Curata vs. Ion, by Rock Content

I liked Curata, but it depends on the use case of how it will be used as to how effective it is for someone. If you are trying to curate content it works great. Had I not been so put off by the issue mentioned earlier I would have given more effort to learn the CMS, so I am not sure how effective it really is.

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

• Curata is great at curating in content that is relevant to our audience. It is easy to add many different sources to the feed from all around the web and we've really seen Curata "learn" what we see as the most relevant.
• The microsite we got as part of our Curata subscription is really fantastic. It's very customizable and we've been able to really craft it to suit our needs. There are so many different options available and our Curata rep has been really great with helping us cater each piece to our vision while making helpful suggestions along the way in terms of best practices. Plus, the word processor for publishing blog posts is so easy to use and I've had no issues with it so far unlike many other CMS platforms I've worked with. The Curata microsite is actually going to be replacing our current blog very soon - we love it that much!
• I've had a great experience with customer service from Curata. Our rep is responsive and helpful and really good about not just answering our concerns but also providing feedback on our processes and giving advice for how we can improve.
• Search capabilities within the curated content feed are fabulous. This is one area where I found other solutions to be lacking when we were going through the sales process, but Curata really succeeds here. It's extremely easy to find exactly what you're looking for in your content feed.

• 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

• more subscription plans as not all people need all features.

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

For all of the features we loved when we signed on like the microsite and search capabilities and also their customer service, we will very likely renew with Curata. We also really like the evolution we have seen of the solution, just recently a new integration with Marketo (also a vendor of ours) was announced which will be very beneficial to us in optimizing our email newsletters

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

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.

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

The main difference that made me choose Curata over Percolate is that it is not complex. Curata is easier to set up, to use, and to manage. It does not involve any complicated configuration to get the content and data you need. Curata technical support is amazing, to say the least. I am not an expert in the technical stuff, but I feel assured their team can help me out when I have an issue

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

• I would say neutral for us, but more so because of how we were using it and it being a stop-gap fix for us.

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