Likelihood to Recommend If you need a single place where you can handle all the third party pixels, this is a well-suited platform. As well as if you want to keep the deployment independent from all other (and more complex) deployments driven by IT. If you need a pixel to be fired not just when the page loads, but based on user actions, you should use the events and that's pretty complex to handle.
Read full review If you are required to develop applications that are cross-platformed, Xamarin is a great tool to use. It will help save time and effort from your development team to be able to build applications seamlessly for android, IOS, Windows, and web on a single platform instead of requiring multiple tools to get the job done.
Read full review Pros Creating new pixels is very easy, as well as organizing all of them, handling prioritization between different partners' pixels. Defining the perimeters and constraints where the pixels need to be fired is a breeze. Deploying the container and keeping track of all the modification is very well done. The configuration of the deduplication rule is pretty flexible. Read full review Xamarin allows you to write cross platform code. This allows companies to build apps more quickly by writing less code. Having code abstracted and reused across multiple platforms allows for more testing and less issues overall. The ability to use Visual Studio is a huge plus. Visual Studio is one of the best IDE's available and being able to write cross platforms apps while in a great IDE makes everything less painful. Xamarin is now free with a large company backing. This means that bugs on the platform get fixed more quickly and there is a large community of developers. Read full review Cons Reports. Tag Commander lacks in term of reports of what's happening. There is an additional module called Attribution Management System that gives you a lot of insights, but more basic reports to understand what has been fired will be useful. Support. Tag Commander support is very low responsive. It took several days to have the first feedback and generally, it takes a lot of emails to get what you need. Deduplication engine flexibility. The engine is there and it works pretty well, until you have a slightly different need. In that case you need to implement something custom in terms of implementation, reports, etc. A more flexible approach would be useful. Read full review Forms - not 100% there. Still needs work but is production ready. iOS - sometimes errors can be hard to understand, if they even show up. Insights - Xamarin offers their own crash analytics software. However, it's not perfect and sometimes doesn't pick up crashes. Read full review Likelihood to Renew Xamarin has been great for developing different projects efficiently and effectively. It's nice to reuse the core business logic across different platforms so that there are less to maintain and little replications are needed. The biggest benefit is that C# programmers do not have to learn a different language to do mobile development.
Read full review Usability If you are required to develop applications that are cross-platformed, Xamarin is a great tool to use. It will help save time and efforts from your development team to be able to build applications seamlessly for android, IOS, windows, and web on a single platform instead of requiring multiple tools to get the job done
Read full review Support Rating I never had to contact support for any help. Most of the problems we ran into, we were able to identify and use peer support through blogs and other internet sources to resolve the problems. There are plenty of sources online which provide tutorials, discuss problems, etc. Example: StackOverflow
Read full review Implementation Rating Just with any programming tasks, have a plan first. Design out the system, spend time to build it correctly the first time and have plenty of testing and user acceptance opportunities. Xamarin was easy to implement for a C# programmer. However, you need to do tutorials to realize the platform's capabilities.
Read full review Alternatives Considered Xamarin runs natively on MacOS, and the debugger and other integration and auto-complete tools are far better than
Eclipse for C# .NET. It also carries much of the plugin/add-on capabilities that are so desirable on Atom.
Eclipse is a better for generalized software development, provided a developer is comfortable switching between the IDE the command line for certain parts of their workflow, like building, package management, or debugging. But for C# .NET development on MacOS specifically, Xamarin is the best product I've used for the job.
Read full review Return on Investment It let us deploy new pixels/fixes to pixels independently from the IT deployment process. It let us easily turn on/off and sort the pixel execution based on partners' priority, assuring better data tracking for more important partners. It provides out of the box pixel implementation for tons of partners, but really often we need to rewrite the pixel from scratch as they're not up to date. Read full review Saves development time and deliver fast. Allows inhouse developers build both Android and iOS application without switching languages. Allows use coding in C# in Visual studio IDE from which we can code in different languages. We don't need multiple IDEs installed Read full review ScreenShots