Drip is an ECRM–an Ecommerce CRM offering email marketing automation software specifically for B2C online retailers. The vendor’s value proposition is that with Drip's simple, user-friendly visual campaign builder, users can design email campaigns based on specific subscriber behavior—so they always send the right message, to the right person, at the right time. Drip starts at $41/mo (with email sending and every feature enabled).
$19
per month
Higher Logic Thrive
Score 7.1 out of 10
N/A
Higher Logic Thrive is a private community platform that empowers members, customers, support and product teams to create and manage meaningful, engaging online communities. The solution is designed to keep users coming back. They can find support, best practices, peer-to-peer connections, resources, events, and networking, all in one destination.
If you're looking to take your email program to the next level with automation, you definitely need to consider Drip. Their support team is always timely and helpful whenever we've needed guidance on the platform or using the API. They are constantly improving their tools. It never feels stagnant or lacking in critical features. Their prebuilt workflows make getting started very easy and you can start driving more revenue almost immediately.
Higher Logic works very well for our business purposes. We can very easily create new communities when we need to (and this is often!). Our association isn't as concerned with driving engagement, but the tools Higher Logic provides allows us to take a closer look at the engagement level of our committee members when needed
Simplicity + power. Drip is one of the quickest platforms to use in terms of setting up simple drip email sequences. Yet it also packs enormous power if you need to do complex automation.
Drip's direct integrations with other systems mean you can easily create hyper-personalized communications and anybody can set this up.
Drip's Javascript embed is easy to setup and great for helping to build deeper insights into customer behavior as well as triggering automation.
Higher Logic product managers are probably some of the best in the industry. They know their products and aren't pushy in trying to sell them to you. Don't get me wrong, they do try to sell you a product, but they understand that not everyone who is tasked with learning more is also a decision maker. That doesn't stop them from being professional and thorough in their demonstrations or explanation of fees.
Their technical support is top notch. Not only do they work to resolve issues, they also work with you to help you with non-issues. Our initial redesign was done by an agency that worked with HL directly to set up the new site. When I was tasked with a mini-redesign this year, HL technical support offered me a lot of insight on how to best do this using just my skills and HL.
They offer training on their platforms to ensure your success as an administrator. There is no cost and you can either go to their onsite two days "boot camp" or you can access a plethora of training videos and webinars through their online users' community.
Reporting is copious but you cannot build your own reports so you may have lots of information in several different reports and have to pick and choose across several to combine manually. Exporting functionality is there but there are some reports that are only a screen shot and you cannot export them.
They are a great company that offer great products - primarily their community. As they continue to grow and expand their offerings, I believe they will increase the number of products that offer and in turn grow their client base. We use their community, activity synch, and volunteer manager currently.
The software is not that simple to use when you have to get volunteers involved in the content assembly process. The content management system that is native to Higher Logic could improve to make the task of training volunteers far easier. Given its simplicity, it is hard for the system to rival more developed websites that use advanced CMS software.
Higher Logic's support is sub-par at best. It can be difficult to get in contact with anyone from the support team, and when you do, it seems as if they don't want to talk to you and don't even have the answers to your questions. Within the past few months, we've contacted them twice and both times have been very disappointing. The first time was to let them know there was an inconsistency between the analytics report and the heat map. They basically said that they already knew about the problem but didn't have any set plans to fix it because they were working on other "more important" things. The second time was for a conference call to go over some additional features that we wanted to implement. And the lady we spoke with seemed very disgusted to have to speak with us and then rushed us off the phone because she had another call.
Again, this is dependent on the use case. If you are a small- to medium-sized business that doesn't have a sales team, this is likely a great product for you. It is also a good price compared to larger enterprise software. Other software I have used worked better for other companies I worked for, but Drip fits best for my current company.
We are just in the early stages of looking into HubSpot Service Hub to determine if it will be a viable replacement for Higher Logic Community. We have other uses for the ServiceHub so there is an appeal to have it be a "one stop shop" for us. The big question however is how it will stack up to Higher Logic for the online communities. Candidly, while Higher Logic may be tough to beat in this area, it is something we will be looking closely at in the next 12 months.
