Adobe Marketing Cloud vs. HCL Unica

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Adobe Marketing Cloud
Score 8.9 out of 10
N/A
Adobe Marketing Cloud is a suite of products including analytics, social, advertising, targeting and web experience management. It comprises foremost the popular integrated web content management and digital asset management (WCMS / DAM) solution Adobe Experience Manager, Adobe Campaign's cross-channel campaign management and marketing resource management capabilities (based on technology acquired with Neolane in 2013), the Adobe Audience Manager data management platform, analytics, and other…N/A
HCL Unica
Score 7.9 out of 10
N/A
HCL Unica (acquired by HCL Technologies from IBM in late 2018) is a suite of enterprise marketing management tools including marketing automation with cross-channel campaign management, budgeting and forecasting, project workflow management, asset management, brand management and spend management.N/A
Pricing
Adobe Marketing CloudHCL Unica
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Adobe Marketing CloudHCL Unica
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeOptional
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Best Alternatives
Adobe Marketing CloudHCL Unica
Small Businesses
HubSpot Marketing Hub
HubSpot Marketing Hub
Score 8.5 out of 10
HubSpot Marketing Hub
HubSpot Marketing Hub
Score 8.5 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
LeanData
LeanData
Score 9.7 out of 10
LeanData
LeanData
Score 9.7 out of 10
Enterprises
Optimizely Content Marketing Platform
Optimizely Content Marketing Platform
Score 8.5 out of 10
Adobe Marketing Cloud
Adobe Marketing Cloud
Score 8.9 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Adobe Marketing CloudHCL Unica
Likelihood to Recommend
8.3
(13 ratings)
9.0
(15 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
6.5
(2 ratings)
8.7
(11 ratings)
Usability
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(1 ratings)
Support Rating
-
(0 ratings)
3.0
(1 ratings)
Implementation Rating
-
(0 ratings)
7.2
(2 ratings)
User Testimonials
Adobe Marketing CloudHCL Unica
Likelihood to Recommend
Adobe
If you have a rather large budget and/or several clients to take advantage of the AMC, you would likely benefit from its all-in-one solutions. There are a myriad of excellent tools for digital marketing professionals to take advantage of within the suite, and creating a campaign becomes much more manageable for collaboration and execution through to reporting thanks to the suite's vertically integrated nature.
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HCL Technologies
I think it is wel suited for a business with a lot of one on one relations in the database. For example a supermarket that sells products to a client and gives a reduction on that product. It is nice if the selection process is not to complex and does not involve to many calculations. It is also nice if it is very clear what you want to follow up. In our environment we have lots of many-to-many relations. for example one product is held by more then one client. And that client might have more of those products with other clients. These kind of situation demands for a lot of calculations with derived fields(*), and there things go far too slow. Unica is probably not such a good solution for us, because our environment is too complex, and so is to process of creating the selection, we often have to change things in the selection flows. Because of the complexity it is difficult to see what the flow is exactly doing afterwoods, it also takes to much time to modify existing campaigns. The interface is not handy to work with, if you have long lists of variables, of tables or derived fields(*) you have to scroll through trough them, you can not really search them or reorder them. You can not drag and drop fields or other objects like derived fields in the flow, what would be easy if you have to make frequent changes to the proces flow. When you copy objects something the content of the object changes because the links with other objects or lost. (*) derived field: field to calculate something
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Pros
Adobe
  • Content Analysis - Between the Pages report and the participation metrics which show what percentage of conversions a page was involved with, you get an excellent analysis of what content is important and effective, and what is not. With the ability to add up to ten metrics side by side, drill downs, and power tools like Ad Hoc Analysis, you will know exactly where you need better content.
  • Pathing - Adobe Analytics captures every single path of every single visit of every single visitor and puts it at your fingertips. There are tools to aggregate common paths so you find out how frequent they are, lots of good page flow reports, and tools to pick out specific paths that will keep you from being overwhelmed. This has been absolutely invaluable to us as we have learned about how our customers are using our sites and which paths are leading to exits rather than converions.
  • Customization - There are so many custom metrics and dimensions you can add and you can create segments based on all of them, along with the out of the box metrics and dimensions. You truly get an implementation that is specific to your company, your needs, your strategy, and your site.
