Glip (discontinued) vs. CommUnity by Personify

Glip should definitely be on your shortlist for a team collaboration tool. Glip has a lower cost and contains all the features found in competitive tools such as Microsoft Teams and Webex Teams. Glip is also scalable and robust enough for large enterprises and is great to coordinate and document large projects with hundreds of tasks and hundreds of resources. Glip, MS, and Webex Teams are excellent for an individual to create and receive task assignments and document and complete those tasks but these tools do not replace enterprise project management software and tools. Glip, MS Teams, and Webex Teams quickly become complicated and disorganized and it becomes easy to drown in all the sea of data unless you work diligently and continually at organizing your workspace.

Incentivized

You can tell from the CEO and all staff that this is a very competent company that wants you to succeed with integrity. There is a strong
support and services team that works collaboratively with us to make
sure we are always getting what we need. They provide
24x7 emergency support, online ticket support, email support, a client
community, and the ability to call and talk to the same account manager or
community consultant every time (I even have Mariano's skype and he replies on weekends!). They recently launched a client community - so they are now even practicing what they preach. Our questions in the client community are always answered quickly.

• Ease of use: It is extremely easy to use Glip and its features.
• Ease of adoption: You can start using Glip in a couple of minutes and scale its use to the whole team, no hassle.
• Scalability: This products scales well both in users and in pricing.

Incentivized

• It's easy to use. The admin panel has a number of drag and drop options to modify the experience
• Flexibility. There are a large number of standard block features that can be added to areas. In addition, each dynamic block as a number of settings that allow you to tailor the experience you want to create. You can do this without being a programmer.
• Personalization. There are good tools that allow you to personalize the experience based on whether users are logged in or not, whether they are in particular segments (which we can create) or recommendations based on information the user has provided about themselves.
• Mobile. Small World Labs has a really great way of doing mobile. They give you a drag and drop interface for designing the mobile environment so there is a lot of flexibility with this. We are currently turning this module on.

• Allow the ability to move a conversation when a hyperlink is involved. Currently not able to do this. Glip is aware and hopefully working on it.
• Add a more robust search feature to find old conversations. Search query time could also be sped up.
• Add reminder notifications. When tasks are added, it is sometimes easy to overlook older tasks.

Incentivized

• Integration with our Association Management System (AMS) didn't go as smoothly as I had wished. Having said that all of the issues with that integration have been addressed.
• Because the platform is updated so frequently you need to stay on top of what is available to you and your end users or you may miss out on key functionality releases.

Glip has saved us so much time that my team could no longer live without it. I don't know what we would do. All of us used it constantly all day every day. It is one of the best tools in my arsenal!

From the first conversation and beyond, it has been a pleasure working with Small World Labs. Their staff are genuinely interested in understanding our business and our goals, and actively make recommendation on continued improvement and long-term strategy. All of their staff demonstrate a clear understanding of the product and when to expect new features. Furthermore, their CEO, Michael Wilson, is more than competent and has proven to be an industry expert. He understands both the technical side and the community strategy side of the business. In fact, we have already initiated a project to build a second community with Small World Labs for a separate business unit

Mobile UI is not as pleasant as others, it looks washed out and that makes it seem like it lacks some features.

Incentivized

There are a multitude of options to configure the exact user experience you want and what you want to emphasize.

Uptime has never been an issue.

Speed is not an issue.

We have a free account so I understand why we are not at the top of the list. But we have had issues before that took forever for them to get back to us. Once I had to make a Twitter account just to tweet at them about the issue and they finally got back to me. After several weeks. And the issue was something we just had to wait out for a few more days. Normally you have to submit a ticket through their support page and maybe they will get back to you and maybe not. We had one issue where the standard user on the iMac was getting popups every few minutes about installing a helper tool. The only way to fix this was to delete and reinstall Glip as an admin user. This was frustrating because it took time to do this for me as the IT person, and after reaching out to a few times, I was finally given an answer two years after I had asked about it! Finally some devs reach out to me on Glip and told me to just put the app in the user folder instead of the app folder which is managed by the admin account. They said it should be fixed now and I believe it is.

Incentivized

The people at Small World Labs are very accessible. I can email, open a ticket, or call and they are there. I'd also point out that senior management is quite available too. We frequently have talks about potential strategies and new things we might be doing, which is great. I think the whole organization genuinely likes what they do and likes helping us succeed.

In-person training is more ad-hoc based on if they are traveling to you or you are going to visit them. I imagine that if I paid for in-person training that it would be set up as well, but I've just used the standard training that comes with the initial set up and ongoing support.

Online training is through online webinar & how-to posts and videos in the client community.

We had staff turnover at our own organization during the implementation. We were able to get the community up and live in a good timeframe even though that happened and we had to switch some people around for managing the project on our side.

Zoom, Slack, and Wunderlist are all great applications. They do a good job at one core focus. If your team is already familiar with these applications and satisfied with them, you can stick with them. I found Slack confusing and difficult to learn, as did others when onboarding. Zoom and Wunderlist both have a solid user interface and do their jobs well -- not many complaints from them. I just valued simplicity and ease of adoption, which made us look at Glip as one app to do it all.

Incentivized

We evaluated a few different community platform vendors over the course of a couple of months. I believe we also evaluated Jive, Lithium, KickApps, and Powered.

• Because Glip was free, it helped us save money on our chat app. While not a crucial part of the business, the costs of software for your company add up and it was nice that, in this case, it did not add to our expenses.
• This isn't really Glip directly, but we used it because we were using RingCentral Meetings for video conferencing with clients, and unfortunately RingCentral Meetings was a bit difficult to use. This was often the client doing things wrong, but it was annoying to have frequent audio feedback, etc. So if that is part of your reason to use Glip, check out if you have any problems there first.

Incentivized

• Our community has been very active since the re-launch of our site. Have seen some increases in member engagement.
• Feedback from our membership has been nothing but positive since we transitioned off of our older Sharepoint community. Look and feel and ease of use have been real pluses for our members.
• Having the Small World Labs community is allowing us to be more creative with the way we integrate our community into all aspects of our online presence, web-site, social media, etc.