Adobe Connect vs. Buffer vs. Sprout Social

Adobe Connect is wonderful for repeatable branded learning experiences or webinars. They allow for creating an event with a series of similar layouts. The ability to alter these are easy, and duplicating layouts makes for fast alterations. Changing between layouts also creates visual interest as learners see things shift. Adobe Connect also is great for accessibility, the captions allow for resizing and placing the captions in various sections. The recordings also can have a searchable transcript to get to the information you want fast. Adobe Connect allows for running fun games/events as well, there are lots of apps that make the experience unique, and allows for managing content on screen as you'd like.

Incentivized

It helps me save hours by devoting only half an hour in a month's worth of posting, in addition to that it is quite simple to use. Buffer for scheduling social posts well in advance, but I have begun using it instead of posting natively on the social apps themselves because it makes it super easy to post the same messages to more than one platform.

Sprout Social is a great tool, but it comes with a high per-seat price. In my opinion, this tool is great for a well-established brand, but for any start-up or multi-person agency, the cost can add up quickly and make or break your decision to use it. The reason for the lower recommendation score is a recent and ongoing issue I am facing with getting out of our current agreement. In our experience, Sprout Social makes it impossible to do, and the way they get you to agree to a year-long contract is a little shady. No contract is renewed after a year; just a simple email asking if you want to make any changes. In my experience, if you are not fully aware of what you agreed to a year ago, they will get ya, and you will be in the position we are in now. After experiencing this, I see that it is common among Sprout Social users looking for a more cost-effective option. Big bummer considering the monthly price users are paying.

Incentivized

• It's a quick method to exchange files, file, documents, and videos from a web app. Real-time conversation, and screen-sharing are all supported. It has a highly user-friendly interface. It is really simple to assist the teams.
• Even team engagements is beneficial since it allows them to share their expertise with others, and the big benefit is the security of the rooms' access is fairly simple to manage.
• The interface, which include features like notes, chat, pods, etc. When we're trying to gather rapid and exact information, simplify our work as much as possible.
• Adobe Connect's features since they allow team members to express their ideas during meetings without causing disruptions, thereby bypassing the current international boundary of distance.

Incentivized

• I can plan and publish content on social channels.
• Buffer's interface is quite tidy and generates the necessary facilities to save us time in publishing consistent content.
• It has a special price; it is pretty affordable.
• It has the possibility of integrating with other tools to improve its functions.

Incentivized

• Social Scheduling: Sprout Social makes it easier than any platform I've used to schedule posts with each, and to batch-schedule the same post to run on multiple dates. The scheduling platform is intuitive and easy to understand.
• Social Reporting: With just a few clicks of the button, you can easily export reports that are easy for both social media experts and complete novices to understand. I like how you can get a report within 60 seconds or so if needed.
• Customer Service/Help: Whenever I've had a question, both my Sprout Social rep and the Help Center have been extremely easy to contact and quick to reply. Problems are solved very fast and it's made easy to understand.

Incentivized

• Nonetheless, Adobe Connect lacks the engagement monitoring, which can be critical for the management to oversee.
• Besides, Adobe Connect has no certification management, which is essential in the current education or training field.
• Lastly, Adobe Connect has no offline editing tool, hence, when the internet connection is not there, many things can not be conducted effectively.

Incentivized

• Expensive Analytics: The upgrade you need to access your analytics is quite expensive, and I have come across other tools that provide the same or even more for a lesser priced plan.
• No Media Library: The one feature I have found on another social media planning tool that I wish Buffer had is a media library. This allows you to upload photos you aren't using right away to have them readily available when you do decide to use them. This is not a feature in Buffer.

Incentivized

• I would like for Personal Instagram Accounts to be able to integrate with Sprout Social's Employee Advocacy platform. You are able to connect personally accounts to Sprout Social itself, which is great, but for employee re-sharing internal stories, this is not possible unless it is with a Business Instagram account.
• I would like for the left hand tool bar to be more user friendly. There are so many tools and settings that are available, and I would like for it to be simplified in a way that makes it less cluttered.
• An improvement can be made with the Sprout Social Mobile App. The user friendliness of the app does not allow as much autonomy as the regular webpage.

Incentivized

The longer you use Adobe Connect, the longer you are likely to use it. Because you can build more and more resources over time, creating rooms that you re-use, recorded content you can repurpose, and tools that form the basis of ever increasing productivity, the more you use Connect, the more productive you become. Unlike competing products where, with every meeting you essentially start over -- setting up your resources for each meeting -- in my Connect rooms, I have highly tuned tools to accomplish my knowledge transfer goals. When I want to conduct another session - I send a link out to the appropriate room and instantly we are all focusing on getting a job done together. This ability of Adobe Connect to make you productive at an ever quickening rate is a competitive advantage

I am giving buffer this rating because of a couple issues that it has compared to other platforms. It does not always post to instagram and you will need to go in an manually post. Also, one of the biggest qualms that we have with buffer is the price it costs to have robust analytics

Incentivized

Sprout Social is the best platform out there for social-media management, and now that I have all my clients using Sprout Social, it would be sort of silly for me to walk away format at this juncture. The only cloud on the horizon would be if Salesforce bought it (as has been rumored) and put it inside its walled garden.

