Buffer is a social sharing tool. When browsing content, clicking on the Buffer icon automatically stores the content and schedules posts to social media channels throughout the day.
$6
per month per channel
Livefyre (discontinued)
Score 8.2 out of 10
Enterprise companies (1,001+ employees)
Livefyre was acquired in 2016 and became part of the Adobe Experience Manager suite of products. The product has since been discontinued, and is no longer available for sale.
N/A
Sendible
Score 9.2 out of 10
N/A
Sendible is a social media marketing platform that allows users to engage with their audience and track results across multiple social media channels at any time.
$29
per month 1 user and 6 profiles
Pricing
Buffer
Livefyre (discontinued)
Sendible
Editions & Modules
Free
$0
Essentials
$6
per month per channel
Team
$12
per month per channel
No answers on this topic
Creator
$29
per month 1 user and 6 profiles
Traction
$89
per month 4 users and 24 profiles
Scale
$199
per month 7 users and 49 profiles
Advanced
$299
per month 20 users and 100 profiles
Enterprise
$750
per month 80 users and 400 profiles
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Buffer
Livefyre (discontinued)
Sendible
Free Trial
Yes
No
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
Yes
Yes
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
Yes
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
Required
No setup fee
Additional Details
A discount is offered for annual billing.
—
15% discount if paying annually.
15% monthly discount or 25% annual discount offered to non-profits.
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Buffer
Livefyre (discontinued)
Sendible
Considered Multiple Products
Buffer
Verified User
Employee
Chose Buffer
Buffer is way more user-friendly and gets straight to what I need to do. There is no frilly extra stuff—it's straight to the point. Buffer incorporates all the parts of the apps as well.
It helps me save hours by devoting only half an hour in a month's worth of posting, in addition to that it is quite simple to use. Buffer for scheduling social posts well in advance, but I have begun using it instead of posting natively on the social apps themselves because it makes it super easy to post the same messages to more than one platform.
I was strictly the implementor of Livefyre (for my company only). That task alone was at least 3 weeks worth of work. From a user standpoint, Livefyre is a good product which is why this review is strictly about how difficult it was to implement. Therefore, if a colleague was to ask me if I recommend Livefyre, it's not a straight answer. Questions like, 'how fast do you need it?', 'how centralized is your user database?', 'do you want social login?', all come into question and were details that made my job not easy (hence, my review of 5/10 for suggesting it to others). Once implemented, Livefyre is a great product (notice my overall review is higher), but based on my experience with implementation, it certainly requires a senior developer's dedicated time and patience to set up exactly as desired. For smaller companies with small/simple user bases and websites, the process may be more straightforward, but from my experience, it wasn't out-of-the-box at all.
I have a fairly straightforward use case for Sendible and it meets almost all of my needs. If you are a small company that needs a collaborative solution to social media content creation, and likely has a small team (or no team) to manage social media postings, I think Sendible is likely a great tool to schedule posts and largely automate social media marketing. A larger company or more involved marketing team could still use Sendible to schedule and collaborate on posts. However, there may be additional features they may want or need (like the ability to promote posts) that may not be available with Sendible.
Easy to schedule and post to all of your social media platforms.
Customer support is very accommodating and always there to help. I have never had an issue with reaching someone whether it was for a quick question or to demo other features.
They have an awesome affiliate program (example: I earned over $600 from one company clicking through an signing up from my affiliate link - yay!)
Compared to other social media platforms, Sendible has been the most robust with features and ease of use.
They are always making advances and upgrades to their service offerings to better meet the needs of their customers.
Expensive Analytics: The upgrade you need to access your analytics is quite expensive, and I have come across other tools that provide the same or even more for a lesser priced plan.
No Media Library: The one feature I have found on another social media planning tool that I wish Buffer had is a media library. This allows you to upload photos you aren't using right away to have them readily available when you do decide to use them. This is not a feature in Buffer.
Implementation was not easy. Although flexible, I personally wrote at least 1,400 lines of code to get this implemented over a few week's time.
The social login aspect is cool, but again, hard to implement. They did not write any of those modules, although they could have. This required senior-level developmental skills and a knowledge of how social media is interfaced with programmatically. Lots of questions arose from this and it was difficult to implement with virtually no help from Livefyre, other than to provide the hooks into their system for when users were validated. I had to write at least 2 separate login/redirection scripts to accomplish this flow.
