BigCommerce vs. Hootsuite vs. X Pro

BigCommerce is really well suited for someone who wants to get selling quickly, but may not have endless developer experience, or even web design experience for that matter. Their templates, even the free ones, are very attractive and supported by tons of third party apps. I think the only times it is not a slam dunk recommendation would be if someone is dead set on using another solution like Shopify, or if they are not looking for an ecommerce site and more of a flat website, this would be overkill.

Incentivized

Hootsuite presents my team everything we need to manage the social media function. Even writing the "what can be improved" section strained me, because there really isn't a whole lot to complain about. At this point, I (and my social media manager) need to explore the platform more, specifically OwlyGPT, campaigns, and listening. It's pretty much everything we need right now

Incentivized

TweetDeck is ideal for complex media organisations / newsrooms where you want to keep track of several users accounts, or switch between multiple user and/or title accounts. It is perfect for those who want to follow conversations in real-time via many channels, at a glance. It is also useful for those who want to schedule tweets to provide around the clock coverage even when unmanned. Now that it paid-for is less suited to smaller organisations with tight budgets.

• We really appreciate how easy it is to add products, and variants of products.
• The integrated site analytics is pretty slick and tells us how our customers are utilizing our site/allows us to recognize trends.
• Adding sales badges is a breeze and allows us to target specific items for sale to market!

Incentivized

• Reporting. We are able to pull accurate and concise data points on our channels.
• Planning and calendaring. We love that we are able to have our teams plan out content across months so that we are never feeling behind schedule on getting content out there.
• Creating content natively in the platform!

Incentivized

• TweetDeck is the best platform to schedule tweets - it is far better than the website itself. The process is remarkably easy and scheduling a day's worth of tweets takes no more than 10 minutes.
• Tracking news is very easy on TweetDeck due to being able to create multiple columns each focusing on a different subject. Columns can be created using handles, searches, hashtags, and trends, and this makes TweetDeck a great platform as a news editor.

Incentivized

• In my experience, customer support FAILS terribly in knowledge of getting a BC site live
• In my experience, the back side/ dashboard is very archaic compared to Volusion, will add hours of work to your week.
• In my experience, pretty much anything you NEED is done with an "app" at additional cost. I think we have a few hundred dollars in apps already on top of cost of BigCommerce.
• I feel coming from Volusion to BigCommerce was so depressing but we do feel secure that the company will remain in business. We are looking for something else already.

• TikTok is an area for improvement as it's newer to Hootsuite. It would be beneficial to be able to link non-business profiles on TikTok to Hootsuite as many businesses use personal accounts to access TikTok's expansive music library.
• Hootsuite does have room to improve the analytics capabilities. There could be more ways to customize each aspect of their reports. There isn't much manipulation of data in each type of data set.
• Simplicity is an area of improvement for Hootsuite. The streams are one example of an area that is super cluttered and difficult to view. Their platform could really use an aesthetic overhaul to make things look more pleasing.

Incentivized

• TweetDeck has an editing feature for scheduled posts only if there is no image attached. When a post with an image needs editing, users must instead delete the entire post and reschedule it with the edits needed.
• TweetDeck has a real-time display, however users often need to refresh the window manually to get scheduled posts to appear in the appropriate column.
• TweetDeck users can scroll side to side to view all off the types of columns selected. This functionality often leads to traveling back to a previous page unintentionally.

Incentivized

I personally would not even consider another e-commerce website platform.

Bigcommerce may have the same (or close to the same) functionality and integrations as other SaaS platforms but they excel at customer service and tech support. At the end of the day you need a company that will answer the phone in less than a minute especially if you're having a 5 alarm issue. That said, we hardly ever have any issues. The site was down for a few minutes one time 5 years ago. Sometimes we have issues with coding or apps and they help me with that too. They even walked me through installing our new theme when the contracted developers told me that wasn't included in the development of our new website.

Bigcommerce comes out with new innovations every year, not including apps that other people write for the platform, and there are a lot of those and new ones all the time. And there are a LOT of awesome themes to choose from (Halothemes are the best).

And the price is reasonable!

I'd give Bigcommerce my business any time and recommend them to anyone looking to run an e-commerce website. You could even use them for a non-shopping site, we have one of those too!

Incentivized

At this time we are satisfied that Hootsuite offers the most of what we are looking for at the most reasonable price point. As the social media landscape and monitoring/scheduling software changes, so do our needs. We re-evaluate our tools semi-annually or as new tools emerge onto the market. If we find at any point that we aren't gaining an advantage, then we are open to switching products.

Incentivized

As I previously mentioned, if TweetDeck were to increase some features and integrations, cleaned up its interface, and developed a tool to measure ROI, it would remain competitive with HootSuite and Hubspot. Altogether, it is an effective tool for the job of scheduling and monitoring your impact on Twitter, it falls behind other competitors that offer a more robust solution.

I think that overall it has a great front end for the customer. On the back end, it takes a little spin-up time, but in just a couple of hours you can really have your head wrapped around everything you're going to need 99% of the time. It takes me about 5 minutes to train a new user on how to interact with customer orders.

Incentivized

I will give Hootsuite a rating of 10/10 because it has delivered measurable business impact through social media. It helps centralize and streamline content planning, approvals, scheduling, and reporting in one place. It has significantly reduced manual workload and improved team efficiency. We achieved higher engagement rates, faster customer response times, and improved lead quality through social channels. It has also helped us with centralized reporting across different social media channels.

