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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

    Podium

    Score7 out of 10
    N/APodium, formerly Repdrive, is a ratings and review management platform from the company of the same name in Provo, Utah.N/A
    Pricing
    Ion InteractivePodium
    Editions & Modules
    Managed Services + SaaS
    Custom
    per year
    No answers on this topic
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    Ion InteractivePodium
    Free Trial
    NoNo
    Free/Freemium Version
    NoNo
    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 InteractivePodium
    Considered Both Products
    Ion Interactive LLC
    No answer on this topic
    Podium
    No answer on this topic
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    No answers on this topic
    58%
    Would buy again
    19 Answers
    Delivers good value for the price
    No answers on this topic
    58%
    Delivers good value for the price
    15 Answers
    Happy with the feature set
    No answers on this topic
    64%
    Happy with the feature set
    21 Answers
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    No answers on this topic
    52%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    15 Answers
    Implementation went as expected
    No answers on this topic
    59%
    Implementation went as expected
    17 Answers
    Features
    Ion InteractivePodium
    Content Creation
    Comparison of Content Creation features of Ion Interactive and Podium
    Feature
    Ion Interactive
    7.5
    105 Ratings
    4% below category average
    Podium
    -
    Ratings
    Ideation10.099 Ratings00 Ratings
    Content collaboration5.094 Ratings00 Ratings
    Content Publishing
    Comparison of Content Publishing features of Ion Interactive and Podium
    Feature
    Ion Interactive
    8.7
    120 Ratings
    11% above category average
    Podium
    -
    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 Podium
    Feature
    Ion Interactive
    8.5
    118 Ratings
    14% above category average
    Podium
    -
    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
    Best Alternatives
    Ion InteractivePodium
    Small Businesses
    Contently
    Score9.9 out of 10
    Affinity CRM
    Score9.2 out of 10
    Medium-sized Companies
    CoSchedule Marketing Suite
    Score10 out of 10
    Hunter
    Score7.8 out of 10
    Enterprises
    PathFactory
    Score8.3 out of 10
    No answers on this topic
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    Ion InteractivePodium
    Likelihood to Recommend
    10.0
    (135 ratings)
    6.9
    (43 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    7.0
    (22 ratings)
    10.0
    (3 ratings)
    Usability
    7.4
    (17 ratings)
    7.0
    (5 ratings)
    Availability
    10.0
    (1 ratings)
    10.0
    (1 ratings)
    Performance
    9.0
    (1 ratings)
    10.0
    (1 ratings)
    Support Rating
    10.0
    (18 ratings)
    9.0
    (13 ratings)
    Online Training
    8.0
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Implementation Rating
    10.0
    (6 ratings)
    10.0
    (2 ratings)
    Product Scalability
    10.0
    (2 ratings)
    10.0
    (1 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    Ion InteractivePodium
    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
    Read full review
    Podium
    Podium is well suited for several types of businesses. If you are an entrepreneur or small business owner, Podium would be a great way for you to ask that customers leave you a review online sharing their awesome experience. For medium to large businesses, Podium review invites can be automated through the company's customer management system, allowing the use of Podium to be simple and not timely, even with a large customer base. It may not be appropriate for a large company to manually send out individual review invites
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    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
    Read full review
    Podium
    • Maintains conversations indefinitely, so we are able to go back to confirm details from conversations.
    • Provides the ability for our company to have a 'team' messaging platform where we can communicate with one another via single person to a single person, groups where we can add/subtract members of the group... this is invaluable to our organization.
    • Until today(!), we could 'share' or forward a message to one another; oddly, that feature disappeared just today, so I'm hoping it's a glitch!
    Read full review
    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
    Read full review
    Podium
    • Account manager communications: I had been asking my Podium account manager for integration with our CRM tool for over 8 months before my account manager fell silent. After another 6 months, I proactively reached out only to find out that the integration had been in Beta for months and 8 other companies had already integrated. It was frustrating that my account manager did not remember a key request and make the Beta available to me the minute that it was open.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Podium
    Again, Podium has been so wonderful in the year and a half we have been using it, we are able to integrate it with our CRM and use alot of the available features. The most helpful has been getting TONS of reviews on MULTIPLE sites through Podium!
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    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
    Read full review
    Podium
    While giving our clients the ability to leave a review was there, we had much worse results and got fewer reviews through the Podium portal than we did by sending our clients simple email requests, or simply having our service staff ask for a review while still on the clients' job sites.
    Read full review
    Reliability and Availability
    Ion Interactive LLC
    No answers on this topic
    Podium
    We haven't had any outages or issues whenever we need it over the last few years of use
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Performance
    Ion Interactive LLC
    Sometimes the editor can be a little slow.
    Read full review
    Podium
    It moves quickly and has no issues with delays. Performance is good as it is a web-based tool
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    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
    Read full review
    Podium
    I have to send an email to get information. They have a chat system but I end up having to go through my rep for account questions. It was a little frustrating to not have a direct phone number to call with questions. I would like to see a helpline added.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    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
    Read full review
    Podium
    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
    Read full review
    Podium
    We only had a hard time getting our technicians to remember to send the review invites.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    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
    Read full review
    Podium
    We use Digital Air Strike at our two GM dealerships because it is one of a small list of reputation management companies authorized by GM as part of their SFE program. Digital Air Strike surveys our customers and invites them to write a review about our dealership. It is not as effective or flexible as Podium so we have been using Podium at those dealerships alongside Digital Air Strike. We also recently started a trial use of ReplyPro which is a service that monitors review sites and writes customized responses to positive reviews and suggested responses to negative reviews. I'd like to see Podium add this as part of their service so we can consolidate 3rd party vendors and manage every aspect of online reputation management from one place.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    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
    Read full review
    Podium
    Its easy to scale to different departments as needed. We initially began using it to solve one problem and as new features became available it was easy to scale this and include other departments who could benefit from its tools
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    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
    Read full review
    Podium
    • I am glad there are card readers now, sales team members too often try to just send a request instead of taking payment onsite.
    • It's made capturing messaging leads much easier.
    • It's worth the cost but if it did a few more things it would be worth a lot more to us. Document signatures, surveying after jobs, even geotagging of photos/reviews for SEO
    Read full review
    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.