Jive-x (Discontinued) vs. CommUnity by Personify

Our version has some limits which have been overcome in newer releases of Jive with better workflow processes and plugins. It is clear that you need to be on the public cloud version as this will lower future costs however this limits you in terms of customization. So to make the case for a cloud version, you get the automatic upgrades with the upgrade costs attached to hosted versions

You can tell from the CEO and all staff that this is a very competent company that wants you to succeed with integrity. There is a strong
support and services team that works collaboratively with us to make
sure we are always getting what we need. They provide
24x7 emergency support, online ticket support, email support, a client
community, and the ability to call and talk to the same account manager or
community consultant every time (I even have Mariano's skype and he replies on weekends!). They recently launched a client community - so they are now even practicing what they preach. Our questions in the client community are always answered quickly.

• Simple. Intuitive for non-techies like myself.
• Real-time and easy to access.
• Optimized across multiple platforms, mobile devices, etc.
• Excellent reporting and visibility on usage and effectiveness.

Incentivized

• Design of your community through the admin panel is very easy to pick up. Drag and drop functionality on the site admin allows you to make quick changes to your community on the fly. Easy to modify the look and feel of the site and keep pace with the changing needs of our membership.
• The platform is updated on an ongoing basis with new exciting functionality added with each release.
• The mobile version of the platform is very easy to use and looks great on all devices and operating systems.
• Feedback on enhancements to the platform are taken very seriously and often suggestions from customers end up on the roadmap for the platform for future enhancements.

• Jive could do a better job of providing parity with its on-prem product in terms of features and in terms of making tiles on par with widgets. They basically quit developing for widgets and then stopped at a basic set of tiles.
• Jive has some good health metrics built in, but the reporting tools need to be way more robust. It shouldn't require an API call to get information on which pages have the most likes or which customers have the most followers, or that sort of data. And they need to make the views/pageviews match the way Google Analytics reports them so it's honest data.
• They need to improve the Data Export Service, which is opaque, klunky and hard to use. If CMs are required to use it to get important metrics, it needs to be MUCH easier, less time consuming.

• Not much to say in this section. Anything that the product doesn't currently do is quickly identified and prioritized appropriately on their road map.
• Chat room functionality doesn't exist yet, but has been placed on roadmap.
• Instant messaging between users doesn't exist yet, but is roadmapped.
• We're unable to run a couple of specific reports, based on what's available in the reporting tool. There's a workaround that our community administrator can perform that is a little more time consuming.

For a large company the cost can quickly escalate so this must taken into account when renewing. For me, the decision to review will be taken with upgrading to the cloud version in mind as well. My power users love Jive for it versatility but it is important to note that you must be prepared to constantly train and coach the non-power users

Small World Labs has been a great partner in relaunching our community. They have had great ideas of new ways to use our community to better service our members. They are very knowledgeable in the world of online communities and are forward thinking about new functions to enhance the user experience.

The positives for general usage more than make up for the difficulties faced by the community manager. There are some glitches which will ease as future releases are made. No developer resources are required to help with set up and once users get used to the sometimes clunky way of creating content then the experience is quite good

There are a multitude of options to configure the exact user experience you want and what you want to emphasize.

Uptime has never been an issue.

It works wonders. My only gripe would be that there are some customizations you can't make without hiring a vendor with coding experience to implement them.

Incentivized

Speed is not an issue.

The support has been fantastic when we have been trying to code our own apps. Jive have went above and beyond what was required to help us out. Bugs fixes are generally very good and they are upfront when they are unable to help or a 'problem' is actually in need of Professional Services

The people at Small World Labs are very accessible. I can email, open a ticket, or call and they are there. I'd also point out that senior management is quite available too. We frequently have talks about potential strategies and new things we might be doing, which is great. I think the whole organization genuinely likes what they do and likes helping us succeed.

In-person training is more ad-hoc based on if they are traveling to you or you are going to visit them. I imagine that if I paid for in-person training that it would be set up as well, but I've just used the standard training that comes with the initial set up and ongoing support.

Online training is through online webinar & how-to posts and videos in the client community.

We had staff turnover at our own organization during the implementation. We were able to get the community up and live in a good timeframe even though that happened and we had to switch some people around for managing the project on our side.

For the money, it just happens to fit best with our original use case. Now that it's been sold to Aurea, which essentially halted any support or dev for the product before selling it off to Lithium, we will have to eventually move off of it (this assumes Lithium won't hire devs for code they didn't build, and that's not a bad assumption). So, while I recommend it, it's with the caveat that it's been sold and will be evolving in the near future.

We evaluated a few different community platform vendors over the course of a couple of months. I believe we also evaluated Jive, Lithium, KickApps, and Powered.

• It reduced calls.
• NPS increased.
• Increased engagement in the program.

Incentivized

• Our community has had more than 100,000 interactions within the first 7 months of launching - and the product has been stable.
• Small World Labs even contributes to the conversations in the community by participating with our community members and moderating, when necessary.
• Our community experiences a high level of knowledge sharing (one of our goals), and is resulting in more informed and creative volunteers.