Likelihood to Recommend Specific scenarios where Communifire would be well suited to an organisation, would be companies that are people focused and committed to frequent and open communication channels from both the top-down and bottom-up. It also would suit organizations that are committed to providing the staff opportunities to collaborate, share and actively contribute to company initiatives and planning. If these aren't elements of your organization's culture, the system would still work for you or those companies who just want to push information out and have an effective intranet. Communifire would cater to these scenarios just as well and is more than capable of providing that type of simple solution.
Read full review If your business relies heavily on content creation, and particularly on blog posts, then WordPress is really the best option you have. But if you don't have a blog, you only need static pages, or you want to build an eCommerce site, then you might want to explore other alternatives.
Read full review Pros Communifire allows people to connect easily through instant chat and messaging. It works similarly to other social media platforms like Facebook so its not hard to learn. Communifire makes it easy to share news and events with our community and the presentation of this information looks very professional. I found Communifire quite easy to configure to our individual needs. There were a lot of options to turn things on or off. This was important to us because in some areas of our community we wanted to allow our contractors many features and in other areas we wanted to really limit what was on offer. We had a big list of things we needed a platform to do. Communifire ticked all the boxes. Read full review WordPress is incredibly easy to set up and get running with little to no technical knowledge. Most web hosts will do it for you, since it's so easy. With thousands of themes available for free and for low cost, WordPress can accommodate any design you can imagine. The community behind WordPress is generous, and there are loads of educational opportunities both online and in person to learn and connect with other users. Read full review Cons Some UX issues that could be improved Some architecture decisions don't make complete sense to me (though that's just one man's opinion) Read full review WordPress breaks often so you need to have someone who understands how to troubleshoot, which can take time and money. Some plugins are easier to customize than others, for example, some don't require any coding knowledge while others do. This can limit your project if you are not a coder. WordPress can be easily hacked, so you also need someone who can ensure your sites are secure. Read full review Likelihood to Renew Our business depends upon this software to provide information on all aspects of our business. The future of business is a marriage between web site and customer interaction. This software will allow us to move in that direction.
Read full review My rating is based on the knowledge I have of the community that WordPress has had built around it for years now. It's as solid as it comes when you talk about community involvement and expansion. There's no other CMS out there that can match-up with it, hands down.
Read full review Usability This rating has a caveat - there is always room for improvement, and this team gets it. You always learn from customers how to do things better and easier, so it is a constant learning of how people use the site. Although the search engine is exceptional, most people do not use it as their first line of research. Much of the usability has to do with layout - and is not just a software usability item, so the rating is severely dependent up on the layout/options you choose for your usage. And their team will do anything in their power to get the results and layout you want. The areas that need improvement - and acknowledged by the team - are the administrative tools. There are a ton of options, and it takes a little to learn some of those. For most people, however, this won't be an issue, because the support team will always help you. This is always the case with more power. If there were fewer options it would no doubt be easier, but they give you the keys to all of the cars in the lot; so a little more to learn.
Read full review It's a sophisticated but easy to use piece of software. Many of the content addition pieces are familiar from other pieces of software so there isn't a huge learning curve. And for new areas, there is a lot of info on WordPress.org as well as other WordPress help sites.
Read full review Reliability and Availability Never any problems. Quite impressed
Read full review Anyone can visit WordPress.org and download a fully functional copy of WordPress free of charge. Additionally, WordPress is offered to users as open-source software, which means that anyone can customize the code to create new applications and make these available to other WordPress users.
Read full review Performance Works in real time.
Read full review Mostly, any performance issues have to do with using too many plugins and these can sometimes slow down the overall performance of your site. It is very tempting to start adding lots of plugins to your WordPress site, however, as there are thousands of great plugins to choose from and so many of them help you do amazing things on your site. If you begin to notice performance issues with your WordPress site (e.g. pages being slow to load), there are ways to optimize the performance of your site, but this requires learning the process. WordPress users can learn how to optimize their WordPress sites by downloading the WPTrainMe WordPress training plugin (WPTrainMe.com) and going through the detailed step-by-step WordPress optimization tutorials.
Read full review Support Rating I have always found Communifire support to be exceptional. We have had a personal account manager who has been very helpful.
Read full review WordPress itself only has community service so your experience will depend on where you turn. Online, through forums and community boards, support is rudimentary but effective. You can easily turn to your local community and find exceptional individuals who know and use WordPress regularly for more advanced, inexpensive, support. I'm rating this less than 10 because of the lack of any formal support provided by a company.
Read full review In-Person Training Varies by the person providing training. High marks as it's incredibly easy to find experienced individuals in your community to provide training on any aspect of WordPress from content marketing, SEO, plugin development, theme design, etc. Less than 10 though as the training is community based and expectations for a session you find may fall short.
Read full review Online Training It is very easy to find online resources to learn how to do just about anything with WordPress.
Read full review Implementation Rating I found the system to be very flexible and the Communifire team very supportive in helping me identify solutions for my goals.
Read full review WordPress is not a great solution if you have: 1) A larger site with performance / availability requirements. 2) Multiple types of content you want to share - each with its own underlying data structure. 3) Multiple sites you need to manage. For very small sites where these needs are not paramount, WordPress is a decent solution
Read full review Alternatives Considered We selected Communifire for the excellent sales support, strong feature set and quick set up time. We were able to get started immediately and build out features as need required which led to faster execution and higher adoption rates among our team.
Read full review We have considered and operated within
Shopify and
Squarespace . Both serve their purpose for niche clients, but we do recommend WordPress as being the superior option. We find that WordPress is easier to use and offers maximum scalability while the others are more challenging to design, code, configure and launch.
Read full review Scalability WordPress is completely scalable. You can get started immediately with a very simple "out-of-the box" WordPress installation and then add whatever functionality you need as and when you need it, and continue expanding. Often we will create various WordPress sites on the same domain to handle different aspects of our strategy (e.g. one site for the sales pages, product information and/or a marketing blog, another for delivering products securely through a private membership site, and another for running an affiliate program or other application), and then ties all of these sites together using a common theme and links on each of the site's menus. Additionally, WordPress offers a multisite function that allows organizations and institutions to manage networks of sites managed by separate individual site owners, but centrally administered by the parent organization. You can also expand WordPress into a social networking or community site, forums, etc. The same scalability applies to web design. You can start with a simple design and then scale things up to display sites with amazing visual features, including animations and video effects, sliding images and animated product image galleries, elements that appear and fade from visitor browsers, etc. The scaling possibilities of WordPress are truly endless.
Read full review Return on Investment We are still building out features of the platform but with implemention of paid features by members, we will be able to cover our operating cost of the platform. Read full review WordPress helps us reduce website management costs because we can oversee updates in-house. WordPress is easy to use, reducing the amount of time we spend on website management. The ease of use enables us to offer website management for clients, helping us grow our capabilities/business. Read full review ScreenShots