Khoros (Formerly Spredfast + Lithium) is a social media management platform. Key features include: Plan and Organize Social Campaigns, Manage Real-Time Engagement, and Learn and Prove Social Impact
N/A
Livefyre (discontinued)
Score 8.2 out of 10
Enterprise companies (1,001+ employees)
Livefyre was acquired in 2016 and became part of the Adobe Experience Manager suite of products. The product has since been discontinued, and is no longer available for sale.
While I cannot say any scenarios where Khoros wouldn't be useful (when it comes to social media moderation), I can say it is very well suited for clients who have time constraints on their work. With the speed Khoros can pull in new content, we see issues for the client almost immediately.
I was strictly the implementor of Livefyre (for my company only). That task alone was at least 3 weeks worth of work. From a user standpoint, Livefyre is a good product which is why this review is strictly about how difficult it was to implement. Therefore, if a colleague was to ask me if I recommend Livefyre, it's not a straight answer. Questions like, 'how fast do you need it?', 'how centralized is your user database?', 'do you want social login?', all come into question and were details that made my job not easy (hence, my review of 5/10 for suggesting it to others). Once implemented, Livefyre is a great product (notice my overall review is higher), but based on my experience with implementation, it certainly requires a senior developer's dedicated time and patience to set up exactly as desired. For smaller companies with small/simple user bases and websites, the process may be more straightforward, but from my experience, it wasn't out-of-the-box at all.
Implementation was not easy. Although flexible, I personally wrote at least 1,400 lines of code to get this implemented over a few week's time.
The social login aspect is cool, but again, hard to implement. They did not write any of those modules, although they could have. This required senior-level developmental skills and a knowledge of how social media is interfaced with programmatically. Lots of questions arose from this and it was difficult to implement with virtually no help from Livefyre, other than to provide the hooks into their system for when users were validated. I had to write at least 2 separate login/redirection scripts to accomplish this flow.
CSS tweaking was tricky. We could override lots of common CSS classes, but to get things just the way we wanted it, I ended up writing LOTS of jQuery listeners and functions to transform the output into exactly what we wanted. This was a surprise since the software was sold to us as being 'fully customizable'.
Documentation was sufficient, but not great. Getting the flow of the callbacks that are fired wasn't clear at first, and sometimes did not work as expected.
It should be noted that, after this review was published, Livefyre contacted me stating they now have better documentation and process for implementation (for version V3, specifically) and urged me to revise this review. However, I can only write of my experience with V2, and it WAS difficult to implement over 3 weeks of dedicated time. Another developer on my team implemented version V3 and his evaluation is very similar to mine, claiming much difficulty with the CSS customization.
There is no product like Khoros. Our company lives and dies by the analytics, and to date, we have not seen a more comprehensive analytics structure for any social media management tool. Khoros support is also fantastic, responding and resolving any and all questions, ideas, or complaints, usually in 24 hours.
We feel we have a real partnership with Livefyre and we both make each other better. Their customer service has been phenomenal even during a time of rapid growth.
Khoros Marketing is very user-friendly and easy to navigate. The calendar visibility is the view I use most so I can see all posts going out on all of our channels. It allows us to time posts in a proper cadence so we don't overlap with other pressing content.
• We still experience a bit of downtime and slowness here but things have drastically improved in the last year with their feature updates and reconfigured hosting.
Khoros has greatly improved the performance of its SaaS products in the last 5 years. Their applications, including Conversations, Intelligence, and Experiences, all load quickly with real-time data. This performance is critical to provide meaningful, social customer support, and marketing. The performance maintains integrity even when you deploy powerful integrations like Salesforce Customer Relationship Manager.
Overall, support does a great job and is timely in their responses and efforts. We have had to contact support many times due to the Capture app. Some tickets have remained open for months, while others get resolved quickly. I understand this is not always up to support and they often have to wait for their engineering team to fix issues that we identified, but it's difficult to deal with issues that are affecting our workflow, especially for extended amounts of time.
• As a very early customer, we did not undergo formal training but worked closely with the team to get the system set up to do what we wanted. However, online training resources are now available with many blog posts / video lessons and tutorials.
it is important to note that my perspective is not necessarily common - I'm a geek/nerd/poweruser in general, so I found the online resources to be more than adequate (and often very aesthetically pleasing, too). That said, a less "geeky" person might struggle a bit.
The implementation team from Khoros were great - they worked hard to understand our somewhat complex organization, and were with us all the way through face to face meetings, user training, and technical training. We had a clearly defined account manager and implementation manager, who worked really effectively together and with us.
On some accounts that I am on, I use Asana in place of Khoros marketing but I much prefer Khoros Marketing. I prefer Khoros Marketing over Asana because I can post directly (and schedule posts) on Khoros but not on Asana. Also, I can moderate directly on Khoros but not Asana
We felt Livefyre was more innovative and better at SEO. It felt like we were working with a partner for the long haul who was interested in our business and how to improve it.
Khoros seems to struggle a little past a certain level of scale. More than 30 separate per day makes it difficult to view all content in the weekly calendar view, which is frustrating and could cause issues. However, the ability to schedule one post across multiple channels is hugely valuable and cuts down on a lot of duplicative work.
