Azure Bot Service (Microsoft Bot Framework) vs. ShoutOUT

It is suited for applications like computerizing messages, or any business thought that would require the entrepreneur to robotize their reactions, particularly assuming they are managing a ton of clients and they can't answer to every single one of them. It'd be the most ideal to computerize messages of enormous associations where the reactions measure up to the clients' assumptions. It would be less appropriate in associations where clients' viewpoints matter and every client is interesting and requires the association's consideration, where the specialist organization doesn't need to sum up the clients' interests.

If you are mainly using Instagram influencers to promote your business, ShoutOUT works excellent for that. Most of those influencers aren't very tech-savvy, so giving them a coupon code to track their sales and commission them off of that seems to work well. The mass payout feature is pretty simple to use as well, but I wish that you didn't have to do it on a 1-on-1 basis.

Incentivized

• Real-time communication.
• Lightweight software protocols.

Incentivized

• Great for simple, not very tech-savvy influencers or affiliates.
• Ties in seamlessly to Shopify Plus, which is a must for our organization.
• Simple dashboard, easy to manage affiliates.

Incentivized

• They have simplified the coding for the bot in Azure, but it would help if the coding was further simplified so that non-IT can operate [and] create it easily.

• Not a vast network of affiliates to choose from if you need them to facilitate that side of your business.
• Sometimes the tracking by coupon code doesn't seem to work correctly, and the numbers don't match up with what we see on the backend of our Shopify numbers.
• Could make it easier to add creatives and deep linking for affiliates.

Incentivized

It works perfectly for what we need it to do. It is very inexpensive, works well, and makes it easy for us to navigate and use. We can easily add new affiliates and create coupons for them to track their sales. For the influencers that are a little more inclined to post product links and go the more traditional affiliate approach, we can certainly provide that option for them and go that route as well. We like the ease and simplicity.

Incentivized

Azure Bot Service provides an integrated environment for bot development. Microsoft Azure Cloud is fully compatible and its security features. It's more important to pay attention to the logic of business than the specifics of each messenger. We don't have any issues using the bot framework because the implementation is excellent.

Incentivized

Support is helpful when we have a problem, but online documentation is lacking

We only had to use it once, but they got back to us very quickly and helped us solve the issue that we had. So, ShoutOUT support is batting 1000% in our book, but that is only 1 out of 1 and may not be enough of a sample size to verify that they are as good as we think.

Incentivized

Microsoft Bot Framework is much better and well more established without a lot of proprietary software/coding language. Lex is very limited with integration with standard hardware and network configurations. Lex has performance issues and was too slow to meet near real-time collaboration requirements. Bot Framework complements many other Microsoft communication products and this was key to implementing without a lot of new training required.

Incentivized

We used Shareasale and Commission Junction in the, and they are awesome to manage your traditional affiliates that run blogs or email campaigns. We would still be using those if we did more of a traditional approach to influencers. But since we moved over to a more influencer based marketing approach, ShoutOut is fantastic and has made it simpler for us and our affiliates.

Incentivized

• Interfaces with the SQL data set, tracks down plans/replies, and tests them with the SDK.
• Utilizing the system is made conceivable by the Bot Dev gateway. We can interface our bot in excess of ten channels, including Twilio Facebook, Twilio, Twilio, and Slack, and that's only the tip of the iceberg.
• It is expensive.

• Very positive right off the bat because we dropped our Commission Junction expenses and got most of our bigger affiliates to switch over to keep their sales.
• Easy to use and much simpler for our affiliate manager to do her work.

Incentivized