Bonterra Apricot is a cloud-based solution for nonprofits of all sizes. It's designed to bring data to the forefront in order to bolster a nonprofit organization’s impact. Apricot helps organizations to save time and resources because the tool makes managing data more efficient, so that users increase the time spent delivering the mission. Apricot offers configurable forms and fields so organizations can customize their experience to their clients and mission. It allows…
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Bonterra ETO
Score 7.0 out of 10
Enterprise companies (1,001+ employees)
Bonterra ETO is a case management platform that consolidates data, caseloads, and service delivery programs, helping users to save time and serve more people. ETO is purpose-built for organizations looking to improve their program and case management. ETO is built in accordance with industry security standards and includes tools that helps users to focus on advancing their missions, as well as: Reduce time spent entering data into separate systems to increase…
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Pricing
Bonterra Apricot
Bonterra ETO
Editions & Modules
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No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Bonterra Apricot
Bonterra ETO
Free Trial
Yes
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Yes
Yes
Entry-level Setup Fee
Required
Required
Additional Details
Pricing for Bonterra Case Management is driven by individual usage and needs of the nonprofit.
Organizations aren't one-size fits all, so neither is Bonterra's pricing.
We opted to transition away from Bonterra ETO for our tracking after a demo of the Bonterra Apricot software. The Bonterra Apricot quickly demonstrated how much faster, easier, more accurate, and refreshing it was compared to other previously used products. The previous …
In ETO, we don't have access to create our report; we are just users. In Apricot by Social Solutions, we have more access, and as administrator, I am able to do everything from my side, but sometimes we need help from the support team, like copying the form.
The Social Solutions sales team actually suggested Apricot to this organization, based on its needs and SaaS contract cost. The other Social Solutions ETO software is more feature-laden and costlier than what was needed.
In the past I have used ETO. This was honestly a great system and it was awesome to use. However I feel that Apricot is more aesthetically pleasing. This was years ago that I worked with ETO however I do believe that I have more flexibility and freedom with the apricot system.
When we made our decision several years ago Social Solutions had just acquired Apricot. At that time it was recommended to use ETO based off our revenue stream. However, it seems like Social Solutions has put in a lot more time and effort into Apricot over ETO and it seems more …
We have been using ETO for a while. I haven't come across another reporting system quite as robust as ETO. For this reason, we are continuing with ETO.
Secure case note documentation: It is well-suited for organizations like the NAMI Living Room that need a secure, reliable system for storing sensitive client information and maintaining confidentiality. Also, it allows for continuity of care as staff can easily access past notes and track progress.
ETO Social Solutions should be avoided until they start caring about the problems generated by their software. In regards specifically to the ARMS suite utilized by the entire state of California, until the ETO software learns how to speak with SOMS, and unless it can be customized by knowledgeable people who consult with front-line users. It is not appropriate to provide the state legislature with bad data. I have 6 years of experience with it and I have multiple sources of agreement from fellow users throughout the state.
ETO's customization allows for the use of so many different and unique applications.
The ability to build extremely customized reports also allows us to get very detail oriented results or very broad building wide stats.
The additional added features such as workflow, referrals, and ETO Engage are useful in their own way and add more ways to better track and record data while simplifying some end-user processes.
The Connect feature is poor. We were hoping to use it to send resources to families geographically, but the system does not have that function to filter at this time. A way to filter the people you want to message without having to do it manually is needed
Apricot can run very slow in general and I have to hit the refresh button multiple times
The user interface is not intuitive and exceptionally difficult for non-tech savvy people to learn.
The system is not as customizable as we were led to believe at the initial purchase.
The system does not interface well with other systems. Organizationally we are moving towards data integration, and we will likely replace ETO because of this limitation.
Considering the limitations of the system, the cost is quite high. We've seen only marginal benefits of this system over pen and paper, and the ROI is not promising.
The initial build process was very frustrating. We didn't understand what the developer was billing us for. Something like simple touchpoint forms was billed for more hours than it would seem to require.
A system like this should be both fully mobile compatible and have offline functionality.
We would benefit from more nuanced security settings.
I went to the Summit a few weeks ago to learn about the future expansion and vision of Social Solutions. I already been with Apricot for 5 years and researched other products I still come back to Apricot and where it can grow with us.
Social Solutions has been great for our organization. It has allowed us to not only report on data, but to dive into it to see trends and give snapshots of the current status of our neighbors. Social Solutions has been helpful in getting us to see additional ways we can use our data and ways that it is easier for front line staff to use this tool
Without any formal IT education, I was able to utilize their articles and videos to teach myself how to configure and customize the software to our organization (although I do recommend their Apricot Admin training to polish your skills). The majority of users are able to adapt immediately with minimal training.Staff that have challenges with technology in general do adapt to using the system once you can create buy in and engagement (although it does take time and training)
As a technically savvy person with experience learning new database software systems I find ETO relatively straightforward now that I've been trained in it's use. However, many of our staff are less technically savvy and the learning curve for ETO can be grueling for many, who require frequent troubleshooting and support from me. Additionally, there are small quality of life improvements that would increase usability even for me - such as allowing multiple tabs to be open simultaneously or being able to use the browser's "back" and "forward" buttons.