Incentivized

I gave it a 6 because it does have lots of functionality, has a strong brand and reputation following, etc. but it does have its glitches and experiences with low bandwidth issues. I believe it has more features than my organization fully leverages, so some of those pieces haven't been explored yet. But there are opportunities for improvement in their online resource support, stability at high usages as well.

Incentivized

We use Buffer for certain website content that should be shared on social networks, having this tool helps us to do it faster and easier since we can send the publications from the internet browser and the stack of scheduled messages. It is really fast and easy for all team members who share access to the account, so at the same time that we analyze the information that we can share, the message stack is prepared

Incentivized

Sprout Social is straightforward to use - built for anyone regardless of tech experience to be able to navigate. It integrates pretty seamlessly to the native platforms and brings a lot of things together to make a seamlessly experience for seasoned social media managers.

Incentivized

Buffer is always on hand and very reliable, their software suite rarely has outages

Incentivized

Uptime was OK, but given the fact that we are in Europe, there were some specific problems: They tended to take the system down for maintenance during the night in the US, which was during our workday. This was definitely problematic and hard to explain to our clients.

Buffer performs well on both desktop and mobile platforms. The one area as I have stated before is that it does not always want to automatically push to Instagram and the user will have to go do it manually. Buffer works very well pushing to other platforms. The instagram issue is the only reason buffer does not get a 10 on this section

Incentivized

It is quick to post, however you have to refresh the page every time you add a new scheduled item.

The customer support of Adobe connect is professional and well-skilled for resolving our minor and major issues. Moreover, it has almost all the features that will provide you a secure connection, with people across the world. Education institutes can also implement this software. On the basis of its quality and technology, I will surely advise you to try it once.

Incentivized

1. It really helped to my business to grow online.
2. I was able to take actions mindfully as the analytics are damn good.
3. Also used for managing clients social media accounts and it proved to be a best resource.
4. Clients were really happy as they got high demand and growth on internet and the secret is Buffer.
5. The user interface is really easy to understand and manage. Support is 24/7 available to help.

Incentivized

The chat and online resources are great. The managers are too. They go through account reps pretty fast. Also, not a lot of onboarding once a product or service is sold. The ticket request system is terrible, they have too many people switching off roles, they take a long time to get back to you and don't plan on anything being fixed over a weekend - even if you have a problem. Their customer service via tickets is the worst.

Incentivized

The ability to have most of the functionality of a full LMS at a fraction of the cost is huge. I can create manage and deploy both synchronous and asynchronous training based on the situation and all of my training is tracked through a series of easily created reports

Their training is good, but the promotion of it is even better. I don't need or have the time for training, but I was always happy to know it was there. They did a great job sending updates out and making me aware when there was a new feature that I may want training for. As for the training I never used it, so I can't comment on that

Prices do not seem to vary much among resellers of the Adobe Connect hosted license; the only price variation you're likely to find are among the audio providers. When implementing, you may also wish to look into expanding the amount of storage you are allowed on the server to avoid any problems later on as your library of files starts to build up

We were very satisfied with the implementation of Buffer. We had no issues switching from the platform that we were using over to buffer. Our staff did not even miss a beat when it came to posting content. It was an easy transition and I feel that is something that buffer has really done well. They have an "out of the box" usability platform

Incentivized

Make sure you do it all the way. Do not break it into phases. Pour yourself a coffee, start it in the morning and you'll be done before you finish that coffee.

Actually, it was the other way around....we were using Adobe Connect, company-wide, then switched over to Zoom, mostly, I think, as a cost-cutting measure. But some Learning & Development folks campaigned to be allowed to retain some Adobe Connect licenses (for example, one L&D area had literally over 250 room layouts that their course facilitators could just jump into and use to deliver a course on short notice), which also allows some of us to continue to publish Presenter and Captivate modules to the Adobe server. (But, even those of us who still have Adobe Connect licenses use Zoom for most regular business meetings.)

Incentivized

I also used Combin which is easy and free to use. However, Combin only posts when the computer is active and connected to the internet. So, posting while you are not actively using your computer at that moment is not possible, therefore Buffer is much more efficient as you can even post while being on vacation without working.

Incentivized

Takes the best of all of these and puts them in one place. I am yet to find a feature that these have that are not on Sprout Social, while there are many missing features on these platforms that come with Sprout Social as standard.

Incentivized

Buffer does what it say on tin as they say! you can always count on Buffer. Buffer can be scale to 25 social account with 2,000 scheduled post which is enough for most agencies or businesses

Incentivized

• Save on time - our instructors and people that use the platform can teach more classes and more often than in-person training and time traveling.
• We cut down on spending. When we offer training using Connect - we do not have to spend on meals, hard copy materials, and reserving a venue to deliver training.
• We increase our training sales significantly but offering Connect as an alternative - any unforeseen cancellations to a public class can result in transferring to a remote online Connected class.

Incentivized

• It has saved money by allowing us to automate our social using one person
• It allows us to connect one channel at a time instead of wasting money on larger account management tools
• We are making money, because it has already delivered several clients

Incentivized

• One positive impact has been a huge time saver for our team. Where we once had multiple systems and delays from producing content to approval to publishing, now everything is seamless.
• Another positive impact is streamlining the onboarding process for new team members. Sprout Social is user-friendly and intuitive, making it easy to study even for someone completely new to social media.
• One negative impact has been the time it takes to wade through irrelevant social listening posts. The filtering is not effective enough to eliminate the noise.

Incentivized