Dryfta vs. Omnify

I can't provide a scenario where Dryfta could be well suited. I guess it's a matter of delivering what has been promised on time, and without having to invest thousands of hours in extra work, as it was in our case. If it worked properly it could be a good tool for any conference.

Shailja Rohillah, of Omnify, went above and beyond to respond quickly and did everything she could to accommodate my needs. Even when the exact thing I wanted, was not an option, Shailija not only found a work around but put the time in herself to address my need.

• It has a lot of functionalities (website and administration) all included in the same platform. If it worked properly, it allows you to organise a conference paper-free.
• Help desk responds quite quickly
• They consider making improvements when asked for.
• It’s not too expensive.

• Omnify's customer service during setup is excellent. Very knowledgeable and patient.
• Omnify's seems infinitely customizable to suit any need.
• Omnify's web presence is simple to use to make a reservation.
• Omnify can be customized to include pictures of your business, facility, etc.

• Multilingual issues. Although it is advertised as multilingual, it didn’t really work as such. The many issues that popped up throughout the conference preparation were fixed little by little at a cost in time, from help desk emails and to struggles with the unfriendly UX.
• Admin pages reloaded every time you clicked on a button (their developers seem to ignore Ajax technologies). It was time-consuming and required constant page searches.
• Inflexibility in many of the supposed functionalities it offers.
• Certificates were not modifiable nor custom when we had to send them (it was solved months after the conference finished when we were surprisingly contacted by the help desk).
• Problems with the size of images to be displayed on the site, very small fonts and limited options to display content. We had to hire a professional developer in order to get a graphically consistent and presentable website.
• Very poor mobile version. Too big margins, unreadable text, endless text blocks and lists, distorted pictures, etc.
• Issues with the ordering of the authors’ names for different proposals (authorship being so important in research).
• Fixed, inflexible fields in the contact sheets, speakers info, and so on.
• Special character issues (due to Latin characters and other types used in linguistic research).
• Not being able to include links in the HTML editor due to Dryfta's inadvertent decisions to block them.
• Only one Superadmin user allowed to access the full functionalities of the platform, so we had to share it (consequently not knowing who did each action).
• Problems with the generation of reports and the high complexity of their interface.
• Some issues on the mandatory anonymity. The double-blind review process not fully respected due to unclear user info and options, with other issues coming up on the go such as unwanted info in automated notifications and messages in the Welcome dashboard.
• Not being able to use the other payment methods on the platform because they were incompatible with the conference country.
• Missing information and time wasted when creating events for sessions with info that already existed in the server that randomly failed to be selected. These issues were reported even with video proofs (help desk didn’t believe us), and were never solved. We had to repeat the same processes again and again, never knowing what was going on

• We would love to have more specific options for restricting the number of times a client can book a reservation per week.
• It would be very beneficial for admins to be able to book clients in advance for classes that are not available to the mass clientele yet.
• We would like to be able to edit client's email addresses. Several of our members have typos in the emails provided, so they aren't receiving confirmation emails and they can't log in, so they have to make new accounts.

Incentivized

Invited by the Vendor

A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info

I'd give it a 10 except it didn't always render well on mobile devices, which caused some frustration for users. Otherwise it was easy to use, easy to manage, easy to make it look like "our" site, and very pleasant.

It was quick, that's all we can say. Quite a few times they sorted out the problems and issues. But, sadly, sometimes their answers were useless and irritating (not addressing the problem or simply ignoring it, "passing the buck"). In some cases, they pretended the problem didn't exist and we had to send them videos as proof. No response to that.

Omnify's customer service has been pretty much always on point. Their chat feature is a great way to keep track of past communications and follow up on recurrent issues, and their response time is most of the times very quick.

Before Omnify we used Jumbula. Jumbula made registering families much easier but Omnify has the benefit of auto-renew and auto-pay plus the membership set up in general is something new that Omnify provides. We have also used Formsite in the past but it requires a bit more administrative back end work for our employees than Omnify does.

Incentivized

Invited by the Vendor

A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info

• The overall performance was okay in the end, but it was due to our team's commitment and effort. Without that extra work, the results would have been awful.

• My ROI is calculated by customer satisfaction and Omnify allowed us to operate three community pools during a pandemic, making those that wanted to use community amenities able to do so in a measured and safe way.