timelines for example I record on Monday and we publish on Tuesday which wouldn't be otherwise possible with other methods I've used

Incentivized

• Though we have not had the service long enough to see any measurable outcomes, we've been able to create interactive web content faster than ever before
• The speed with which we can build interactive pages and re-use assets has been critical as projects we've done with Ion have made their way around and more and more internal clients have said "me too" for their own projects
• It is very pricey at $28K for the base annual subscription (dropping to $24k after the first year), so depending on your budgetary situation, that may make no sense for your team--but we had contract money set aside for a company to build us a microsite for around the amount, so we just used it for Ion instead and will now be building the microsite ourselves using it

Incentivized