Adobe Business Catalyst (Discontinued) vs. emfluence Marketing Platform

The service provision is good the accounts customer service is poor so I would struggle to give BC a better than average review, if only they could offer customers a better accounts service then the value would be much higher.

The reporting feature is not as detailed as we require for our documentation, so we have to organize the results into charts and graphs. For every other component of our social media and digital marketing, emfluence checks all of the boxes.

Incentivized

• Probably one of the easiest e-commerce platforms to work in, it does take setup, but compared to a lot of other e-commerce solutions, this is probably the best one that I have seen that can be designed and implemented custom.
• Their template system works very well and allows you to create and re-use templates across Adobe Business Catalyst.
• Their pre-built modules are great, giving people a great way to use common web elements without having to use a plug-in or find some solution, it is simply built in and generally works exactly as you would expect.
• Adobe Business Catalyst is more of an all-around solution, providing elements that most smaller companies would have a hard time figuring out, since it includes the ability to build websites, send and track e-mails, analytics. It really is a powerful tool that would typically require a fair amount of coding knowledge and expertise but with the system already built, it can be easily modified and edited by those with limited or no coding knowledge at all.

Incentivized

• Custom landing pages to dive deeper into campaigns and track results
• Responsive customer service with any problems we come by
• A/B testing

Incentivized

• Multi Client Management: The dashboard for managing multiple clients as a reseller is a little difficult to get to. There is also no very easy way for me to manage multiple clients at once. I have to log into and out of individual client accounts to do billing or management.
• Lack of Server support: There are certain server protocols and languages that are not supported using BC. For example I cannot build a custom php database and upload to BC. I am required to use their tools.

Incentivized

• I do have issues sometimes when making a website popup. I specify certain measurements of my popup yet when it shows up on my website, the graphic doesn't adjust and I have a bunch of white space. But that could also be my website.
• When adding a new contact into the contact section, once you hit save, the contact information stays on the screen instead of an empty contact profile so you can immediately add the next person.
• Sometimes when I update a template, The unsubscribe link will link to my email address instead of the person the email is being sent to.

Incentivized

Actually with Business Catalyst there is no renewal; once you are a partner, you are a partner for as long as you like. It is an investment in your business not simply a product you purchase...and as an investment in partnership with Adobe, both are committed to each other's success.

Overall it is a "plug and play" interface. The majority of the work is done in other software interfaces. Managing billing, user roles and custom reports are all that you need to manage in the actual BC user interface. For my business this is an incredible benefit as I have to leave my preferred software less.

Incentivized

very few issues with availability

Incentivized

Very few issues

Incentivized

The support provided by Adobe is excellent. Though the knowledge base, forums, blogs and online chat questions most all answers can be found. In the event that you are unable to find an answer or you have a unique situation simply post a question to the forums. These forums are regularly monitored by Adobe and its users.

bcgurus.com kiyuco

Incentivized

Pretty easy to do

Incentivized

As far as the CMS for BC goes, there is none out there that compares. In the past we have utilized Joomla, Wordpress, Mambo, Drupal, Concrete 5 and others. None of them were as easy to use and train on that Adobe's Business Catalyst. Our alternative to BC is WordPress when our clients want a less expensive solution. For the most part that works OK but we have had issues with plugin incompatibility among other issues. We lost at least two clients because of similar issues. The other great part about BC's solution is that we can still work with our favorite site creation tool - Dreamweaver. The whole process continues to be more and more simplified with added features to the system. No other solution (that we've found) offers such an easy way to create custom web sites that are easily editable by our clients.

Incentivized

They were the only company that could solve our specific problems. When we looked at larger companies like Constant Contact, they weren't as capable at handling our specific needs for a reasonable price. Some companies need to charge us programming hours. Bigger companies couldn't help our issue. emfluence is more flexible.

Incentivized

It's easy to build small sites or large sites and there is lots of templating.

Incentivized

• As someone who uses it on behalf of other clients, our ROI with BC is definitely positive. We needed a mid-range CMS without huge licensing costs to satisfy mid-range clients who have some dynamic needs but doesn't need the expense or liability of enterprise level products. Without it we would have lost possible customers or taken bigger hits on projects because of the costs involved with satisfying their mid-level needs
• Our clients are all usually very positive about the BC platform and are able to use it themselves which lessens our Support time/cost.
• To use the Web App element,. which we do on almost every site, you need to pay for the highest plan. This brings along with it many features most of our clients would never use. A more basic plan with that Web App capability would be a big improvement on our costs.

Incentivized

• It's allowed for us to generate more traffic to our client's websites.
• It's allowed for us to generate more leads from email marketing through emfluence.
• Visual click maps, more customized dashboard and email templates, and a deeper dive in data would help further business objectives.

Incentivized