Ion, by Rock Content vs. Uberflip

If you want to choose a quick start template and fill in the fields with your content, Ion will be fantastic for you. We've done this with whitepapers and quizzes and it's been great and extremely easy to use. If you have an exact idea of what you want, and a background in web development, you may get frustrated. Ion has some quirks that make it tricky to fully customize - everyone once in a while I really just want to go into the HTML and make some changes, but can't. If you are looking to reuse a piece of content for specific targeting (industry or account-specific), Ion is great. The dynamic substitutions are great and very helpful.

Uberflip is well suited to bring your larger organization into sharing content. Instead of relying only on marketing to be driving content, Uberflip has made it easy to integrate content into the sales process or client services process, with the ability to make the experience unique to sales or CS. Where Uberflip may not be as suited is if you are looking for landing pages to capture leads, most of the time for landing pages designed to sell a product you want to add specific feature copy and be able to place a gate over content without having a user jumping from page to page, while also having the gate capturing information and allowing you to trigger activities from your marketing automation system. Uberflip doesn't allow you to add copy or manipulate a landing page and only allows you to add information from a gate to a static list, which does not allow you to automate the process.

• Quick Starts make it so easy to get started.
• Real-time updates are awesome and save a ton of wasteful process.
• The combination of user friendliness for simple things and the flexibility to do more complex things is great.
• Chat support is excellent and deeper-dive support has been super helpful.
• The ability to use these tools in the cloud or embedded has given us tactic flexibility.

• Integration into already existing CRM platforms, like Marketo.
• Robust back-end reporting with the what seems like endless filters.
• High-level of support from both the account management and technical teams.
• Problem-solving with a focus on your end goal or what you are trying to accomplish.

• Ion University, while stacked with a wealth of information, is difficult to navigate from a troubleshooting perspective. The tutorial videos are all very helpful, but they are also very long. Sometimes I would want to search for how to address a particular issue I was struggling with and it would be a two-minute segment buried in a 45-minute video.
• Again, getting back the self-guidance side of things. I think a lot of the tutorials are set up in a way that makes sense to Ion, but not as much to the end user.
• I think the controls admins use when creating new users could be a bit more straightforward.

• Decent amount of bugs in the system, constantly need to work with support.
• Continues to raise their prices without adding much extra value.
• Lots of turnover on their customer team's.
• Somewhat customizable but could use some work on making hubs not all look exactly the same.
• Mixed bag on the helpfulness of their teams.
• Not overly proactive with suggestions for optimization or knowledge of their accounts.

We use it for every landing page and we plan on only doing more dynamic content creation. We dont see that option coming in-house any time ever in the future. ION has a very robust platform for us to work with that really allows us to do more for our customers in regards to having the one-to-one conversation.

This serves all of our content marketing needs, but our sales team does need a more robust sales enablement solution. It's hard to have the engagement/usage data for different kinds of content in disparate systems. But I've looked for years and been unable to find a one-size-fits-all solution to solve all marketing and sales enablement use cases.

Usability is straightforward, with extensive documentation and tutorials provided to ensure landing pages are built to specifications and can be optimized for performance. Built-in platform funnels give insight into customer dropoff, success/failures, and conversions (at a glance). Setting up a landing page can be done quickly and easily, with numerous integrations (CRMs like SalesForce, for instance) supported

For me this has been very easy to use. Once we got the basics down it was easily repeatable and if we did end up having questions our point of contact was very helpful and fast in getting our questions answered. If it was above their capabilities they brought in a support professional who really made it easy for us to learn and replicate their steps.

After using Uberflip for more than a year, we have yet to experience any down time.

Sometimes the editor can be a little slow.

The ION support team is amazing. There has not been a single issue they they could not solve for me. If there is a feature or request that they do not have, they have even, on occasion, created custom scripts for our team. *Update 6/5/17 - ION has continued to delight on multiple occasions. I appreciate their attention to detail and ability to solve whatever issue I have. After 3+ years of use and support, ION still has my full endorsement.

The support and the team at Uberflip is THE BEST!!! They are seriously so great. They got to know me on a personal level and really cared about getting my Hub set up the way I wanted and they want my Hub to be successful. They even took a few of us out to dinner when they were in my area for a marketing event. They are always there to help me and only a quick email or phone call away

They offer a great amount of online training, videos, articles, etc. There is usually an answer available if you run into an issue. I would recommend taking advantage of the online training they offer. I wish I would have done it sooner.

It wasn't exactly training but there was a step by step check list of things in a project the Uberflip team shared with me. There were links to helpful articles on it that walked me through how to set things up

There were a lot of things we learned about the tool once we really got in and got our hands dirty. Being hands-on was essential for our team to be able to utilize ION in the most effective manner.

The implementation team was with us every step of the way, helping us map what needed to be done, providing examples of other customers and being as hands-on as we needed

I was not the decision maker to choose this over Uberflip, but the UI is much more appealing to me. It's incredibly easy to use, clean, and from a backend standpoint, it requires little to no tech savvy'ness. Our team has really enjoyed using it and has required no training what-so-ever.

When it comes to asset management, Uberflip has a HubSpot beat. That doesn't mean HubSpot isn't necessary for other functions, but when it comes to the content itself, the backend organization, reporting (item and stream level), and delivery of the content is much more useful in Uberflip. Otherwise, they have the same learning curve.

Separate client portfolios enable scalability, however, some elements are still grouped for all accounts so it's difficult to scale for an ad agency with multiple clients. Would prefer totally separate sections of the platform for all clients with each element housed separately.

• Though we have not had the service long enough to see any measurable outcomes, we've been able to create interactive web content faster than ever before
• The speed with which we can build interactive pages and re-use assets has been critical as projects we've done with Ion have made their way around and more and more internal clients have said "me too" for their own projects
• It is very pricey at $28K for the base annual subscription (dropping to $24k after the first year), so depending on your budgetary situation, that may make no sense for your team--but we had contract money set aside for a company to build us a microsite for around the amount, so we just used it for Ion instead and will now be building the microsite ourselves using it

• It has enabled us to track the performance of the content being sent out by sales. Now we can make data-driven content decisions.
• Have had multiple use cases where Sales Assist was able to reengage prospects that were thought to be lost.
• Content management has been key, it has been extremely helpful to centralize content in Uberflip.