Igloo vs. Socialtext (discontinued) vs. Vialect Noodle

Igloo is a well-suited option for teams/companies that want to build an employee intranet with some other interesting features, like file storage and sharing, internal communications, and resource and knowledge management. All of these features may help your workers increase productivity significantly by centralizing everything in one robust and reliable platform. However, it can be less appropriate if costs are a problem for you, due to the pricing. So, if you will not be using several features and just want an intranet for you company, you may want to go with another solution.

Incentivized

We use Social Text as a platform to air our issues with different departments. We voice our concerns and suggestions so we can help find a solution to the problems we incur on a daily basis. We need to have social text as an app so we can communicate in real time not only during work hours.

• Notifications: Igloo can push email updates to users.
• Organization: Igloo allows for you to create pages, sub pages, and many layer deep sections. You can also organize the layout of your pages.
• Versioning: it's super easy to reserve and edit documents for offline use. And you can see who last edited a document and when.
• Offline access: there's a desktop version you can use very easily. It's really good for dropping a bunch of files at once.

Incentivized

• Version history - Always keeps the edited versions and one can revert back any time
• Creating and Editing an article is very easy and intutive
• Sharing the articles with peers

• Their UI is not used-friendly. Their use of Igloo-specific terminology made it difficult to understand how each function of the site worked. They would repeatedly say, for example, "a ___ is really a ___" vs. just calling it what the function actually is.
• Implementation was a far cry from their sales support. After basically nickel-and-diming you for everything, they - very poorly - cap your use of their implementation support team.
• Overall, Igloo didn't work for our organization because they do multiple things decently vs a few things excellently. The experience with Igloo was unremarkable.

Incentivized

• Search needs a ton of improvements. It was very slow a year ago
• Search result quality was also not that good
• I know they have improved their UI recently but when i used it last year it did not really have any design elements which could be used to make the articles look more presentable. It was important for us as we used it for external communication as well.

We have a lot of info in Socialtext already. It would be hard to get all that info out and port it to a different system

Easy to use, cost-effective, and benefit in organizational culture development and information sharing across various employees and from higher management. Great customer support and continuous development to make the software better for users. It allows better collaboration with a little bit of fun too and requires less resources to handle.

Incentivized

I frankly like Confluence better than socialtext because of the speed and the quality of search. They also have better design elements which can help make the articles pleasant to the eyes.

• Helps with employee retention - especially in a virtual environment.
• Costs less than a separate wiki system for storing key information.

Incentivized

• We get solutions to concerns much faster
• We promote interactions with the other depts
• We listen and have discussions