Act-On Software vs. Wildfire Interactive (Discontinued) vs. Writecream

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

The transition to Google has been painful - key contacts are no longer available.

• 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

• Facebook tab implementation. Allows you to easily create and produce functioning social tabs on your brands FB page.
• Add voting, sweepstakes, poll functionality to your website. Easily implement these campaigns to increase user engagement and TOS.

• 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

• More customization - Would like to have the ability to edit more without coding.

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

Our initial contract with Wildfire Whitelabel was for $30,000/year, as we progressed we found several alternatives for significantly less. We used this to our advantage to lower the second year to $17,000 with the limitation in the level of support (they call this their "core" subscription). Support has been quite bad.

During our contract, we also asked for quotes on some custom work, but never managed to get an answer (or actual quote). Now two years into our contract, the limitations and lack of development are enough for us to find a different solution. Newcomers to the market like Rafflecopter, WooBox and PunchTab are delivering much better results for a fraction of the price

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

Very easy to use, almost anyone can learn how to build a comprehensive promotion.

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.

I have never been kicked out of Wildfire service. Always up and running.

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.

Easy to perform tasks and quick to upload changes to your promotions.

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

Phone and email support were always available to us when we needed it.

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.

Gave me a thorough rundown on everything the software does. Sometimes it is difficult to run through it all over the phone/internet, but I was able to figure it out myself.

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

Simple to use and very effective in increasing user engagement on both social channels and website. Noticeably helped raise TOS.

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

Wildfire was a merely an adequate social media tool when it existed as a standalone, but it just couldn't compete against other players like Sprout, Falcon, and Sprinklr.

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.

• 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

• As with any social media management tool, there is a savings on labor hours (rather than doing the manual work)
• Aggregating all content into one system creates efficiencies for content teams

Incentivized