Bloomfire provides knowledge engagement, aiming to deliver an experience that connects teams and individuals with the information they need to excel at their jobs. Their cloud-based knowledge engagement platform aims to give people one centralized, searchable place to engage with shared knowledge and grow their organization's collective intelligence.
$25
per month
Agentforce Sales
Score 8.8 out of 10
N/A
Salesforce' Agentforce Sales (formerly Salesforce Sales Cloud) is the company's flagship CRM platform. The AI CRM for Sales features data built right in.
$25
per month per user
Vena
Score 8.1 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
Vena Solutions provides a financial process automation solution to automate Corporate Performance Management, accounting and budgeting, Regulatory & Compliance, and other finance-related processes. It is scaled for medium to large-sized organizations.
N/A
Pricing
Bloomfire
Salesforce Agentforce Sales
Vena
Editions & Modules
Basic
$25.00
per month
Starter
$25.00
per month per user
Professional
$80.00
per month per user
Enterprise
$165.00
per month per user
Unlimited
$330.00
per month per user
Agentforce 1 Sales
$550
per month per user
Professional
N/A
Complete
N/A
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Bloomfire
Agentforce Sales
Vena
Free Trial
No
Yes
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
$25
Optional
Optional
Additional Details
—
—
The Professional Plan is the most flexible way to get started quickly and can be added onto as a company grows. The plan includes: Vena Platform, Customer Success Manager, Standard Support and Customer Portal.
Complete Plan includes everything in Professional, plus: Vena Insights, Premium Support, Sandbox Environment, and Expert Managed Services.
For a limited time, new customers who use Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central (Online) as their primary ERP can get a free year of Vena and 40% off implementation costs.
Vena also offers special pricing for not for profit organizations. To learn more, speak to an expert.
Bloomfire is the best platform to find updates on partner kickoff events and also Training and Enablement plans. we can find good articles related to partner sales talks which gives a good information on maximising mulesoft value proposition and maximise their investment by …
Bloomfire has a good number of articles available to read and gain knowledge whereas other products don't provide such flexibility in knowledge sharing. It also provides recordings of various partner tech talks, partner webinars, Lab materials, training classes, and start …
We cannot find some solutions for tableau both online and offline applications which ultimately disturbs client requirements. But on Bloomfire we can find a good number of articles and information on many Mulesoft concepts and integration LAB pics. We don't have frequent …
Salesforce also provides a free learning platform and some special access to partners on some trial heads where we can earn badges for the trials we complete. Bloomfire should also start such user-friendly practices which will help learners to access and learn them easily. They …
I didn't chose this system, but when I was hired by the company I was challenged to figure out the best use of it. I met with our representative and we went over ideas that would make using the site better and more appealing to learners. In the last year we have had a …
Salesforce has an awesome platform to learn which is called Trailhead, where their explanation was so innovative. for every trail we complete they provide us with a badge that can be shared on LinkedIn which further increases the number of Opportunities. We can find information …
In my opinion, Fuse is a dying database platform with user-friendly capabilities equivalent to trying to fit a square peg in a round hole... with a blindfold... underwater. Bloomfire's ease of use has been a tremendous upgrade in every way, other than video recording …
We utilize Teamwork for Project / Task Management. We looked at their functionality to house our guides, etc. Bloomfire was way ahead in terms of product functionality.
Hive is the closest competitor to Bloomfire that I have encountered. Its main benefit is the ability to manage individual tasks along with accessing larger hosts of information. I think that Bloomfire is better at the organizational component on a Macro level, however, Hive is …
Boomi is a no code platform where we cannot deal with bluk data. Here in Boomfire we can find good number of articles on mulesoft and salesforce integrations and we can easliy get back to client with best solutions. where-in boomi has not much flexibility compared to Mulesoft. …
I like Bloomfire because it is more concise with the work I do whereas Google search engine would provide broader information. It has just been so user-friendly, and easier to use [than] I could have imagined. I would use this program over any other that I have tried in the past.
Bloomfire is much easier to use than Microsoft SharePoint as a standalone knowledge base. Atlassian Confluence is pretty similar in this regard. All of these products shine in their own way, but Bloomfire does very well as a knowledge base.
Based on my experience, I’ve used Odoo — it’s an open-source ERP system. It’s not exactly the same as Salesforce or Sales Cloud, but it serves a similar purpose. And I feel that Sales Cloud is better. Personally, I find it easier to use and better than what Odoo offers, …
Over the years, I’ve helped many people move from different sales solutions — like Dynamics, HubSpot, and Act, which was one of the first ones. I’ve supported a lot of organizations in moving from those platforms to Salesforce.
