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    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    Olark

    Score10 out of 10
    N/AOlark is a website live chat tool for engaging website visitors while they browse. It can be used to to track leads, drive sales, provide support.

    $15

    per month

    Xamarin

    Score6 out of 10
    N/AN/AN/A
    Pricing
    OlarkXamarin
    Editions & Modules
    Self Service
    $19.00
    Per Agent Per Month
    Xamarin
    Free
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    OlarkXamarin
    Free Trial
    YesNo
    Free/Freemium Version
    NoYes
    Premium Consulting/Integration Services
    NoNo
    Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
    Additional Details——
    More Pricing Information
    Features
    OlarkXamarin
    Chat Analytics and Reports
    Comparison of Chat Analytics and Reports features of Olark and Xamarin
    Feature
    Olark
    10.0
    1 Ratings
    14% above category average
    Xamarin
    -
    Ratings
    Chat history and transcripts10.01 Ratings00 Ratings
    Chat reporting10.01 Ratings00 Ratings
    Chat and web analytics10.01 Ratings00 Ratings
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    OlarkXamarin
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    User Ratings
    OlarkXamarin
    Likelihood to Recommend
    10.0
    (18 ratings)
    7.0
    (12 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    8.6
    (5 ratings)
    10.0
    (1 ratings)
    Usability
    10.0
    (1 ratings)
    10.0
    (1 ratings)
    Support Rating
    9.8
    (2 ratings)
    10.0
    (2 ratings)
    Implementation Rating
    -
    (0 ratings)
    10.0
    (1 ratings)
    Product Scalability
    8.0
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    OlarkXamarin
    Likelihood to Recommend
    Olark
    Olark chat is easy to set up and use. You can have more than one user logged in to monitor the chat on different computers. This makes a fast response time more likely. Although you have to be sure to keep your volume up on the computer so you hear the sound letting you know there's a chat waiting. I like that you can see the customers path through the website and you can put clickable links while you are in a chat to guide the customer to a product or a help page. Plus you can see if they actually went there. This makes it easier to upsell
    Incentivized
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    Microsoft
    If you are required to develop applications that are cross-platformed, Xamarin is a great tool to use. It will help save time and effort from your development team to be able to build applications seamlessly for android, IOS, Windows, and web on a single platform instead of requiring multiple tools to get the job done.
    Incentivized
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    Pros
    Olark
    • Olark is user friendly for both sides of the CHAT conversation. If you are initiating the chat, or the one receiving the chat, it is extremely easy to follow and use. There are many different levels of computer use comprehension and Olark is for every level.
    • Olark has reporting features to allow you to check the quality of your employees chat abilities as well as their productivity. It provides feedback for the employee themselves to also see how they are doing and take any suggestions the customer may leave for them regarding their chat experience.
    • Olark is very affordable and offers you the option, at a low cost, to look bigger and more professional that you even are. We were a smaller company and has the chat option with Olark and now have grown tremendously and STILL have the Olark chat option. Olark allowed us to grow and provide professionalism to our customers .
    • The Olark program allows you to set up quick responses to keep your customer from waiting, and to allow your employees to not have to retype the same response over and over. It is a great program that the employees really enjoy as well. It reminds you if you forgot to log out when you left your desk and provides your customer a quick note giving them the option to send the chat as an email inquiry instead, so you don't miss a thing.
    Incentivized
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    Microsoft
    • Xamarin allows you to write cross platform code. This allows companies to build apps more quickly by writing less code. Having code abstracted and reused across multiple platforms allows for more testing and less issues overall.
    • The ability to use Visual Studio is a huge plus. Visual Studio is one of the best IDE's available and being able to write cross platforms apps while in a great IDE makes everything less painful.
    • Xamarin is now free with a large company backing. This means that bugs on the platform get fixed more quickly and there is a large community of developers.
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    Cons
    Olark
    • Not really an area of improvement for Olark specifically, but I will offer that it is incredibly important to keep in mind your company's "shopping hours" or peak traffic times (there is a Reports feature on the software that allows you to analyze peak traffic times).
    • Transcript history can be a little tricky - if you're searching for a specific past conversation, sometimes you may get multiple search results and have to sift through them until you find exactly what you're looking for.
