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    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    Ion Interactive

    Score8 out of 10
    Enterprise companies (1,001+ employees)
    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

    Microsoft Visual Studio Code

    Score9.3 out of 10
    N/AMicrosoft offers Visual Studio Code, an open source text editor that supports code editing, debugging, IntelliSense syntax highlighting, and other features.

    $0

    Pricing
    Ion InteractiveMicrosoft Visual Studio Code
    Editions & Modules
    Managed Services + SaaS
    Custom
    per year
    No answers on this topic
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    Ion InteractiveMicrosoft Visual Studio Code
    Free Trial
    NoNo
    Free/Freemium Version
    NoYes
    Premium Consulting/Integration Services
    YesNo
    Entry-level Setup Fee$5,500 per customerNo setup fee
    Additional Detailsion’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.—
    More Pricing Information
    Community Pulse
    Ion InteractiveMicrosoft Visual Studio Code
    Considered Both Products
    Ion Interactive LLC
    No answer on this topic
    Microsoft
    No answer on this topic
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    No answers on this topic
    100%
    Would buy again
    70 Answers
    Delivers good value for the price
    No answers on this topic
    100%
    Delivers good value for the price
    69 Answers
    Happy with the feature set
    No answers on this topic
    100%
    Happy with the feature set
    70 Answers
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    No answers on this topic
    100%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    50 Answers
    Implementation went as expected
    No answers on this topic
    100%
    Implementation went as expected
    63 Answers
    Features
    Ion InteractiveMicrosoft Visual Studio Code
    Content Creation
    Comparison of Content Creation features of Ion Interactive and Microsoft Visual Studio Code
    Feature
    Ion Interactive
    7.5
    105 Ratings
    4% below category average
    Microsoft Visual Studio Code
    -
    Ratings
    Ideation10.099 Ratings00 Ratings
    Content collaboration5.094 Ratings00 Ratings
    Content Publishing
    Comparison of Content Publishing features of Ion Interactive and Microsoft Visual Studio Code
    Feature
    Ion Interactive
    8.7
    120 Ratings
    11% above category average
    Microsoft Visual Studio Code
    -
    Ratings
    Content hub10.0104 Ratings00 Ratings
    Forms / Gated content10.0107 Ratings00 Ratings
    Embedded CTAs10.0108 Ratings00 Ratings
    Content distribution8.093 Ratings00 Ratings
    Content promotion8.086 Ratings00 Ratings
    Content automation6.090 Ratings00 Ratings
    Content Reporting & Analytics
    Comparison of Content Reporting & Analytics features of Ion Interactive and Microsoft Visual Studio Code
    Feature
    Ion Interactive
    8.5
    118 Ratings
    14% above category average
    Microsoft Visual Studio Code
    -
    Ratings
    Audience profiling and targeting6.091 Ratings00 Ratings
    Closed-loop tracking and reporting8.095 Ratings00 Ratings
    Content performance analytics10.0116 Ratings00 Ratings
    Campaign optimization dashboard10.0107 Ratings00 Ratings
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    Ion InteractiveMicrosoft Visual Studio Code
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    User Ratings
    Ion InteractiveMicrosoft Visual Studio Code
    Likelihood to Recommend
    10.0
    (135 ratings)
    9.5
    (104 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    7.0
    (22 ratings)
    9.4
    (2 ratings)
    Usability
    7.4
    (17 ratings)
    9.4
    (21 ratings)
    Availability
    10.0
    (1 ratings)
    8.0
    (1 ratings)
    Performance
    9.0
    (1 ratings)
    9.0
    (1 ratings)
    Support Rating
    10.0
    (18 ratings)
    9.7
    (23 ratings)
    Online Training
    8.0
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Implementation Rating
    10.0
    (6 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Product Scalability
    10.0
    (2 ratings)
    8.0
    (1 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    Ion InteractiveMicrosoft Visual Studio Code
    Likelihood to Recommend
    Ion Interactive LLC
    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.
    Incentivized
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    Microsoft
    As a general workhorse IDE, Microsoft Visual Studio Codee is unmatched. Building on the early success of applications such as Atom, it has long been the standard for electron based IDEs. It can be outshone using IDEs that are dedicated to particular platforms, such as Microsoft Visual Studio Code for .net and the Jetbrains IDEs for Java, Python and others. For remote collaborative development, something like Zed is ahead of VSCode live share, which can be quite flakey.
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    Pros
    Ion Interactive LLC
    • Quick Starts make it so easy to get started.
    • Real-time updates are awesome and save a ton of wasteful process.
    • The combination of user friendliness for simple things and the flexibility to do more complex things is great.
    • Chat support is excellent and deeper-dive support has been super helpful.
    • The ability to use these tools in the cloud or embedded has given us tactic flexibility.
    Incentivized
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    Microsoft
    • Integrate with the git repository very well.
    • Integrated copilot chat is very helpful to write code snippets and helps beginners to start with coding and development.
    • Great library of available extensions is one of the best features in Microsoft Visual Studio Code.
    • Dedicated Testing option to configure pytest and others are quite handy to use.
    Incentivized
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    Cons
    Ion Interactive LLC
    • 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.
    Incentivized
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    Microsoft
    • The customization of key combinations should be more accessible and easier to change
    • The auxiliary panels could be minimized or as floating tabs which are displayed when you click on them
    • A monitoring panel of resources used by Microsoft Visual Studio Code or plugins and extensions would help a lot to be able to detect any malfunction of these
    Incentivized
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    Likelihood to Renew
    Ion Interactive LLC
