Bronto Marketing Platform (discontinued) vs. Goolara Symphonie

If you're a mid-size to larger business and rely on regular email engagement from customers, then Bronto Marketing Platform could be a potentially great partner if not game-changer for how you've been doing email campaign management previously. Their automation tools and development interface is amicable. The amount of data that's collected and available from engagement with subscribers through their tools can be overwhelming. Still, if you enjoy digging into every kernel of possible user activity information, you'll love it.

Incentivized

Goolara comes with awesome features like A/B Splits, Dynamic Content, Triggered Email and more. The highlight is that Goolara provides all these enterprise-level email marketing features within an affordable price range. Goolara works well in data control like archiving, custom tables, dashboard controls and segmentation. There is another notable feature is "Fix After Sending". If you make a mistake while sending the email, Goolara will let you fix it even after you have started sending.

Incentivized

• It's easy to work with – it has seamless integration across all platforms, which helps when you're working with big clientele.
• It's logically organized, which can't be said of all ESP's.
• It has the LIVE CHAT support. A lot of email marketing clients simply don't have that. It's the little things!

Incentivized

• Advanced Email Features
• Calendar Dashboard
• Awesome Visual editor
• Triggered Email
• Dynamic Content
• Transactional Email

Incentivized

• Segmenting- although there's a lot that can be done with segmenting audiences, there's a bit of a learning curve when it comes to setting up segments. Wish it was more intuitive.
• Workflows- setting up automation workflows requires some practice and I've needed to consult a Bronto support person each time I set up a new workflow.
• Bronto Pop-up manager- we use this feature, not sure how common it is among Bronto clients, but there is overall some improvement needed with this tool. There is limited capability to update the look and feel of the pop-up manager, and we've run into some conflicts with other pop-ups on our website interfering with the Bronto pop-up.

Incentivized

• Need more Flexible Plans
• Should add a Demo Page on the home page
• More templates are always welcome

Incentivized

Never really had any issues that caused out-of-the-ordinary frustration levels. Of course, you'll have days where the learning curve of using a tool gets challenging. Still, I don't remember ever really coming across an obstacle or roadblock while using the tool because of a feature or function it just couldn't do successfully or at all. Customer support was always available as needed, and it was generally easy to find answers to questions when they arose.

Incentivized

Usability is great. Very intuitive drag-and-drip metaphor for building automations. And the UI is very user-centric. It constantly prompts you with suggestions and next steps such that you hardly have to refer to the (excellent) documentation.

I never experienced any downtime.

No issues.

They used to be good, but they've evolved into a monolithic bureaucratic nightmare after the Netsuite / Oracle acquisition. Can't talk to anyone that actually knows the system and support tickets seem to go days or weeks without responses and resolution.

Incentivized

They have lots of videos on list importing / segmentation / report customization etc. when you sign on they give a link to online tutorials and documentation which is very helpful. They have very helpful PDFs on how to import / set up platform

Easy to set up.

Bronto hits the sweet spot for us. It is most similar to the Salesforce family of products. Salesforce however can feel cluttered and configuration and setup can be time consuming and confusing. Bronto is much more streamlined and also has features built in that may require additional purchases in the Salesforce world. Adobe Campaign is a very powerful solution and can do many things hard to achieve in Bronto. However, Campaign is much more of a developer tool where Bronto is easy to learn and use right out of the box.

Incentivized

We tried both MailChimp and SendPulse. SendPulse should improve the autocomplete fields and it comes with fewer templates. MailChimp lacks in more integration with other programs and software. Once you create a template on MailChimp, it seems difficult to edit. Goolara works perfectly with auto-responders, has an advanced bounce tracking system, mailing frequency limits, and more. I'm sure you won't regret once you are ready to set with Goolara.

Incentivized

• Offering great reporting for tracking everything. I can see what emails are working (I track on a monthly basis) and what people are clicking.
• A/B split testing lets us try different things. Try this and that.
• Creating lists and segments of subscribers lets us look at who is the best performing contacts. Really get 'into the data' and understand what is working and what is not.

Incentivized

• All in One Email tool. We won't need another tool for the same functionalities.
• Powerful built-in visual editors help us to work in the same place without navigation to other pages.
• Calendar Dashboard lets us see all future work at a glance.

Incentivized