Livefyre (discontinued) vs. Mapp Digital

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.

During our use of MAPP Digital, it is deserving to say that the product helped us to overcome the main challenges we faced in our business at the time. As a preliminary user I have struggled much with hosting manual campaigns on remarketing etc. But with the Mapp digital software hosting marketing campaigns became a complete automated process with supervision. This feature offered by Mapp made a huge decrease in my daily workload and I'm more than grateful for it.

Incentivized

Independently Invited by TrustRadius

A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info

• It provides and allows comments and comment management that is fast, seamless and shareable.
• Having used disquss, WordPress comments and many others I like Livefyre better for its seamless integration and transparency
• It is really nice that they have a range of services from free to enterprise with increasing functionality and benefits.

• BlueHornet's WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) interface for creating emails is easier to use than many platforms. Users appreciate this. BlueHornet makes it super simple to create a version specific for mobile devices.
• I am a big fan of the custom data segmentation tools built into BlueHornet. They are powerful and easy to use. Many other ESPs, including a number of the top rated ones, do not have such powerful, easy to use segmentation tools. This matters. It helps a user send more relevant emails.
• BlueHornet makes sharing to social networks simple. In this day and age, forwarding to a friend is dead. Sharing to social networks is essential. Having this be easy to do is very important.

• 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.

• It would be nice to see the API's functionality introduced into the web client.
• The reporting tools for transactional messages is different than the rest of the system. This promotes difficulty with getting accurate reporting in the web client, outside of an API call.
• The custom fields are different for transactional messages, which introduces times when human error may flub the fields because they aren't contiguous throughout the product.

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.

Although BlueHornet offers helpful testing capabilities, the ESP is a bit outdated. There is a lot of room for aesthetics improvement as they are not appealing. The reporting tool is usually broken, and reporting either no, or wrong metrics. If this ESP were to update their design, as well as fix the reporting tool, I think this platform would be much better.

It's really easy to implement that app but should improve some analytics.

Incentivized

Independently Invited by TrustRadius

A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info

There were three tabs used to navigate throughout the system called, "publish," "engage," and, "measure." These three tabs made the site very user friendly and all features easy to find

They rolled out new feature requests quite frequently and always kept our team up to speed on what they were changing/adding to the system

From purchasing to implementation, the customer service/support was really perfect!

Incentivized

Independently Invited by TrustRadius

A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info

Sometimes it was hard to get an initial response but after we started CCing more people, it became a lot better!

They made sure to go through anything and everything that we wanted

I wasn't there when they first got it, but when I got there there were only a few people that knew a little bit about it. There was A LOT that we didn't know. Then BlueHornet came and had some workshops and we learned a lot that we didn't even know existed. They were doing a lot of things wrong before BlueHornet came and showed up more about the tool

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.

We were able to thoroughly evaluate the program for Mapp Digital thanks to the free trial's availability. Comparing the two products' graphical user interfaces, it's evident that Mapp Digital comes out on top. Mapp Digital's excellent customer service was another reason for our decision to work with the company.

Incentivized

Independently Invited by TrustRadius

A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info

• The heavy work is already done given that we take the time to implement.
• Very useful insights and AI powered delivery.

Incentivized

Independently Invited by TrustRadius

A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info

• BlueHornet has been a good entry-level platform. We have successfully launched scores of clients with limited email marketing experience onto this platform. Because it is easy to use, we have spent minimal effort needing to help these clients with problems.
• It is easy to migrate clients on or off BlueHornet, depending upon their needs. This is helpful because it allows our clients to be on exactly the right platform. Some platforms make it difficult to migrate off, essentially trapping clients on a platform that no longer meets their needs or business objectives.
• I wish BlueHornet were keeping pace with technology advancements in the industry. The gap between the biggest ESPs and competitors like BlueHornet seems to be growing.