Likelihood to Recommend 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.
Read full review If you are in an industry where content drives pipeline through engagement and education, Pathfactory is an invaluable tool to help people consume more of what you are producing and offers additional entry and interaction points on your website. It also creates very specific and personalized paths through your assets.
Read full review Pros 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. Read full review Create Visually appealing performance report Give more in-depth information about performance metrics than most alternatives Ability to track performance over time and compare this performance across time periods Provide and send auto-run reports to top level management based on predefined criteria and timeframes Read full review Cons 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. Read full review Evolving into a more sales-focused UX. While the tool is great for marketing, there are some areas to improve the functionality of PathFactory for Sales in regards to navigating and sending out content as a salesperson. GA goal reporting. I can't speak to this specifically, but I know our web team has run into some issues creating GA goals when we lead to a PathFactory track. Evolved reporting. Reporting is great, but for some use cases, we have had to ask for custom reports that the team is always happy to create! But it would be great if this was self-serve. Read full review Likelihood to Renew 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.
Read full review We have seen a lot of value from our team's use of Path Factory. We also like working with this vendor as they actually take our feedback and implement it on their roadmap. A great vendor with a great product
Read full review Usability It's really easy to implement that app but should improve some analytics.
Read full review Overall, I think the tool is fairly easy to use to get a basic content uploaded to create a track and even the more complicated features become easier once you become familiarised with the process
Read full review Reliability and Availability I think there was only one time where we had issues reaching our account manager, otherwise PathFactory was always willing to hop on the phone to talk through strategy, to work through issues, and help build custom solutions to fit our needs. Customer service is a big selling point of PathFactory.
Read full review Performance The analytics and reports feature is fairly new and have proved very popular with many areas of our business and is growing in popularity. The metrics that are attainable are very insightful and provides a clear picture on the performance of the track.
Read full review Support Rating From purchasing to implementation, the customer service/support was really perfect!
Read full review We meet weekly with Jennifer and I can't say enough about her. When issues have happened or we need help, she jumps on it quickly. If she doesn't know the answer, she pulls in Reggie or another on her team that can help. She goes above and beyond and has been very supportive, even when we had a lot of hard questions to answer from higher-ups. All this is on top of just being an awesome person.
Read full review In-Person Training I was able to browse around the tool quite easily once some basic training was given. I learnt much from using those method and only needed further help when wanting to learn about Reports, External codes and adding forms.
Read full review Online Training The customer service, from technical through to customer success, is one of the biggest reasons I'd recommend PathFactory. This is true of their training. It can be as bespoke as you like, at least in my experience, and the team is always willing (where possible) to incorporate your suggestions.
Read full review Implementation Rating The PathFactory team was very helpful when implementing the product. They gave us a lot of recommendations on best moving forward. As a note to new users, when implementing I would make sure that you create with your team a system to make sure that the platform is scalable. My team was able to do this through creating a foldering structure, naming conventions for tracks and assets, and ensuring tagging is used on all content uploads. I would also make sure when implementing that you have an understanding of how your team will track success and that your brand team is involved to make sure that there is consistency in the look and feel of the tracks
Read full review Alternatives Considered 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.
Read full review I wasn't involved in the purchase decision, but I am glad we chose them! Their team is helpful and knows how to help you accomplish what you're trying to do. If there's a feature you see isn't working right or that you need their technical team will listen and make actual changes.
Read full review Scalability Pathfactory is growing in popularity amongst individuals from different parts of the organisation and it would be difficult to forecast how scalable this can become
Read full review Return on Investment The heavy work is already done given that we take the time to implement. Very useful insights and AI powered delivery. Read full review We saw ROI within the first 9 months of using PathFactory. Our onboarding team saw quicker adoption of our product while using PathFactory to engage them during the onboarding process. We've been able to more accurately understand our content needs and what works best when prospecting for specific segments. (eg. SMB, mid-market, and enterprise) Read full review ScreenShots Adobe Experience Manager Livefyre Screenshots