Ion Interactive vs. Olapic vs. VEED.IO

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

If your brand has a good amount of steady social content, and you like to show it on your site along with shoppable links at the catalog and also at the product level, Olapic is an easy to use utiilty and also allows you to render your Instagram feed shoppable. In our case, we had a very active social presence but did not leverage it directly for the customers to shop from it, so Olapic filled that need.

Incentivized

VEED is a very simple and effective platform to create podcast videos and short video clips for social media marketing and educational purposes. If you only have audio files that you want to share on social media, you can transform these audio files into video files that can be shared on social media. You can embed the caption into the video and insert a progress bar which makes the video produced high quality and very user-friendly to consume. We use VEED to give a taster to our clients and we build a library of snackable videos.

Incentivized

• 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

• With Olapic, you can tag UGC and point out which of your products are in the photo, informing other consumers how your products can be used.
• Olapic offers many out-of-the-box widgets for bringing the tool on to your website with minimal coding necessary.
• Olapic makes it easy for consumers visiting your website to upload their own images and share their experiences with your products.

Incentivized

• smart AI was able to auto generate subtitle info

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• 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

• It's a niche solution. If you're looking for niche, it's great. But if you're looking for an enterprise tool connected to many different systems and data solutions, it might not be for you.
• The revenue analytics are not very reliable.
• Price. This seems like it would be a great solution for medium size businesses, but the price is not feasible for the product.

Incentivized

• Support
• Clip breakdown
• Live recording

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.

Incentivized

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

Sometimes the editor can be a little slow.

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

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.

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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.

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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

We have not used many competitors, but we stick with Olapic because of the capabilities that it offers. We don't use much of the reporting functionality, but it is a great tool to allow for collaboration between team members. It also allows us options when it comes to sharing content on the website, as it has gallary-style plug ins to display UGC.

Incentivized

I originally chose Veed over Descript for its easy interface. However, I am switching back to Descript because in my opinion the product is less glitchy and comes with better support and features.

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

• 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

• In general, we are seeing customers react to the content and use the links for shopping on our site. Their analytics is perhaps more optimistic than I believe, but content is king, and customers like to see more images of the product in more sizes and situations
• We are starting to make custom brand pages and landing pages for advertising campaigns, and it's always great to add believable UGC to those pages to showcase a brand's style and general feel.
• Tracking our social content is a good way to get a more generalized feel of how the brand is tracking, and who is creating content regarding our brand, so that is a beneficial side effect of constantly monitoring our tags.

Incentivized

• Boosted our social media profile
• Create a library of short videos to add value to our clients
• Quickly produce content from audio sample than can be shared on social media
• Video production delegated to virtual assistant
• Can create content quickly from any recording class or workshops
• Grow social media reach and followers

Incentivized