Spruce vs. TOTVS Educacional

I think my single most surprising and satisfying experience with ECI and its RockSolid Maxx and then Spruce products was the ease of implementation and rollout -- both on the hardware and software side. ECI seems to have mastered the idea of using an integrated team along with robust tutorials to make that process easy.

Incentivized

The TOTVS ERP is very well suited for online courses that require frequent contact and discussion among participants. On the other hand, the array of customizable features on the platform seems quite vast, which can make taking full advantage of the different features somewhat difficult if a business does not have a clear idea of what they're looking for.

• Inventory management
• Multi-branch management
• Purchase order generation and tracking

Incentivized

• Attractive interface.
• Wide range of customization tools.
• No down time or crashes.
• Encourages interaction among students and instructors.
• Seamless payment processing and grading system.
• User-friendly consulting platform.
• Good cybersecurity.

• Spruce offers a method for doing repetitive and reoccurring billing but it is not as intuitive and easy to use as it might be.
• In my 30+ years of experience as CFO/CTO I've always found printing to be problematic. Though it is a problem with roots in hardware and thus somewhat beyond being fully addressable by software I'd like to see Spruce's solutions become a little more transparent. This said, my experience is that Spruce does a much better job of it than the Rocksolid Maxx product.
• Though this may be a niche problem for a business with large construction and service components, the ability to track labor with greater detail would be nice.

Incentivized

• System sign-out after a few minutes of user being idle.
• Automated HelpDesk questions are very simple.
• Video load times were delayed at times.

The system itself was very easy to navigate as a user, but sometimes load times would be higher than expected

Several outages recently not tied to ISP. No Mac Support! No iOS Support!

Incentivized

Basic HelpDesk questions, but few problems or questions arose.

Spruce is possibly just above average. Not super impressed with usability and especially not impressed with tech support who is rarely able to answer questions on the first call.

Incentivized

• With $13 million in gross and 40 employees I'm able to run a full back office with a staff of two. In today's tight labor market that is invaluable.
• Being able to implement Spruce with almost no upgrading or replacement of existing computer hardware represented a huge cost savings to us. I'm not even sure what dollar amount I could attach to that.
• Dealing with both a wholesale and retail customers requires that we provide different levels and kinds of reporting and documentation. Spruce has made it easy to respond to the different demands that those customers place upon us.

Incentivized

• Workflows were easy to manage.
• Very few user complaints.
• Good cost-benefit.