So I've evaluated, implemented Microsoft Dynamics in the past. I've used Oracle CRM solutions. I've used Daylight, which is a very niche CRM system the last couple of years. And I've evaluated a variety from Legacy Microsoft Ones to Zoho and Sugar when making implementation …
Actually, we have not. By the time I joined my company, we already had Sales Cloud. It was already there and the decision was made. I'm sure that there were other small companies that the upper management team evaluated very quickly, but they came to a decision very quickly. I …
Raiser's Edge, CSING. Those are the primary ones. There's no competition at all. I mean, in terms of tracking duplicate contact, I mean contacts ability to be secure and provide the right access for different levels. Salesforce was able to do that. Oh yeah. Yes. Whereas the …
We have used HubSpot and we have used jojo CRM. So the customer who cannot afford the licensing model of Salesforce, jojo CRM is a very good platform and another for assembly level, hub Spot does the work as well.
Salesforce is magnificently more robust and functions much better when managing complex sales cycles with multiple individuals and products. With simple sales cycles and few products, Excel is a strong contender.
Salesforce CMS stacks up as a Customer management system because it has a more user friendly snd intuitive interface. The UX is better and more modern. It can be customised and extended. There are always learning opportunities and updates for the system so it keeps on …
Salesforce more so compliments these products, rather than stacks against them. We don't have any products similar to Salesforce CMS, so in lieu of that, these are the products we were using that mesh the easiest with Salesforce CMS in terms of proceeding through the …
In my opinion, Salesforce CMS is the most complex of these offerings, and probably the most complex platform of its kind. It was selected by another stakeholder - I would likely have chosen something less expensive and more intuitive to use. The robust feature set is amazing, …
We used the Catalyst product of Totango. It was not great as it was hard to navigate, and it did not offer any reporting capabilities at all, nor did it speed up our day-to-day tasks.
We went with Vena as the alternatives felt like everything was contained in the box, and would have required more IT department assistance than we had bandwidth for.
Vena is much better for customization and data representation. It gives us much more flexibility in how we show our information to stakeholders. We need our information to be digestible for non-financial employees, and with that flexibility to show things how we want, we are …
we did our diligence when selecting Vena. I do not want to disparage other products so I will not list them. However, we were extremely thorough and gauged all offerings on multiple criteria. Big players and small players. We are very happy with our Decision to go with Vena.
we liked that Vena was fully integrated into Excel and we were already doing all our manual work within excel and creating all our reports and templates so we thought that only made sense to use Vena as it was most comfortable for us
I think from the finance perspective specifically, Vena is more clear and easy to read. Besides, the report that Vena generates is more reliable and realistic in our case. But we do integrate the data from Workday to Vena every month. So we use the both platforms for our …
We selected Vena because the product worked in Excel, so there was less of a training curve for people, because all of other people work with cell users and we also chose it better because of the people, the sales reps, and the implementation teams. You know, the processes that …
Vena is Excel-based, which is what our users wanted. Pigment was web-based, like Adaptive, but our users did not fully trust or adopt it. Adoption drives success for any software. Amy's software, which is not adopted, has a negative ROI by definition. Vena was the right choice …
I didn’t have an option in which one to go with but I have looked at others. It has stacked up well but I would want more scenario analysis and predictive analytics that some of the other products offer.
Vena being excel based is the what sets it apart from tableau and makes it very easy for finance professionals to be self sufficient when needing reports. Tableau can be very difficult to use for a finance person and typically requires some sort of tech help. Being able to …
I think Bloomfire is most appropriate in a medium to large business entity since onboarding can be difficult without an organized tool to prioritize job functions. It would be most well suited for positions that incorporate data analytics/reporting and consist of regular deliverables. So for example: if an accountant wants to learn how to compile a cash flow statement but also has to turn it into a client-facing presentation, there are resources specific to internal accounting and then separate resources (also in the accounting vertical) for data visualizations and client reporting.
In the end, I think we can always make it fit — and that’s one of the powers of Salesforce. Because of its flexibility and wide range of possibilities, you can really make it work for almost any need. The key, though, is to make thoughtful decisions upfront and plan carefully how you set it up. If you do that, you’ll end up with a truly flexible and effective system.
