Livefyre was acquired in 2016 and is now part of Adobe Experience Manager. Later versions of AEM include features of Livefyre pre-installed. Livefyre (or the Livefyre Studio app) is a content curation, social media UGC, audience engagement application that enables users to access user generated content that can be streamed in real-time to a customer’s sites, digital billboards, apps,…
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.
3 Scenarios where Sitecore Experience Platform is well suited: 1. Customized AI/ML Model development - Developing and deploying ML/AI models to automate tasks related to the process. e.g., image classification, sentiment analysis or text classification, etc.2. RPA & Chatbots - RPA scripts to automate simpler tasks and integrate with legacy systems (UI path, opensource RPA scripts). Implementation of chatbots training by human agents to respond to redundant queries 3. Data Enrichment - Structuring and enriching data using automated techniques in ML as well as human agent labeling
Sitecore has a decent supply of out of the box components and capabilities that can be fairly easily styled to meet business needs without much customization needed. This often helps speed to market.
Sitecore has had the flexibility of offering on-premise hosting or cloud hosting to meet different needs of clients, though recently they have strongly pushed their cloud-based hosting. This is in alignment with the industry and very helpful for organizations that aren't looking to add another product to the portfolio of packages that their internal IT teams need to manage
Sitecore has a capable UI for editing content. Though some competition may do better in this regard, Sitecore's editing interface is fully capable.
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.
While the UI is capable, some other products in this space have a much more intuitive editing interface. Sitecore could do better in providing an easy to use editing UI.
It would be nice to see a fully managed Sitecore instead of just cloud hosted
The price falls more to the premium side of things. Making the value proposition a bit harder to justify
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.
Implemented for various projects such as:›Market and sales intelligence Competitor tracking Management moves Social media tracking Customized information sourcing. Use web-scraping and parsing for data harvesting where the search is keyword-based and, the content and data extractions are required from various websites•Implemented for diverse requirements:›Social media tracking›Image recognition›Pricing comparison›Competitor content mapping›e-Commerce products’ cataloging, etc.
1. Customized software development & maintenance. 2. Technology Consulting - Consulting-based services for technology solutions data engineering or cloud solutions. 3. Used for tapping into multiple data sources such as CRM and marketing automation systems and, creating automated data extracts with a high-end visual representation of data. 4. Implemented for scheduling an existing report to automatically refresh and be delivered to specific users at a specific regular interval.
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.
All of these platforms have their pros and cons. Selecting the best fit is a matter aligning corporate need vs features provided. Have a .NET shop with an advanced marketing team looking to push UX forward and willing to pay a premium, then Sitecore may be the right fit. Have an organization centered around Java and only looking for basic CMS capabilities or looking for a budget-friendly option, then there may be better options beyond Sitecore.
For mature marketing organizations, the analytics that Sitecore allows you to capture have been valuable in pushing forward marketing objectives and giving insight into how to tailor content for the best UX
