Ion Interactive vs. PathFactory vs. Uberflip

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.

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It's a great tool if you want to create experiences on web and share content with your audience - especially if you want to create bingeable content. For a microsite, I would like to see more modules that build up a page, and great examples for inspiration

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Uberflip is well suited to bring your larger organization into sharing content. Instead of relying only on marketing to be driving content, Uberflip has made it easy to integrate content into the sales process or client services process, with the ability to make the experience unique to sales or CS. Where Uberflip may not be as suited is if you are looking for landing pages to capture leads, most of the time for landing pages designed to sell a product you want to add specific feature copy and be able to place a gate over content without having a user jumping from page to page, while also having the gate capturing information and allowing you to trigger activities from your marketing automation system. Uberflip doesn't allow you to add copy or manipulate a landing page and only allows you to add information from a gate to a static list, which does not allow you to automate the process.

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• 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.

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• Create Visually appealing performance report
• Give more in-depth information about performance metrics than most alternatives
• Ability to track performance over time and compare this performance across time periods
• Provide and send auto-run reports to top level management based on predefined criteria and timeframes

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• Integration into already existing CRM platforms, like Marketo.
• Robust back-end reporting with the what seems like endless filters.
• High-level of support from both the account management and technical teams.
• Problem-solving with a focus on your end goal or what you are trying to accomplish.

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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.

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• Microsite was very hard to build ourselves. Changing the site can be really confusing and is not always intuitive. We have trouble knowing how to update items to get it to work the way we want it to.
• Better instructions on how to customize tracks and use the different tools.
• Users that come in without UTM parameters should still be included in all data reporting.
• The reporting is confusing.

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• Decent amount of bugs in the system, constantly need to work with support.
• Continues to raise their prices without adding much extra value.
• Lots of turnover on their customer team's.
• Somewhat customizable but could use some work on making hubs not all look exactly the same.
• Mixed bag on the helpfulness of their teams.
• Not overly proactive with suggestions for optimization or knowledge of their accounts.

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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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We have seen a lot of value from our team's use of Path Factory. We also like working with this vendor as they actually take our feedback and implement it on their roadmap. A great vendor with a great product

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This serves all of our content marketing needs, but our sales team does need a more robust sales enablement solution. It's hard to have the engagement/usage data for different kinds of content in disparate systems. But I've looked for years and been unable to find a one-size-fits-all solution to solve all marketing and sales enablement use cases.

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

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Overall, I think the tool is fairly easy to use to get a basic content uploaded to create a track and even the more complicated features become easier once you become familiarised with the process

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For me this has been very easy to use. Once we got the basics down it was easily repeatable and if we did end up having questions our point of contact was very helpful and fast in getting our questions answered. If it was above their capabilities they brought in a support professional who really made it easy for us to learn and replicate their steps.

I think there was only one time where we had issues reaching our account manager, otherwise PathFactory was always willing to hop on the phone to talk through strategy, to work through issues, and help build custom solutions to fit our needs. Customer service is a big selling point of PathFactory.

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After using Uberflip for more than a year, we have yet to experience any down time.

Sometimes the editor can be a little slow.

The analytics and reports feature is fairly new and have proved very popular with many areas of our business and is growing in popularity. The metrics that are attainable are very insightful and provides a clear picture on the performance of the track.

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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.

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We meet weekly with Jennifer and I can't say enough about her. When issues have happened or we need help, she jumps on it quickly. If she doesn't know the answer, she pulls in Reggie or another on her team that can help. She goes above and beyond and has been very supportive, even when we had a lot of hard questions to answer from higher-ups. All this is on top of just being an awesome person.

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The support and the team at Uberflip is THE BEST!!! They are seriously so great. They got to know me on a personal level and really cared about getting my Hub set up the way I wanted and they want my Hub to be successful. They even took a few of us out to dinner when they were in my area for a marketing event. They are always there to help me and only a quick email or phone call away

I was able to browse around the tool quite easily once some basic training was given. I learnt much from using those method and only needed further help when wanting to learn about Reports, External codes and adding forms.

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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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The customer service, from technical through to customer success, is one of the biggest reasons I'd recommend PathFactory. This is true of their training. It can be as bespoke as you like, at least in my experience, and the team is always willing (where possible) to incorporate your suggestions.

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It wasn't exactly training but there was a step by step check list of things in a project the Uberflip team shared with me. There were links to helpful articles on it that walked me through how to set things up

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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The PathFactory team was very helpful when implementing the product. They gave us a lot of recommendations on best moving forward. As a note to new users, when implementing I would make sure that you create with your team a system to make sure that the platform is scalable. My team was able to do this through creating a foldering structure, naming conventions for tracks and assets, and ensuring tagging is used on all content uploads. I would also make sure when implementing that you have an understanding of how your team will track success and that your brand team is involved to make sure that there is consistency in the look and feel of the tracks

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The implementation team was with us every step of the way, helping us map what needed to be done, providing examples of other customers and being as hands-on as we needed

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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.

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I used Uberflip in a past company. I think they are pretty comparable. From what I remember, Uberflip was more intuitive to use, but I think PathFactory might have more capabilities. Although this was years ago, I am not aware of Uberflip's functionality now. I have had good experiences with both.

Incentivized

When it comes to asset management, Uberflip has a HubSpot beat. That doesn't mean HubSpot isn't necessary for other functions, but when it comes to the content itself, the backend organization, reporting (item and stream level), and delivery of the content is much more useful in Uberflip. Otherwise, they have the same learning curve.

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.

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Pathfactory is growing in popularity amongst individuals from different parts of the organisation and it would be difficult to forecast how scalable this can become

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• 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

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• We saw ROI within the first 9 months of using PathFactory.
• Our onboarding team saw quicker adoption of our product while using PathFactory to engage them during the onboarding process.
• We've been able to more accurately understand our content needs and what works best when prospecting for specific segments. (eg. SMB, mid-market, and enterprise)

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• It has enabled us to track the performance of the content being sent out by sales. Now we can make data-driven content decisions.
• Have had multiple use cases where Sales Assist was able to reengage prospects that were thought to be lost.
• Content management has been key, it has been extremely helpful to centralize content in Uberflip.

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