Vena suited to our environment because we do have so many different budget owners that are in so many different places in our organization and for them to all be able to go onto the software and bring it down in two native Excel where they are all used to work in Excel and putting in the line items and pieces that go with their budget is super helpful a scenario where it might not be as helpful is when we are bringing people on and trying to teach them how to report and map because we struggle with that so much ourselves that it is a difficult situation to try to get people to understand things that we’re you know may be struggling to understand ourselves.
Quickly reach out to whatever employee segment you want to reach by posting a topic and it will send a notification to everyone in that group with a link to the posting.
Bloomfire saves all of the previous posts so in your free time you can go to the site, and explore the various range of topics others have posted. The information on there will only be as good as the person posting it, but it will be people within your company and industry posting it. So it will always be helpful.
Bloomfire is a place to be noticed by your peers. Have a great topic you want to express, my company allows all to post there as long as we keep it professional. So you can share your ideas or experiences in a safe and productive manner. But we do have some fun on there too!
What i like best about Vena is that it is very seamless Excel integration.
Vena fosters collabs across teams, helping multiple members to work together on financial planning in real-time enhancing overall efficiency.
We now also can automate manual processes like budgeting, consolidation of data and reporting saves my valuable time and also reducing the risk of errors.
I’d say the only thing that can be a bit tricky — and I know Tableau helps address this — is that sometimes we’re limited in how deep we can go with the data in terms of reporting. It would be great to have a bit more robustness within the app itself. However, we’ve figured out our workarounds, and overall, I think it’s a fantastic product — which is why I’ve been working with it for 23 years.
Have another license between power user and contributor that allows building reports that aren't ad hoc, but don't have all the admin rights of a power user.
Have a session on best in class Workforce Planning prior to implementation.
I am with a different employer now days where training is not part of my job description. If I ever found myself doing E-Learning again, Bloomfire would be the first interface I would recommend.
There are days when I wish we hadn't switched, but I know that if we put in the time, we will get to where we want to be with the software and that it has many more capabilities than anything else we looked at. However, the amount of time and onboarding we need to do is also far greater than we realized/were told when we originally bought the product. They told us we should hire onboarding support, but at the end, after we had already reached our budget maximum for this, so it's been slower than we had hoped.
Vena has become an integral part of finance and our daily process. Without it we would take longer to prepare results and decisions will be delayed. Vena has given the whole organization more visibility of results and budgets so that all departments participate more actively in managing their budgets rather than it being the sole responsibility of finance.
Bloomfire is an easy-to-use platform for posting information and asking questions of my peers. It also has a user-friendly search capability. Yet like any other CMS, the secret to success rests in such items as the ability to use metadata to tag content or posts, and Bloomfire provides a wide range of options to make posting content and subsequently searching for it.
All in all, it's a great product that use all day, every day. It's aesthetically pleasing overall and specifically provides information in a clean, concise way. It's easy to manipulate and seems to play well with the other products I use such as Pardot, Gmelius, and our company's proprietary data system. It increases my efficieny in my admin tasks so I have more time to focus on revenue-generation and account management. It's also easy to use from everywhere where it be on a university campus, in a hotel room, one of a million Starbucks, or at home
It's very usable in the sense that it is what you make it. You can keep your Excel spreadsheets as they are then then add Vena's cloud saving capability on top of it or you can take their out of the box templates and apply them to your business. It's truly a super customizable and is what you make of it
All Force.com apps run on world-class data centers with backup, failover, and disaster-recovery facilities. Force.com has had a proven 99.9 percent uptime record for years. Accordingly, I only recall our instance of Salesforce having one unscheduled, brief down time over 6 years. I can't remember for sure, but it may have been due to our Internet Service Provider (ISP) versus Salesforce itself. Also, Salesforce does it's best to keep customers in the loop:
Trust.salesforce.com is the salesforce.com community's home for real-time information on system performance and security. On this site you'll find:
Live and historical data on system performance Up-to-the minute information on planned maintenance Phishing, malicious software and social engineering threats Best security practices for your organization Information on how we safeguard your data
Vena is seemingly always available. They plan maintenance windows well in advance and always off hours (typically over a weekend) and communicate clearly throughout maintenance about what will be affected. Over 5 years of using the product, I can only remember one time when the platform was unavailable (I believe due to an underlying server hosting issue from their provider), and they resolved the issue and had everything up and running again within 8 hours.