    • I'd also offer that you will occasionally come across folks that are on your site to cyberbully or say nonsensical things. While there isn't an absolute fullproof way to deal with this, Olark does offer a nice "block" feature to disregard any unwanted conversations.
    Incentivized
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    Microsoft
    • Forms - not 100% there. Still needs work but is production ready.
    • iOS - sometimes errors can be hard to understand, if they even show up.
    • Insights - Xamarin offers their own crash analytics software. However, it's not perfect and sometimes doesn't pick up crashes.
    Incentivized
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    Likelihood to Renew
    Olark
    To be honest, renewal decisions are not currently within my power. Hypothetically speaking, I'm very comfortable with the platform, have used it daily for nearly a year, and would see no reason to switch to anything else. The small criticisms I had are not significant enough to deter me from using Olark. It's a user friendly, effective tool for our department.
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    Microsoft
    Xamarin has been great for developing different projects efficiently and effectively. It's nice to reuse the core business logic across different platforms so that there are less to maintain and little replications are needed. The biggest benefit is that C# programmers do not have to learn a different language to do mobile development.
    Incentivized
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    Usability
    Olark
    It is simply easy and customizable to be exactly what you need it to be
    Incentivized
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    Microsoft
    If you are required to develop applications that are cross-platformed, Xamarin is a great tool to use. It will help save time and efforts from your development team to be able to build applications seamlessly for android, IOS, windows, and web on a single platform instead of requiring multiple tools to get the job done
    Incentivized
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    Support Rating
    Olark
    Our organization does not have any complaints about Olark's Support. Anytime we reached out to them for assistance, we received a prompt, helpful reply! As mentioned previously, we used Olark fairly basically so we didn't have too much need to work with their support team other than a few general questions here and there. They were always pleasant to work with.
    Incentivized
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    Microsoft
    I never had to contact support for any help. Most of the problems we ran into, we were able to identify and use peer support through blogs and other internet sources to resolve the problems. There are plenty of sources online which provide tutorials, discuss problems, etc. Example: StackOverflow
    Incentivized
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    Implementation Rating
    Olark
    No answers on this topic
    Microsoft
    Just with any programming tasks, have a plan first. Design out the system, spend time to build it correctly the first time and have plenty of testing and user acceptance opportunities. Xamarin was easy to implement for a C# programmer. However, you need to do tutorials to realize the platform's capabilities.
    Incentivized
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    Alternatives Considered
    Olark
    Olark has an easier implementation process and has better functionality such as the ability to send commands through the platform to either create a ticket in your CRM or push an opportunity to salesforce; you're even able to 'push' the end user to a web page. Implementing their SDK is a snap as well.
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    Microsoft
    Xamarin runs natively on MacOS, and the debugger and other integration and auto-complete tools are far better than Eclipse for C# .NET. It also carries much of the plugin/add-on capabilities that are so desirable on Atom. Eclipse is a better for generalized software development, provided a developer is comfortable switching between the IDE the command line for certain parts of their workflow, like building, package management, or debugging. But for C# .NET development on MacOS specifically, Xamarin is the best product I've used for the job.
    Incentivized
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    Return on Investment
    Olark
    • Olark allows my customer support team to respond to inquiries much faster than before.
    • We have seen an uptick in sales as we are able to address more questions from website visitors.
    • We have changed the design of our website based on chat feedback and questions obtained through Olark.
    Incentivized
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    Microsoft
    • Saves development time and deliver fast.
    • Allows inhouse developers build both Android and iOS application without switching languages.
    • Allows use coding in C# in Visual studio IDE from which we can code in different languages. We don't need multiple IDEs installed
    Incentivized
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    ScreenShots