    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.
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    Microsoft
    Solid tool that provides everything you need to develop most types of applications. The only reason not a 10 is that if you are doing large distributed teams on Enterprise level, Professional does provide more tools to support that and would be worth the cost.
    Incentivized
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    Usability
    Ion Interactive LLC
    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
    Incentivized
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    Microsoft
    Microsoft Visual Studio Code earns a 10 for its exceptional balance of power and simplicity. Its intuitive interface, robust extension ecosystem, and integrated terminal streamline development. With seamless Git integration and highly customizable settings, it adapts perfectly to any workflow, making complex coding tasks feel effortless for beginners and experts alike.
    Incentivized
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    Reliability and Availability
    Ion Interactive LLC
    No answers on this topic
    Microsoft
    Overall, Microsoft Visual Studio Code is pretty reliable. Every so often, though, the app will experience an unexplained crash. Since it is a stand-alone app, connectivity or service issues don't occur in my experience. Restarting the app seems to always get around the problem, but I do make sure to save and backup current work.
    Incentivized
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    Performance
    Ion Interactive LLC
    Sometimes the editor can be a little slow.
    Read full review
    Microsoft
    Microsoft Visual Studio Code is pretty snappy in performance terms. It launches quickly, and tasks are performed quickly. I don't have a lot of integrations other than CoPilot, but I suspect that if the integration partner is provisioned appropriately that any performance impact would be pretty minimal. It doesn't have a lot of bells and whistles (unless you start adding plugins left and right).
    Incentivized
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    Support Rating
    Ion Interactive LLC
    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.
    Incentivized
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    Microsoft
    Active development means filing a bug on the GitHub repo typically gets you a response within 4 days. There are plugins for almost everything you need, whether it be linting, Vim emulation, even language servers (which I use to code in Scala). There is well-maintained official documentation. The only thing missing is forums. The closest thing is GitHub issues, which typically has the answers but is hard to sift through -- there are currently 78k issues.
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    Online Training
    Ion Interactive LLC
    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.
    Incentivized
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    Microsoft
    No answers on this topic
    Implementation Rating
    Ion Interactive LLC
    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.
    Incentivized
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    Microsoft
    No answers on this topic
    Alternatives Considered
    Ion Interactive LLC
    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.
    Incentivized
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    Microsoft
    Visual Studio Code stacks up nicely against Visual Studio because of the price and because it can be installed without admin rights. We don't exclusively use Visual Studio Code, but rather use Visual Studio and Visual Studio code depending on the project and which version of source control the given project is wired up to.
    Incentivized
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    Scalability
    Ion Interactive LLC
    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.
    Incentivized
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    Microsoft
    It is easily deployed with our Jamf Pro instance. There is actually very little setup involved in getting the app deployed, and it is fairly well self-contained and does not deploy a large amount of associated files. However, it is not particularly conducive to large project, multi-developer/department projects that involve some form of central integration.
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    Return on Investment
    Ion Interactive LLC
    • 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
    Incentivized
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    Microsoft
    • Saves money by replacing suites of tools such as Visual Studio, IntelliJ, etc.
    • Speeds development time and developer environment setup time
    • Strengthens code quality with integrated autoformatting and linting
    • Strengths Git practices by keeping version control tightly connected with the code
    Incentivized
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    ScreenShots

    Ion Interactive Screenshots

    Screenshot of ion empowers your other marketing technologies to deliver higher fidelity, data-driven scoring, targeting, segmentation and personalization.Screenshot of The types of interactive experiences the ion platform can create is near-endless. These are the most common types used by our customers: Assessments, Calculators, eBooks, Interactive Infographics, Interactive White Papers, Landing Pages, Lookbooks, Quizzes, Resource Library, Solution Finder.Screenshot of See what our customers are saying about our platform and services!Screenshot of Starting at $2,000 per month, you get an unlimited, scalable interactive content platform with our full feature set. Including: Unlimited experiences, unlimited use of Quick Starts, Unlimited Seats/Users, Unlimited A/B/n Testing, Unlimited Sell-Side Experiences, Unlimited Phone, email & chat support, unlimited analytics... PLUS a FREE custom-branded theme that can be applied to all of your experiences.Screenshot of You have the option to start from a template or entirely from scratch. Our Quick Start template library includes more than 100 fully tested, responsive and flexible interactive experiences you can brand, customize and launch.Screenshot of ion is the only interactive content platform that provides the scalable foundation to grow from one interactive experience to one thousand interactive experiences. With ion, interactive content development complexity, long timelines, high costs and maintenance problems are replaced with freedom and agility.