Incentivized

It's a pretty easy tool to use I find a few of the columns to be a bit repetitive. If you are managing more than one account you'll start to find yourself having easily 10 plus columns all tracking all different information which creates nice track lanes to keep all that relative information in one column or "view". With the amount of data that is pushed out, if you are following a large number of accounts, it's extremely easy to lose valuable posts in your feeds. As you begin building out your columns they get the point where you only look at one or two and the rest seem to be lost. Overall, this a free tool and there are other social monitoring tools that are out there but are in the multiple thousands of dollar range

So far in my time with BigCommerce I have not had any down time when it comes to my webstore or accessing it at any time I need to. Knowing that they have such a good uptime, it makes me feel comfortable that my customers can access things anytime, but also keep sales going 24/7

Incentivized

Gliches have made it a bit of a bind, particularly when you just want to 'click and send' a web article after you have read it - and then you have to deal with support (a great team but not always able to solve the problems with the gliches). Gliches with it loading properly, gliches with 'double ups in FB on the posts (the personal page and the business page if both clicked will lead to 2 lots of postings to each page!)

TweetDeck tends to be available for use majority of the time...however, I've had times where it would get stuck in a loop and then post my Tweet multiple times.

I have not had any issues with pages loading slow or any real other issues, not that I have encountered so far. Speed of the site and images loading are fantastic and everything just seems to work nicely, which may seem like a simple thing to say about things, but when something just WORKS! Its rather nice vs fighting with things to work right.

Incentivized

HootSuite does everything it is designed to do very well: the product's performance is very reliable and efficient. Like other tools, there is always a room for new developments and updates, and the HootSuite team recognizes this and focuses on new development as well.

Besides posting multiple times when stuck in a loop not other real issues.

Because they are always there no matter how simple or complex the question is, if they don't know the answer they don't fake it and just make you go away feeling frustrated.. they get you to someone that does know the answer. I always appreciate their help and their honesty!

Incentivized

I can manage all of my accounts on one site! It's absolutely amazing!
The dashboard is helpful to see how you are doing as well. Still
getting to understand the analytics and may need to reach out for help
on this

I've never had to contact customer support. Tweetdeck has always worked like a charm for me. And, if I have had a problem, I've simply deleted the column, then recreated it and it worked again. While it's not without its glitches every once in a great while, it's worked like a charm.

Incentivized

Very easy to teach and learn

They have a comprehensive online help file system that makes it easy to do almost anything. They cover just about everything you'd want to do with your online store with images, clear descriptions and in some cases video. I will, however, say the videos should be a little more professorially done and not sound like the employees are doing it in their cubical.

The online training is decent; however, it takes a lot more time to search for answers to my questions. Having a training session with a live person was much more effective as they were able to quickly address the business needs I have.

A certified BigCommerce design and solution partner will usually comprise a team of highly experienced designers, developers and marketers. It is our view that in the vast majority of cases, this will pay dividends in the long-term - especially for those teams that could use the extra support.

Incentivized

Simple and easy to use, and have never had any issues. We like how it saves me time and allows me to plan in advance. I plan on using this for as long as I can and will encourage others to use it too. If you haven't tried it you should. I hope my review is helpful to everyone.

Incentivized

Easy download and launch of application.

BigCommerce even with add-ons such as a PIM and B2B functionality wins for small businesses on affordability and ease of use. No servers or updates to worry about and no expensive agencies to pay. This being said, if the budget were no issue, for larger organisations Magento is perhaps a better option.

Incentivized

Hootsuite offers a wide range of tools at a somewhat steeper cost. If you manage multiple platforms and want to survey the content being shared and interacted with across all of them, Hootsuite seems to have an easier platform to do that with. HubSpot CRM allows us to integrate our social platforms into our existing CRM, which is a cost saver, but Hootsuite is social media-focused, so the set-up is easier.

Incentivized

Several years ago I used the Hootsuite Free service. I found Tweetdeck to be preferable because of its user interface, and greater functionality. Moreover, I recall Hootsuite bombarding me with emails that were just irrelevant. TweetDeck just does what it does, without hassle. Its UI and functionality for multiple accounts seems to be the best I've tried.

Incentivized

I believe after seeing all of the parts of this platform, one is able to develop the business and keep adding on select features for the business. There are multiple options for purchase with the various platforms once the business grows more. The different features being offered by the platform can lead us to scalability.

Incentivized

We are only using in marketing and have been able to scale.

Incentivized

• Provides a robust platform to sell a high-risk product.
• Page Builder saves you time and money by negating the need to buy a template.
• Includes robust promotion settings that allow for codes and automatic discounts, bulk discounts, and customer groups (i.e. military discount), all native options.

Incentivized

• For our organization, all ROI was on time saved and efficiency: for creating posts, for scheduling and publishing, for interacting with users, and for analyzing performances. It all comes in one place and this makes a very huge difference in your workflows. We would say that Hootsuite went beyond our expectations on this front, for example with the dynamics UTMs and the media library. Saving time was the main reason why we wanted to purchase the platform and it did not disappoint at all.
• The ROI in time was also fast to get. The learning curse is very short and this is also an important element. Benefiting from the platform did not take long to be experienced.

Incentivized

• Positive: User-friendly and therefore easy to teach new members.
• Positive: Easy team management (when there are multiple users/managers for one channel).
• Positive impact on well being - You can take a break from social media and go on holiday even when you are working as a social media manager.

Incentivized