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HCL Technologies
  • Ability to translate Multiple SQL queries into a very easy to use visual GUI.
  • Provides the ability to pre-define segments, run them once in off hours, store them in their own system tables for quick youth and a significant reduction in CPU utilization on the database.
  • It’s use of Reusable objects. Including user variables to pre-define calculations one time, macros that you can create and pass values to parameterize the SQL code And the creation of templates to easily replicate work.
  • It’s ability to bring in external data on the fly that can very easily be mapped into any flowchart.
  • It’s flexibility and creating UNIX script via triggers to automate sending of files to multiple vendors with different FTP sites
  • It’s flexibility in the output layouts that it can create.
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Cons
Adobe
  • Customer services could be improved for smaller clients. Adobe Marketing Cloud provides great support for most of its customers, however, it may not work well enough for smaller engagements.
  • Adobe could offer multiple price options based on the usage, which is missing at the moment.
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HCL Technologies
  • Greater integration of real time (Interact) capabilities with outbound channels, in particular IBM eMessage Email & SMS delivery.
  • Additional outbound channels to be integrated into eMessage, including Facebook Fanpage & Twitter DM broadcasts. At the moment these are possible only through custom additional integration.
  • Support for additional marketing database technology, e.g. MySQL, Exasol, ParAccel, WX2.
  • Provision of database technology with software purchase, as Web technology (IBM WebSphere Express) is supplied for free, but no database is supplied - since IBM also market DB2, which is a supported technology it seems a shame.
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Likelihood to Renew
Adobe
Although a powerful tool, Google Analytics has been catching up in capabilities and is much simpler to use. As analytics move to the spotlight, more sections in a company want to have access to it. However, creating straightforward reports/dashboards and sharing them with different groups is not a strength of Adobe Marketing Cloud.
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HCL Technologies
There are three main factors to renew a licence: 1) Cost to migrate to another platform would be rather expensive and time consuming, plus the requirement of retraining employees to use a new tool 2) It has been proven time and time again that it is a market leader in the space (10 years +) 3) It can be built upon, with the addition of additional IBM EMM modules - despite theories it does have very strong digital capabilities.
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Usability
Adobe
No answers on this topic
HCL Technologies
I think it is easy to use, if you don't have to do to complex selections.
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Support Rating
Adobe
No answers on this topic
HCL Technologies
I didn't use the Unica support since it is with IBM, only before.
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Implementation Rating
Adobe
No answers on this topic
HCL Technologies
- We had to rebuild a part of the datamart afterwards to tighten up and simplify the selection process. But as it was too time consuming to rebuild all the existing campaigns, we no run campaigns on different versions of the datamart. - The response tracking of the campaigns never worked out well, it was impossible to implement a direct response where there is a link between the lead and the response in our operational process
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Alternatives Considered
Adobe
In comparison to other services, Adobe is particularly robust, and the platform is better suited to customers with a high level of maturity in the digital environment, who need a platform to overcome and solve day-to-day problems.
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HCL Technologies
The contact history and the response history are so powerful. You can track whatever you want to help the call center to push relevant offers to our customer. In addition, predictive models can be built, with patience, in IBM Campaign. If you have some complaints from the call center about any campaigns, you can easily validate it into the contact or response history.
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Return on Investment
Adobe
  • It has helped us track our ROI better and see costs versus revenue coming in directly from emails.
  • A/B testing is very helpful to ensure the best email is being chosen to get sent out.
  • Our deliverability has improved a lot.
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HCL Technologies
  • It helps my clients drive their business which in turn, drives more profit for them.
  • It helps my clients determine what works, and what doesn't work, in terms of their social marketing campaigns.
  • It helps navigate proper budgeting through determining what clients' users respond to, and what they find unique.
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ScreenShots

HCL Unica Screenshots

Screenshot of End-to-end campaign managementScreenshot of Faster campaign creation