Conductor vs. SolarWinds Pingdom

Conductor is a great tool to use when we're planning and optimizing content around specific trends. It also helps us track our on-going performance as well, which is great to help us improve. Conductor is less ideal for content that has a quick turnaround time or pieces where SEO isn't a priority, also if you're looking to manage content publishing directly. It's more useful when it comes to strategy and optimization for in-depth pieces.

Incentivized

I believe the scenarios we used it for were quite well covered, from the executive perspective. The downtime alarms worked very well and were easy to setup, uptime monitoring tools were clear and easy to use, even for non-technical people (C-level) and the SLA management tools allowed us to spend less time, and have less friction, with our clients

Incentivized

• When I need to quickly determine what Google features our keywords are ranking for: Featured Snippets, Carousels, Rich Snippets, Sitelinks, PAA boxes, etc.
• The ability to create highly customizable dashboards that provide a one-page view of insights for the specific web properties you are tracking.
• A content guidance tool that is unmatched by any other product available in the market.

Incentivized

• The alerts are very responsive offering quite detailed timing information
• The UI for reports is very clear and set up of reports is very intuitive
• Customer service was good when there were problems - e.g. lapsing billing causing reporting to go down

Incentivized

• Backlink tracking/reporting (would like to see backlinks more easily and maybe backlink opportunities if possible)
• Custom content briefs (right now I move the brief from the platform version into our own in-house Word doc template because it is more detailed. Would love to be able to customize the brief that is set up within Conductor so that we can do it all in one place.)

Incentivized

• The PagerDuty integration could be a lot better. When you use the PagerDuty integration, it doesn't send any information about which check failed! It just sends a message like "Timeout (> 30s)" -- this isn't very helpful when we have hundreds of checks. We've worked around this by using both the PagerDuty and Slack integrations and having them both post to the same Slack channel. But this means that when an engineer is paged from PagerDuty, they have to go to Slack (or Pingdom) to find the details about the page; it's not available on the page itself.

Incentivized

Conductor enables high-value SEO activity. There are a lot of moving parts in SEO and I'm always open to products that fit our requirements, but Conductor has built a stronger argument for its value after we subscribed than it had when we subscribed -- that's rare.

Recently added features have made Pingdom less intuitive for our requirements. While Pingdom has a broad offering and remains a good value, it is becoming more than we need. Our customer base is becoming more and more global and Pingdom still lacks Asia-Pacific monitoring, which we will need within a year.

I check features like the InsightStream every Monday to monitor any major losses or gains in performance. These are easily digested and save me tons of time searching for these insights manually. If there's anything "worth calling home about" I can easily add insights into a workspace and create a report to communicate these results. It's super easy to use Conductor with a team and across departments.

Pingdom is easy to use, very intuitive and has a very short learning curve. From the onset, we've been able to jump in and leverage the tool to accomplish our goals for page speed performance and discover the insights we need to make improvements. Its a well-designed tool and makes for a good user experience.

Incentivized

Always works when I've needed it

Incentivized

Sometimes reports can take some time to load

Incentivized

Interface is unnecessarily complicated and frequently responds slowly.

The Conductor support team is excellent, especially our Customer Success manager. Our monthly calls to review our wins, losses, and key takeaways for the next steps are incredibly helpful, and Conductor's platform provides not only an organic search tool for our company but also a learning resource via our Customer Success calls.

Incentivized

Support responded the same day to my query, as I was setting the product up but couldn't find the setting I needed. This was successfully resolved in a short time frame, so I was pleased with how quickly we were able to get this resolved. I haven't needed to contact support since.

Incentivized

Our in house SEO manager trained everyone. It was easy to learn and he was well versed with the product. Any questions we had he was able to answer or reach out to support to find the answer

Incentivized

I definitely recommend their professional services for getting started. It got our account 90% of the way to where we needed to be in order to gain value from it. In fact, I'd suggest that with few exceptions (such as, you have a staff that is already familiar with the platform and doesn't need any help), the quick start services over the first 30-90 days should be a standard part of onboarding with any new client. It definitely got us to the point of gaining ROI from the solution and, in turn, will make it easier to justify renewal and continued investment in it.

Incentivized

We didn't use another product previously, we used an agency that did everything for us, so bringing Organic SEO in-house was why we went with Conductor. I have used other products in other roles and at other companies and each has its strengths. Conductor is good for large enterprises

Incentivized

1. PRTG Network Monitor was a far more complicated tool to use and set up albeit it does both Internal and External monitoring. The setup wasn't intuitive and there are too many configuration options to complete to form an alert
2. Amazon CloudWatch is specific to AWS resources and cannot be easily use outside of the AWS Ecosystem

Incentivized

Many features

Incentivized

• Conductor helped us aim at low hanging fruits for quick wins, which increased our traffic
• With Conductor's tool, it was easy to look at general keywords where we were already ranking, but not good enough, and then focus around what we could do to increase our positioning
• All this extra traffic, gave us more leads, therefore more sales!

• Honestly, we have 4 other products that overlap this functionality whose organizations provide far superior support. At this point it is an unnecessary expense.
• In my opinion, their lack of support responsiveness and commitment has impacted our IT agility.
• Its time to explore other alternatives.