Routine maintenance is announced with plenty of lead time, and the few times I've been unable to log in to the system properly a simple refresh was all that was required to fix.
Mostly really strong now, although I understand that for some years before switching their hosting service to AWS performance was a real issue with ETO and we had frequent problems with pages timing out or other glitches stemming from performance issues. With AWS that is mostly a thing of the past, although it is still a major issue with the reporting tool which is unable to run reports on the entire database due to performance limitations, instead requiring admins to define universes prior to running queries.
This is a difficult question to answer because when I hear the word "support" I think of this in multiple levels. The customer service on the front end, with my account manager is pretty good. There was a time for about a year and a half where I didn't even want to get to know this persons name because they wouldn't be there there long enough for me to get to know them. For the past 8-9 months we've had the same account manager, and this is helpful as a way to grow our trust in Apricot social solutions as well as the account manager understanding the needs of our organization. The technical support is also fine. The issues we most have problems with is how the technical support is calculated and the lack of roll-over of technical support time. If our account has 1 hour of technical support per month, but we don't need any technical support for 4 months, it would be great to have the ability to use those 4 hours (as time allows per the IT calendar) when we need them, even if it falls within one month. We've also had instances of working with IT persons who didn't seem to care at all about our issues, and seemed eager to put our call behind them and get onto the next without much thought as to why we were calling them in the first place. We've also had instances where the IT person didn't seem to really be listening to what it is we needed, and was heck bent on what they THOUGHT we needed rather than listening to what we actually did need. While we also have had experiences of working with IT persons who were absolutely great at working through issues. They were patient and understanding and would explain why a solution (c)would or (c)would not work. We even worked through those options in real time if they were unsure whether a data solution would work or not. That was great because we felt heard.
We love the first tier customer support folks! They're friendly, helpful, and knowledgeable within the scope of their position. The experiences we've had with their supervisors have also been mostly good and again they seem to be doing what they can within the scope of their positions. This is what prevents me from selecting 1. Unfortunately, none of these wonderful folks can offer real solutions when things are actually broken. They verify there's a problem and send it to the black hole called "the developers". After that, we don't hear anything useful and we figure out how to live with/work around the problem ourselves. (Requests for updates typically get "still with the developer" responses.) This is highly frustrating given that most of our issues are basic system issues (functionality that worked then broke after an update by Social Solutions, servers not syncing, report universes not flattening automatically, etc.). All we want is for the system to work as designed and to be fixed in a timely fashion when it doesn't. Apparently, that's too much to ask. (And no, we don't expect it to happen instantly, programming and quality control checks obviously take time.)
Really good trainer and exhaustive curriculum covered, but ETO is a complex enough system that you don't *really* know how to use it until you've been in the trenches for a few weeks. For instance, I took a Report Writing training and emerged with some fluency in the reports interface and a vague understanding of the process, but immediately encountered a legion of instance-specific idiosyncrasies that would have been totally impossible to address in a webinar training for a dozen folks from different orgs working in different instances.
There need to be specialists who know how to best work with an organization developing a new program, not just transferring existing forms to a digital format.
Hard to say, as I was not with the agency at the time. However, based on our use of the software ~5years later I can say that there were no catastrophic design choices made during implementation that have become unduly burdensome as we've scaled up.
We also use a state database called ETO that tracks case notes for our families, but doesn't give us the ability to analyze things like gross annual income growth for our families during their time in the program, # of housing applications completed, etc. It is solely used to track case notes regarding case management meeting content. Apricot allows us to generate statistics we can use to source funding and prove our efficiency as an organization as we continue to market our coaching model. ETO does not have this benefit.
When we made our decision several years ago Social Solutions had just acquired Apricot. At that time it was recommended to use ETO based off our revenue stream. However, it seems like Social Solutions has put in a lot more time and effort into Apricot over ETO and it seems more modern and user friendly. I think it is worth a second look once our contract expires
The core product scales well, and we've grown quite a bit as an agency during our use of ETO. However, there are some real pain points particularly around creating new programs and managing report universes that require extensive offline checklist resources and a full-spectrum understanding of how changing settings in one part of ETO can have downstream impact in other areas. This can introduce a "chilling" effect on proposed changes to the system, where there is strong incentive to leave things as-is to avoid unforeseen consequences.
I would say that at this point the overall ROI has been negative as we aren't getting much more out of our data by the switch we made to ETO, but the cost is much higher. I anticipate that will change as we get better at using ETO.
Most users that have switched to ETO in our organization prefer it to what they were using before and some are more appreciative of the value they can get from the data.