CSS tweaking was tricky. We could override lots of common CSS classes, but to get things just the way we wanted it, I ended up writing LOTS of jQuery listeners and functions to transform the output into exactly what we wanted. This was a surprise since the software was sold to us as being 'fully customizable'.
Documentation was sufficient, but not great. Getting the flow of the callbacks that are fired wasn't clear at first, and sometimes did not work as expected.
It should be noted that, after this review was published, Livefyre contacted me stating they now have better documentation and process for implementation (for version V3, specifically) and urged me to revise this review. However, I can only write of my experience with V2, and it WAS difficult to implement over 3 weeks of dedicated time. Another developer on my team implemented version V3 and his evaluation is very similar to mine, claiming much difficulty with the CSS customization.
Inbox. The inbox of incoming messages/posts is very clunky. Threads are separated into individual messages, making it difficult to follow conversations.
Reporting. The included reporting features are limited and don't allow for enough customization to be worth using.
Hashtags. When discussing the 10 most common mistakes (or whatever the title might be), we are unable to say "You won't believe #3" because the system reads this as a hashtag to link rather than just a number. It adds on editing time when approving posts.
Default settings. As a Social Media Manager, it is annoying to have myself set as default when looking at the content calendar. I don't write the posts, just approved and schedule them, so manually entering in my writers' names in the filters could be made easier by making this an editable feature.
Instagram. You cannot post multiple images in a single Instagram post from Sendible.
Service Lists. They are supposed to be helpful in grouping your services (we do this by brand), however, these lists don't pull the information you put on individual services. So if I have a list with Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest for Brand A, you can't just add the Brand A Service List filter onto the calendar and see all of those posts that are scheduled. They don't seem to have much purpose at all.
I am giving buffer this rating because of a couple issues that it has compared to other platforms. It does not always post to instagram and you will need to go in an manually post. Also, one of the biggest qualms that we have with buffer is the price it costs to have robust analytics
We feel we have a real partnership with Livefyre and we both make each other better. Their customer service has been phenomenal even during a time of rapid growth.
If I am given a larger budget to work with then I'd like a program that tracks and collects my PR hits, as well as sends me important info to respond to. I realy like the way New Brand Analytics tracks my Trip Advisor,etc ratings
We use Buffer for certain website content that should be shared on social networks, having this tool helps us to do it faster and easier since we can send the publications from the internet browser and the stack of scheduled messages. It is really fast and easy for all team members who share access to the account, so at the same time that we analyze the information that we can share, the message stack is prepared
Sendible is 100% web based so managing social media platforms can be done from anywhere with internet connectivity. During registration, Sendible takes its users on a tour of its main features. The sleek design was engineered by professionals who have great interest in social media marketing. There is ample support in case users get lost and there is no learning curve.
Buffer performs well on both desktop and mobile platforms. The one area as I have stated before is that it does not always want to automatically push to Instagram and the user will have to go do it manually. Buffer works very well pushing to other platforms. The instagram issue is the only reason buffer does not get a 10 on this section
Sendible has a great resource center which I have used multiple times throughout my year using the platform. There are plenty of troubleshooting articles and guides that make it easy to uncover the root of any small issues I may have.
We were very satisfied with the implementation of Buffer. We had no issues switching from the platform that we were using over to buffer. Our staff did not even miss a beat when it came to posting content. It was an easy transition and I feel that is something that buffer has really done well. They have an "out of the box" usability platform
I also used Combin which is easy and free to use. However, Combin only posts when the computer is active and connected to the internet. So, posting while you are not actively using your computer at that moment is not possible, therefore Buffer is much more efficient as you can even post while being on vacation without working.
We felt Livefyre was more innovative and better at SEO. It felt like we were working with a partner for the long haul who was interested in our business and how to improve it.
While lacking in some features compared to those big alternatives, Sendible doesn't stop releasing new features every few months and doesn't cost nearly as much monthly as they do for the amount of profiles they allow to manage. Overall I'd say it's a solid competitor if they keep the updates coming and optimize the platform a little
Buffer does what it say on tin as they say! you can always count on Buffer. Buffer can be scale to 25 social account with 2,000 scheduled post which is enough for most agencies or businesses