For a SaaS provider, I'd rate their performance to be one of the best. At times, reporting tends to slow down if the data set is very large, which is the case in any system. But, that's a very rare phenomenon
The performance is dependent on how much data and calculations are involved and how complex the security settings are. A simple template or report loads in seconds. A complex template or report can take a while. If there are many users with complex security settings, that will be a factor in the load time.
I have not needed to pose questions to the support team yet, as it is a very simple piece of software to use, however, its help documents and the bot ready to answer questions let me know I am in good hands. The help center could load a little quicker, but that's my only complaint.
The overall support has been good. More and more features are being released quite frequently. Very small features are also making big difference in how the tool can be adapted and used better. If there is anything we need or are stuck, the support team sets up a call and helps in resolving the issue/provides workarounds.
I will give Vena credit for at least trying and being initially responsive. However, it is clear that their attitude toward development is cavalier. We have engaged them both via helpdesk and on consulting engagements. The solutions provided are often given without proper testing, resulting in significant time spent on back-and-forth to get issues resolved, or fixing the code yourself. There does not seem to be much in the way of process or project management on their side for customer engagements.
I attended two training sessions. I would rate them a 4 as an advanced user. It was very basic – great for someone new – would give 8+ for new person.
I had 3 years of experience at the time. I skipped basic and went onto advanced and still not helpful. A lot of it was best practices that didn’t feel relevant for our business
This is the best way to learn and buy-in. The in person effect gives students both a hands on approach but an instruction to be there to customize assistance and understanding. In person also builds greater buy in with your future team on creators. However if your audience is better at on line learning this is another good option.
I have gone through multiple. The content that’s delivered is quite basic – I wish they had more advanced training.
We are grandfathered into premium support plus training. We get unlimited access to instructor led and online training for free. We have taken advantage of this
The training was structured as a group training to learn the basics of creating a data model and mapping a template. While we had nearly 10 participants, I was the only actual implementer so we probably didn't actually need the training and could have just learned the initial skills from the implementation consultant. Two years later, when we hired a new team member, they completed several modules in Vena Academy (a self paced learning course) which allowed them to get up to speed on the basics with just a bit of supplemental guidance from me as our existing admin.
Just from an organizational standpoint - we standardized our data prior to moving to Salesforce. But we essentially standardized it wrong. That's created a big disgusting mess for us know that I'll have to deal with as the Admin. Be sure you think through use cases prior to doing something like that - seek outside opinions on how the data will work best, especially depending on what else you're going to integrate with Salesforce.
The Vena consultant had great knowledge of both the Vena solution and Excel and Excel functions. He was able to help suggest ways to build our templates that met our requirements using Excel functions we had not previously considered using. And we have been able to use the Excel information he provided in other ways outside of Vena. He was very patient and flexible as we learned the Vena tool and created templates
- Easier to use - Easier to upload new information - Easier to search - Easier to share Bloomfire search-ability means much less work trying to organize and categorize documents. That means easier upload, which means more information gets stored there and used.
Based on my experience, I’ve used Odoo — it’s an open-source ERP system. It’s not exactly the same as Salesforce or Sales Cloud, but it serves a similar purpose. And I feel that Sales Cloud is better. Personally, I find it easier to use and better than what Odoo offers, especially in terms of customization and achieving business objectives. That’s where Salesforce Sales Cloud really stands out in comparison to Odoo.
Vena is much better for customization and data representation. It gives us much more flexibility in how we show our information to stakeholders. We need our information to be digestible for non-financial employees, and with that flexibility to show things how we want, we are more efficient at getting the point across.
It's very scalable as it has a ton of features (but you do need an admin who understands how to leverage these features). Because of the various features, we've also needed to host onboarding sessions with our users so that they can familiarize themselves with the platform, which isn't always super user-friendly or intuitive.
Vena solutios is a software that provides robust tools that help different departments in their statistics and we can visualize a lot of promising and visually attractive data. Vena Solutions' level of scalability is high and sustainable over time thanks to the fabulous technical support that is ready to help us at all times
It helps us achieve our objectives, especially now with Agentforce — we can get more insights to help our sellers sell more. It’s really nice because it’s almost like you can use the standard part of Salesforce to train your agents and teach your sellers how to improve their sales. So that’s really nice.
Automated monthly financial statements saves us 3 hours a month.
Moving reporting away from IT has begun to save hours of IT involvement, which will only grow as we shift more reports to Vena. This frees up IT to work on more important IT initiatives.
Using budget templates saved hours of copy and paste time when gathering inputs from each department.
