Adobe Experience Manager Livefyre vs. BlueConic

I was strictly the implementor of Livefyre (for my company only). That task alone was at least 3 weeks worth of work. From a user standpoint, Livefyre is a good product which is why this review is strictly about how difficult it was to implement. Therefore, if a colleague was to ask me if I recommend Livefyre, it's not a straight answer. Questions like, 'how fast do you need it?', 'how centralized is your user database?', 'do you want social login?', all come into question and were details that made my job not easy (hence, my review of 5/10 for suggesting it to others). Once implemented, Livefyre is a great product (notice my overall review is higher), but based on my experience with implementation, it certainly requires a senior developer's dedicated time and patience to set up exactly as desired. For smaller companies with small/simple user bases and websites, the process may be more straightforward, but from my experience, it wasn't out-of-the-box at all.

Where you are looking for agility and product placement - this is a great product. We were able to move $750k in product in a month due to the pure agility in offering more targetted discounts to users at the right moment. If you use the software correctly - this is like giving your core website experience steriods to offer users the right products at the right time. This shouldn't, however, replace comprehensive funnel testing. Think of it more like hyper offer-management service

Incentivized

• It provides and allows comments and comment management that is fast, seamless and shareable.
• Having used disquss, WordPress comments and many others I like Livefyre better for its seamless integration and transparency
• It is really nice that they have a range of services from free to enterprise with increasing functionality and benefits.

• BlueConic's technology and interface is second to none. They excel at taking potentially difficult tasks and making them easy for users to accomplish without having to stretch the platform's limits or reach out to customer support.
• The way BlueConic integrates with websites almost seems like magic; by placing a single tag you're able to track almost everything and deploy website personalization.
• BlueConic releases frequent updates to the platform, like new integrations to other platforms and different tools for tracking data.

Incentivized

• Implementation was not easy. Although flexible, I personally wrote at least 1,400 lines of code to get this implemented over a few week's time.
• The social login aspect is cool, but again, hard to implement. They did not write any of those modules, although they could have. This required senior-level developmental skills and a knowledge of how social media is interfaced with programmatically. Lots of questions arose from this and it was difficult to implement with virtually no help from Livefyre, other than to provide the hooks into their system for when users were validated. I had to write at least 2 separate login/redirection scripts to accomplish this flow.
• CSS tweaking was tricky. We could override lots of common CSS classes, but to get things just the way we wanted it, I ended up writing LOTS of jQuery listeners and functions to transform the output into exactly what we wanted. This was a surprise since the software was sold to us as being 'fully customizable'.
• Documentation was sufficient, but not great. Getting the flow of the callbacks that are fired wasn't clear at first, and sometimes did not work as expected.
• It should be noted that, after this review was published, Livefyre contacted me stating they now have better documentation and process for implementation (for version V3, specifically) and urged me to revise this review. However, I can only write of my experience with V2, and it WAS difficult to implement over 3 weeks of dedicated time. Another developer on my team implemented version V3 and his evaluation is very similar to mine, claiming much difficulty with the CSS customization.

• They should have the ability to port data beyond O&O properties. This is likely more complex than I make it seem, but a deal w/ a DMP to be able to do so would likely solve the issue.
• Could have some more "out of the box" APIs.
• WOuld be great if they had in-house consultants that could come and help set-up best practices with your other existing partnerships (this would be a HUGE ask though; places like Salesforce charge thousands for such services).

Incentivized

We feel we have a real partnership with Livefyre and we both make each other better. Their customer service has been phenomenal even during a time of rapid growth.

It's really easy to implement that app but should improve some analytics.

Incentivized

From purchasing to implementation, the customer service/support was really perfect!

Incentivized

We felt Livefyre was more innovative and better at SEO. It felt like we were working with a partner for the long haul who was interested in our business and how to improve it.

BlueConic is more lightweight and allows for more unique experiences at the same time. Again - this isn't meant to perfect the core UX of your site, but sit on top to deliver unique experiences to control offer management and close rates.

Incentivized

• The heavy work is already done given that we take the time to implement.
• Very useful insights and AI powered delivery.

Incentivized

• BlueConic has lead to a deeper understanding of how customers engage with our content

Incentivized