Adobe Experience Manager Livefyre vs. BrightTALK

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.

BrightTalk is well suited for those who cannot always attend live webinars, and can browse through many uploaded webinars. It integrates well with other organizations and provides an ease for what your organization might want to promote. I believe BrightTalk would be best suited for companies with a large employee base.

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.

• Training
• Product explanation.
• Suggestive referrals.

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.

• Our sphere is healthcare and I would appreciate even more customization to this sector.
• Sometimes a shorter webinar would be preferred, an hour is a long time in today's demanding marketplace.
• More of the local live events, love these.

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

BrightTalk has an excellent usability and is intuitive with its design. The registration of events is secure, and the connectivity to webinars is seamless

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

We have not had to contact support.

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.

GoToMeeting is less expensive but does not provide access to a database of users or a good platform to showcase recorded webinars in a channel. BrightTalk is created more as a marketing and content hub so is better for marketing activities.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• For identifying qualified leads and bringing people through the buyer's journey, BrightTALK has proved to have strong ROI.
• Existing and potential customers, as well as partners, stay engaged with our content on BrightTALK. This is a big positive for us.
• This allows us to easily connect with our audience and the platform is low maintenance for us.

Incentivized