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 Sprout [Social] is great for small businesses, small agencies and those who need a platform but don't want to spend a fortune. If you need multiple user log-in's, the cost will add up. This is great to share a log-in for different people to use or add one or two users
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 The Landscape system that Sprout Social offers allows me to modify all the images that I want to publish on my social networks. This service allows me to modify the size of the image, add filters, modify the colors and much more, it is a very important tool to be able to have a better presentation of the images that we use in our publications on social networks. It offers me a perfect statistical system where I can consult all kinds of movements that have occurred in all my social networks, I can see statistics individually or generally. The statistics allow me to see group reports, participation, information on audience movement on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn and also allow me to view the activity that has occurred in my account. Sprout Social allows me to view a record in real time that shows me all the movements that my social networks are having by my employees. As Director of the Marketing Sector, this is a very important role, as I can know what actions my employees are taking to improve marketing with social networks. 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 I'd love to see more robust tag reporting capabilities, but they mentioned that this is something in the pipeline for improvement. I wish it was easier to batch content and shift it to approval or draft mode. Sometimes clients can change their mind and moving through each post individually can be a bit time consuming. This is a very minor thing. I'd love to see more customization options come to its reporting feature so we can insert graphics. Currently it supports the insertion of text only. 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 While I am currently no longer working with the company in which I was employed and utilized Sprout Social, I do know that the company is still utilizing Sprout Social on a daily basis and I do not foresee a time when the subscription would be cancelled.
Read full review Usability It's really easy to implement that app but should improve some analytics.
Read full review Sprout Social is extremely user-friendly. The publishing feature is easy to use, and provides previews of what your content will look like once posted. I also love the calendar view where you can view all posts you have scheduled for the month. The collaborative nature of the platform makes working directly in Sprout Social with clients a breeze, and we are seeing our content get approved much faster.
Read full review Reliability and Availability 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.
Read full review Performance It is quick to post, however you have to refresh the page every time you add a new scheduled item.
Read full review Support Rating From purchasing to implementation, the customer service/support was really perfect!
Read full review Sprout Social's customer support is extremely prompt and always helpful. Not only do they provide quick and useful service, but the representatives follow up multiple times to ensure that the issue is fully address and/or completely resolved. The overall experience is exemplary; very few other companies provide comparable service.
Read full review Online Training 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
Read full review Implementation Rating 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.
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 used Buffer previous to Sprout Social for two years. It was a good solution as we were getting a handle on scheduling content. It was the first real tool we had for this. But we outgrew it and they began removing features that were critical to our workflow, such as the RSS Feed. While their 50% off policy for non-profits was very helpful, once we started adding up the cost to use features like Replies and Analytics, we discovered that our needs were simply too robust for Buffer to handle. Sprout Social was the solution suggested by all our peers and we've been very happy with it ever since.
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 Sprout has given insights to lead our creative refreshes every quarter. As we have a healthy budget on paid social, it is crucial to understand the type of creative that works best. Sprout has the ability to send notifications based on certain types of messages received. This is crucial for social media teams who don't have 24/7 coverage but need to be notified of urgent matters. Sprout has saved me hours of time as I no longer pull analytics natively from each social platform. The generated reports give me a look at all of the platforms and can be customized. Read full review ScreenShots Adobe Experience Manager Livefyre Screenshots Sprout Social Screenshots