Agorapulse vs. Livefyre (discontinued)

Agorapulse has been a huge benefit to us as a business and is the most comprehensive platform we've used, having previously been with Hootsuite and ContentCal. It is likely to be better for companies that are managing multiple social profiles and want to consolidate these into one manageable platform. Given the amount of features it provides, it might not be suitable for individuals. The reporting is a fantastic part of the platform, which includes brand awareness for certain profiles, the best time to post for engagement, and details that all help with strategising. The inbuilt link shortening and tracking is useful, we've set this up and need to explore its capabilities further. Overall, we would recommend Agorapulse and it's a great asset to our business.

Incentivized

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.

• Calendar sharing - great for internal and external approval
• Community management - it means we can keep on top of engagement for all of our clients in one place
• Report - it's really useful for us to be able to create such in depth reports that we can use internally but also share with clients so they can see the results of what we are doing

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.

• Would love to have a draft feature. We often don't schedule things until the assets are ready, or use a placeholder image and swap them afterwards
• Editing posts intended for multiple channels is not as easy as scheduling them in the first place. I would love to edit and have the same menu I do as when I'm scheduling where I have my base text and then the adjusted text for each social media. It's rare that something I've planned to be a similar post across channels, needs editing, but only for one of those channels. e.g. Correcting mistakes or changing strategies.
• Currently, I export the analytics and put it in a Google Sheet where I have more control over the data, which I love. For me to use the Agora Reports system, I would need substantial features like comparing metrics in the same charts, using direct line charts instead of smoothed (smoothed charts look nice, but just obfuscate data), separating out paid growth, etc. It's probably too large an ask for what Agora is trying to provide, which is why the export tool is very useful.
• While I'm talking about it, a slight bug with the export tool is that when you export two things in quick succession, it just sends a duplicate of the first report via email. I'll export a CSV of Global data and then a CSV of Content, and if I do it too quickly, it doubles up the Global data and I don't get the Content until I resend.
• More specific filtering for listening. Sometimes someone has our brand in their name and we get ALL of their content. We have to add each user like this to the filter instead of being able to filter out usernames that contain it.

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.

The decision has been made. It's time to get to work--no steps back. I feel confident this product is well suited to help me make progress. I want to get down business and utilize the functionality of this product to meet my marketing goals. I feel very comfortable with the choice I have made.

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.

Any time I onboard a new team member, they are very quick to adapt to Agora's user interface and therefore require a very quick onboarding process from me, which is a massive plus. While I think having an all-in-one platform would be ideal, there is something to be said about only having a few bells and whistle so that my team can focus on what is most important to us and our clients, content

Incentivized

It's really easy to implement that app but should improve some analytics.

Incentivized

Agorapulse occasionally has outages or shuts down. It never interferes with my use of the application or any of my posts

Incentivized

Agorapulse has generally had great performance. Occasionally I have issues with my videos being posted on Instagram. I still am not sure why. the format of the videos is the same as the videos that are going through.

Incentivized

The support from Agorapulse is excellent. Any time we have made contact they have been quick to reply, and given added extra information to help. The initial sales experience was also good. Not pushy like a lot of other companies, more that they would like to help. And they certainly did for us at a difficult time which built a fantastic relationship with us from the very start. Communication is great too, with just the right amount of emails and updates. Overall we feel that they genuinely care about their clients and users.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

I did not train in person

Incentivized

The staff walked me through the whole platform and asked me if I had any questions. They were very helpful in answering any questions I had.

Incentivized

Be sure of the game play mechanics you need to achieve your objectives, it will help significantly in setting up the game and creating the assets

Want to post the same content on different profiles? Don't duplicate your posts, you can just select what platform to post them onto! You can even change around the copy/hashtags/etc to optimize the posts for each platform.

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.

I'm not sure I understand what is meant by scalability.

Incentivized

• It has saved our company a lot of time digging through all different social medias to be responsive to consumers
• It has helped us be more responsive to prospects, so better lead generation
• Agorapulse allows us to be in touch quicker with our prospects, meaning better lead to appointment generation as well.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized