CoSchedule Marketing Suite vs. Ion, by Rock Content

CoSchedule is great for businesses or agencies who need an overview of all their marketing efforts, and who want to establish collaboration between multiple departments. The calendar view is one of the best we've worked with and makes it easy to see exactly what's happening. There is some slight clunkiness when it comes to admin-related tasks, and a few things aren't easy to find, but there's great support.

Incentivized

If you want to choose a quick start template and fill in the fields with your content, Ion will be fantastic for you. We've done this with whitepapers and quizzes and it's been great and extremely easy to use. If you have an exact idea of what you want, and a background in web development, you may get frustrated. Ion has some quirks that make it tricky to fully customize - everyone once in a while I really just want to go into the HTML and make some changes, but can't. If you are looking to reuse a piece of content for specific targeting (industry or account-specific), Ion is great. The dynamic substitutions are great and very helpful.

Incentivized

• Best time to post is great at updating to when we get the most engagement by platform
• Requeue tool to slate out additional posts for a given piece of content is a huge time saver
• Aggregate analytics tool shows us a peek across our posts on a given platform that's actually easier to read than the platform itself

Incentivized

• Quick Starts make it so easy to get started.
• Real-time updates are awesome and save a ton of wasteful process.
• The combination of user friendliness for simple things and the flexibility to do more complex things is great.
• Chat support is excellent and deeper-dive support has been super helpful.
• The ability to use these tools in the cloud or embedded has given us tactic flexibility.

Incentivized

• The platform seems sluggish as of late, likely as a result of the robust amount of data we are entering and the number of filters we're creating.
• Social media scheduling exists, but we do run into publishing errors more often then we'd like.
• Task templates when updated are not retroactive, so when you create projects for an entire year and then change a template, you need to go back and change them manually.

Incentivized

• Ion University, while stacked with a wealth of information, is difficult to navigate from a troubleshooting perspective. The tutorial videos are all very helpful, but they are also very long. Sometimes I would want to search for how to address a particular issue I was struggling with and it would be a two-minute segment buried in a 45-minute video.
• Again, getting back the self-guidance side of things. I think a lot of the tutorials are set up in a way that makes sense to Ion, but not as much to the end user.
• I think the controls admins use when creating new users could be a bit more straightforward.

Incentivized

We use it for every landing page and we plan on only doing more dynamic content creation. We dont see that option coming in-house any time ever in the future. ION has a very robust platform for us to work with that really allows us to do more for our customers in regards to having the one-to-one conversation.

Incentivized

The interface is very intuitive, from setting up social profiles, to posting, to tags, to optimizing for best day/time to post. It's super easy to scan the aggregate analytics. The calendar is very easy to grok at a glance, and the more advanced functionality is intuitive to set up.

Incentivized

Usability is straightforward, with extensive documentation and tutorials provided to ensure landing pages are built to specifications and can be optimized for performance. Built-in platform funnels give insight into customer dropoff, success/failures, and conversions (at a glance). Setting up a landing page can be done quickly and easily, with numerous integrations (CRMs like SalesForce, for instance) supported

Incentivized

Sometimes the editor can be a little slow.

I didn't have to use their official support, but I can say that they put out a lot of content online to help users. Their YouTube page has quite an array of tutorial videos explaining how things work and how to get the most out of their tools. If you're struggling, before picking up a phone or blasting off an email, try searching for your problem on YouTube or their forums.

Incentivized

The ION support team is amazing. There has not been a single issue they they could not solve for me. If there is a feature or request that they do not have, they have even, on occasion, created custom scripts for our team. *Update 6/5/17 - ION has continued to delight on multiple occasions. I appreciate their attention to detail and ability to solve whatever issue I have. After 3+ years of use and support, ION still has my full endorsement.

Incentivized

They offer a great amount of online training, videos, articles, etc. There is usually an answer available if you run into an issue. I would recommend taking advantage of the online training they offer. I wish I would have done it sooner.

Incentivized

There were a lot of things we learned about the tool once we really got in and got our hands dirty. Being hands-on was essential for our team to be able to utilize ION in the most effective manner.

Incentivized

CoSchedule provides collaborative planning of projects. The calendar view is very well designed. Meetings and tasks can be scheduled and tracked easily. Whatever is being done, no matter how big the task/project is, it gives a bird-eye view of everything. Additionally, it also integrated very well with WordPress. Their customer service team is also very helpful.

Incentivized

I was not the decision maker to choose this over Uberflip, but the UI is much more appealing to me. It's incredibly easy to use, clean, and from a backend standpoint, it requires little to no tech savvy'ness. Our team has really enjoyed using it and has required no training what-so-ever.

Incentivized

Separate client portfolios enable scalability, however, some elements are still grouped for all accounts so it's difficult to scale for an ad agency with multiple clients. Would prefer totally separate sections of the platform for all clients with each element housed separately.

Incentivized

• It has saved me about 1 hour per day to keep things organized from Asana to WordPress.
• By not having a functioning Google Doc import feature, it costs me about 30 minutes for each blog post to copy paste all the content, images, etc.
• By bundling too many features into their plans, many of which we don't use (e.g. social media scheduling), we lose a little ROI because we are not using the full feature set. We use and prefer Buffer for social media, so when CoSchedule raised their price $40+ per month on features we would not be using, that hurt.

Incentivized

• Though we have not had the service long enough to see any measurable outcomes, we've been able to create interactive web content faster than ever before
• The speed with which we can build interactive pages and re-use assets has been critical as projects we've done with Ion have made their way around and more and more internal clients have said "me too" for their own projects
• It is very pricey at $28K for the base annual subscription (dropping to $24k after the first year), so depending on your budgetary situation, that may make no sense for your team--but we had contract money set aside for a company to build us a microsite for around the amount, so we just used it for Ion instead and will now be building the microsite ourselves using it

Incentivized