Livefyre (discontinued) vs. MeetEdgar vs. SmarterQueue

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.

• Edgar works best if you already have enough (or plan on keep adding more) evergreen content to avoid too much repetition. This will of course be dependent on the frequency of your schedule as well as how refined your categories are.
• Edgar works for Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn currently, and it doesn't seem like they will be adding more networks in the near future.

Incentivized

It's a great platform that can easily schedule posts, and create evergreen posting by creating queues with different categories of posts. SmarterQueue allows you to create a range of content categories (tips, updates, quotes, images, videos, promotions, stories, case studies, etc) and choose where to post the various categories of content so you don't blast all your channels with the same content (have content specific channels). The interface is very clean, easy to use, and simple to navigate through, and has an AI assistant to help you create content and content variations. What I like the most creating an evergreen queue to which I can simply keep adding new content to and the posting is taken of.

Incentivized

• 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.

• Scheduling
• Organization
• Engagement
• AI-assisted Posts

Incentivized

• Queueing of posts to create evergreen content
• Setting up different categories of posts
• AI-assisted generating content and content variations
• Searching competition
• Post on Google My Business

Incentivized

• 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.

• The reporting is very limited. There's no dashboards or easy way to track how your posts are performing.
• Honestly, that's the only recommendation I have—everything else works great!

Incentivized

• AI-content generation can be improved
• Sometimes slow to load up queue and unresponsive
• Have more flexible plan to choose exactly the number of channels we want and only pay for what we use

Incentivized

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.

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

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

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.

In terms of evergreen content promotion, Buffer and AgoraPulse offer very basic functionalities in this regard. We were looking for something that would enable us to categorize our evergreen content and Edgar is the only product on the market then that does this. We no longer need to manually re-post anything and only need to focus on content-creation. It is worth noting that we are still using Buffer in conjunction with MeetEdgar, where the former takes care of our new content while the latter will continually share the best content of the bunch.

Incentivized

SmarterQueue is more comprehensive, has more features for cheaper subscriptions, and more flexible price plans to suit your business needs, whether you want to scale down or scale up. The user-friendly interface enabled a very quick learning curve for myself and for my virtual assistant. Better UI design and layout, clean, simple, intuitive to use and navigate through, and does the job well.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• Takes out so much of the guesswork of posting at the best times. It uses the best general times and then uses your own post data to adjust to optimal times specifically for your business.
• Measures engagement on your posts so that you know what content is the most effective
• Helps me track my measurement goals through reporting.

Incentivized

• Save time managing social media channels
• Everything is accessible in one place
• It is easy to delegate social media posting and content creation to a virtual assistant
• Good value for money for a social media management platform
• Posting on Google My Business
• Finding content ideas
• Leverage generative AI with the AI assistant to accelerate content creation

Incentivized