Ion is an enterprise-grade content experience platform that empowers modern marketers and designers to create no-code interactive content experiences integrated with their CRM or marketing automation tools.
N/A
Kapost
Score 7.0 out of 10
N/A
Upland Kapost helps you create and distribute meaningful content to support the buyer journey for B2B companies.
$1
per month
Pricing
Ion Interactive
Kapost
Editions & Modules
Managed Services + SaaS
Custom
per year
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Ion Interactive
Kapost
Free Trial
No
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Yes
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
$5,500 per customer
No setup fee
Additional Details
ion’s Build Anything SaaS platform provides organizations with an entirely new and agile interactive content marketing capability. It enables non-technical marketers and designers to create, test and measure an unlimited number of all types of interactive content marketing experiences. It includes unlimited seats, experiences, tests, customization, phone and email support, analytics and more.
ion just seemed to offer greater functionality and ease of use than some of the other products we were looking at. I do find it hard to compare because there aren't many that occupy this specific space. Some of the other products we were looking at we are still considering …
If you want to choose a quick start template and fill in the fields with your content, Ion will be fantastic for you. We've done this with whitepapers and quizzes and it's been great and extremely easy to use. If you have an exact idea of what you want, and a background in web development, you may get frustrated. Ion has some quirks that make it tricky to fully customize - everyone once in a while I really just want to go into the HTML and make some changes, but can't. If you are looking to reuse a piece of content for specific targeting (industry or account-specific), Ion is great. The dynamic substitutions are great and very helpful.
Kapost has potential to be a great asset in small and large orgs. If you're not producing a great deal of content, or coordinating across a large team, there's still tremendous value, but it scales as your org scales because it makes it easier to coordinate and manage large teams and large content archives.
Filtering: If you make the most out of your custom details and custom fields, you can gain newfound access to materials that may have long been lost in the ether. It's really easy for us, for instance, to see all of our videos at once. Or everything targeting a certain buying stage. Or you can keyword search to see everything on one topic.
Workflows: It's really nice to lay out "who sees what when" in a digital way, because everyone involved on an asset can easily see what stage things are at. You can also set deadlines to tasks, which seems a bit more firm than a casual email, because you can visually see how meeting your deadline fits within the whole timeline.
Calendars: The calendar feature is nice for us because we have a blog, so we can see when everything is (supposed) to go live. It's easy to see when I, as a copy editor, should be expecting work, so I can align my day accordingly. Way better than the old-fashioned "mental note" system.
Ion University, while stacked with a wealth of information, is difficult to navigate from a troubleshooting perspective. The tutorial videos are all very helpful, but they are also very long. Sometimes I would want to search for how to address a particular issue I was struggling with and it would be a two-minute segment buried in a 45-minute video.
Again, getting back the self-guidance side of things. I think a lot of the tutorials are set up in a way that makes sense to Ion, but not as much to the end user.
I think the controls admins use when creating new users could be a bit more straightforward.
Social media distribution needs improvement. Specifically a calendar for planned Tweets and a better way to schedule multiple shares of the same content.
System performance is somewhat slow.
Should be an easier way to make changes, like adding custom fields or publication destinations, to all content types, rather than one at a time.
We use it for every landing page and we plan on only doing more dynamic content creation. We dont see that option coming in-house any time ever in the future. ION has a very robust platform for us to work with that really allows us to do more for our customers in regards to having the one-to-one conversation.
We are using some other systems that might have replaced Kapost, but none of them had the workflow functionality we were looking for. So, we're sticking with Kapost for now.
Usability is straightforward, with extensive documentation and tutorials provided to ensure landing pages are built to specifications and can be optimized for performance. Built-in platform funnels give insight into customer dropoff, success/failures, and conversions (at a glance). Setting up a landing page can be done quickly and easily, with numerous integrations (CRMs like SalesForce, for instance) supported
The calendar view is a great feature and so are the custom views. It is relatively easy to see a clear view of what content the user is responsible for and then the due dates associated to it. The ability to create and update workflows for the team is easy to navigate and keeps us on track.
The ION support team is amazing. There has not been a single issue they they could not solve for me. If there is a feature or request that they do not have, they have even, on occasion, created custom scripts for our team. *Update 6/5/17 - ION has continued to delight on multiple occasions. I appreciate their attention to detail and ability to solve whatever issue I have. After 3+ years of use and support, ION still has my full endorsement.
The reputation of the product matches up to its reputation as one of the leaders in the space. I love that you can share and access content at your fingertips from anywhere. The downside is that it does not have the prettiest interface but you can get over this with its functionality.
They offer a great amount of online training, videos, articles, etc. There is usually an answer available if you run into an issue. I would recommend taking advantage of the online training they offer. I wish I would have done it sooner.
There were a lot of things we learned about the tool once we really got in and got our hands dirty. Being hands-on was essential for our team to be able to utilize ION in the most effective manner.
I was not the decision maker to choose this over Uberflip, but the UI is much more appealing to me. It's incredibly easy to use, clean, and from a backend standpoint, it requires little to no tech savvy'ness. Our team has really enjoyed using it and has required no training what-so-ever.
Workfront has a lot of great features, but Kapost was the right tool for what we needed at the time. With a team of our size, we had to make sure we weren't biting off more than we could chew and the project never got off the ground. We had to be thoughtful with how we rolled it out.
Separate client portfolios enable scalability, however, some elements are still grouped for all accounts so it's difficult to scale for an ad agency with multiple clients. Would prefer totally separate sections of the platform for all clients with each element housed separately.
Though we have not had the service long enough to see any measurable outcomes, we've been able to create interactive web content faster than ever before
The speed with which we can build interactive pages and re-use assets has been critical as projects we've done with Ion have made their way around and more and more internal clients have said "me too" for their own projects
It is very pricey at $28K for the base annual subscription (dropping to $24k after the first year), so depending on your budgetary situation, that may make no sense for your team--but we had contract money set aside for a company to build us a microsite for around the amount, so we just used it for Ion instead and will now be building the microsite ourselves using it
