Wildfire Interactive (Discontinued) vs. Livefyre (discontinued) vs. Solid Social

The transition to Google has been painful - key contacts are no longer available.

I was strictly the implementor of Livefyre (for my company only). That task alone was at least 3 weeks worth of work. From a user standpoint, Livefyre is a good product which is why this review is strictly about how difficult it was to implement. Therefore, if a colleague was to ask me if I recommend Livefyre, it's not a straight answer. Questions like, 'how fast do you need it?', 'how centralized is your user database?', 'do you want social login?', all come into question and were details that made my job not easy (hence, my review of 5/10 for suggesting it to others). Once implemented, Livefyre is a great product (notice my overall review is higher), but based on my experience with implementation, it certainly requires a senior developer's dedicated time and patience to set up exactly as desired. For smaller companies with small/simple user bases and websites, the process may be more straightforward, but from my experience, it wasn't out-of-the-box at all.

• Facebook tab implementation. Allows you to easily create and produce functioning social tabs on your brands FB page.
• Add voting, sweepstakes, poll functionality to your website. Easily implement these campaigns to increase user engagement and TOS.

• It provides and allows comments and comment management that is fast, seamless and shareable.
• Having used disquss, WordPress comments and many others I like Livefyre better for its seamless integration and transparency
• It is really nice that they have a range of services from free to enterprise with increasing functionality and benefits.

• More customization - Would like to have the ability to edit more without coding.

• Implementation was not easy. Although flexible, I personally wrote at least 1,400 lines of code to get this implemented over a few week's time.
• The social login aspect is cool, but again, hard to implement. They did not write any of those modules, although they could have. This required senior-level developmental skills and a knowledge of how social media is interfaced with programmatically. Lots of questions arose from this and it was difficult to implement with virtually no help from Livefyre, other than to provide the hooks into their system for when users were validated. I had to write at least 2 separate login/redirection scripts to accomplish this flow.
• CSS tweaking was tricky. We could override lots of common CSS classes, but to get things just the way we wanted it, I ended up writing LOTS of jQuery listeners and functions to transform the output into exactly what we wanted. This was a surprise since the software was sold to us as being 'fully customizable'.
• Documentation was sufficient, but not great. Getting the flow of the callbacks that are fired wasn't clear at first, and sometimes did not work as expected.
• It should be noted that, after this review was published, Livefyre contacted me stating they now have better documentation and process for implementation (for version V3, specifically) and urged me to revise this review. However, I can only write of my experience with V2, and it WAS difficult to implement over 3 weeks of dedicated time. Another developer on my team implemented version V3 and his evaluation is very similar to mine, claiming much difficulty with the CSS customization.

Our initial contract with Wildfire Whitelabel was for $30,000/year, as we progressed we found several alternatives for significantly less. We used this to our advantage to lower the second year to $17,000 with the limitation in the level of support (they call this their "core" subscription). Support has been quite bad.

During our contract, we also asked for quotes on some custom work, but never managed to get an answer (or actual quote). Now two years into our contract, the limitations and lack of development are enough for us to find a different solution. Newcomers to the market like Rafflecopter, WooBox and PunchTab are delivering much better results for a fraction of the price

We feel we have a real partnership with Livefyre and we both make each other better. Their customer service has been phenomenal even during a time of rapid growth.

Very easy to use, almost anyone can learn how to build a comprehensive promotion.

It's really easy to implement that app but should improve some analytics.

Incentivized

I have never been kicked out of Wildfire service. Always up and running.

Easy to perform tasks and quick to upload changes to your promotions.

Phone and email support were always available to us when we needed it.

From purchasing to implementation, the customer service/support was really perfect!

Incentivized

Gave me a thorough rundown on everything the software does. Sometimes it is difficult to run through it all over the phone/internet, but I was able to figure it out myself.

Simple to use and very effective in increasing user engagement on both social channels and website. Noticeably helped raise TOS.

Wildfire was a merely an adequate social media tool when it existed as a standalone, but it just couldn't compete against other players like Sprout, Falcon, and Sprinklr.

Incentivized

We felt Livefyre was more innovative and better at SEO. It felt like we were working with a partner for the long haul who was interested in our business and how to improve it.

• As with any social media management tool, there is a savings on labor hours (rather than doing the manual work)
• Aggregating all content into one system creates efficiencies for content teams

Incentivized

• The heavy work is already done given that we take the time to implement.
• Very useful insights and AI powered delivery.

Incentivized