Parature was a self-service customer support platform providing a self-service knowledge base to connect with customers across multiple channels, including email, the web, chat or social media. The company was acquired by Microsoft in January 2014 and reached EOL in 2017. Former users are encouraged to migrate to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service.
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Vtiger
Score 8.7 out of 10
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Vtiger is a customer relationship management (CRM) solution with sales and marketing automation, project management, and inventory management capabilities.
$28
per month per user
Pricing
Microsoft Parature (Discontinued)
Vtiger
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
One Professional - Single App
$28
per month per user
One Professional - Standard
$42
per month per user
One Enterprise - Single App
$42
per month per user
One Enterprise - Standard
$58
per month per user
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Microsoft Parature (Discontinued)
Vtiger
Free Trial
No
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
Yes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
Yes
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
$10 / user / month
Additional Details
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Discounts are provided for both annual subscriptions, and for high volume users.
The single element of Parature I've not seen in any other system of this kind is the Download Module. You can post files in the open, or protect them by any number of entitlement methods. The solution is also appealing to those who don't want to manage the back-end/IT needs as it is a hosted solution and has proven to be very reliable.
vTiger packs a ton of functionality and capability, but the challenge is getting there. In today's day where everyone is doing more with less, having a solution that meets a couple specific needs and does that well is essential. To me, at times I feel as though vTiger is trying to be a "jack of all trades" solution which ultimately ends up making it more confusing to use. However, on the flip side of that, if you take the time to learn everything about vTiger, I am sure it is an awesome tool but there is a learning curve associated with it. Finally, I would like to see more integrations with other vendors moving forward so if we cannot use vTiger for everything, at least it would have the ability to "talk" with other programs.
Clean/Friendly UI. It was extremely easy to navigate around Parature's menus at a high level, and you could take advantage of the more robust features as you became more comfortable and familiar with how Parature operates!
Strong Knowledge Base. Writing KB articles or ticket summaries and making use of the search function within Parature allows for expedient recovery of past ticket information. Being able to search for a fix action, or at least a troubleshooting article that can guide you towards a resolution is extremely valuable.
Enhanced Notation Capability. Being able to send/post internal or external updates to a ticket is great! You can leave the wordy technical details for other employees while making sure to communicate the high-points and fix action to the end-user.
Reporting is barebones at best. If you need special reports, we had to go through Parature to have them built.
The use of frames on a website is very 1990s. It actually impacts usability of the product, especially when combined with how Parature handled sessions. An engineer could only work one ticket at a time which, honestly, isn't very realistic for a busy support team that is working on several issues at a time.
Support was often unresponsive when contacted for unplanned problems.
The knowledge base was not very friendly for clients and it provided no real encouragement for it to be used.
It took several clicks to do something as simple as edit and assign a ticket or to close a ticket.
It was bulky, cumbersome, and didn't allow us to handle the volume of cases we received on a daily basis. Many of our issues were highly technical in nature and we would often need to work on 2 or 3 at once. The poor design choices prevented this, which was unfortunate.
They recently had one very extended outage. It was a data center issue - but they were not diversified enough so in the end the system was down for almost 8 hours. There are also periods of time where for no reason the system simply doesn't respond. This small outages are usually short (just a few minutes), and have in fact been occurring less often, so it appears some corrective actions have been taken.
It is as good as you could expect for a company that operates from another continent. Emails are quickly responded to and do not usually require additional questions or answers. It is quite rare for a company of their size to be as responsive as they are and that makes them a sound choice to deal with.
VTiger had better overall cost and native capabilities that other solutions lacked. We used Nutshell CRM for over a year. It was a very efficient contact management system, but it seemed that if we needed to do anything but record contacts, we had to use an add-on. We spent a lot of time exporting and importing between different services. Quoting, invoicing, and payments all had to be manually transferred to our accounting system. It was very frustrating
Integration Across the Organization - What started out as just a CRM tool for sales is now being used for ticket management and project management.
Steep Learning Curve - It is not as intuitive out of the box and really requires a dedicated person to be a vTiger expert which can be challenging and time consuming.
Reliability - Sometimes features that worked yesterday don't work today, thus causing more time to complete the same exact task that was done previously. The thing that comes to mind specifically is the main search box as 1/2 the time it works, 1/2 the time it doesn't work.
