Ion is an enterprise-grade content experience platform that empowers modern marketers and designers to create no-code interactive content experiences integrated with their CRM or marketing automation tools. Ion helps enterprises to build brand awareness and increase conversions and lead generation enriching their contact database with declared, high intent data. Ion helps brands launch quizzes, ROI calculators, assessments, interactive infographics, and other interactive formats in…
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Webflow
Score 8.3 out of 10
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Webflow headquartered in San Francisco offers what they describe as a visual solution to web design, with a CMS for editors, designers, and developers that they state allows users to create needed content structures, add content (by hand, from a CSV, or via our API), and then design it visually. Webflow service plans also include website hosting, with a basic plan for sites that don't need a CMS as well as CMS, Business, and Enterprise plans. Webflow's ecommerce plans are designed to support new…
$12
per month
Pricing
Ion, by Rock Content
Webflow
Editions & Modules
Managed Services + SaaS
Custom
per year
Basic
$12.00
per month
CMS
$16.00
per month
Business
$36.00
per month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Ion, by Rock Content
Webflow
Free Trial
No
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Yes
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
$5,500 per customer
No setup fee
Additional Details
ion’s Build Anything SaaS platform provides organizations with an entirely new and agile interactive content marketing capability. It enables non-technical marketers and designers to create, test and measure an unlimited number of all types of interactive content marketing experiences. It includes unlimited seats, experiences, tests, customization, phone and email support, analytics and more.
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.
Webflow is great for designing pages and creating a really nice looking website, without needing to be a pro designer. However, trying to scale a company blog for SEO leaves a lot of room for desire. There are various SEO-related shortcomings (like how canonical tags are added to pages) and I also need to add a lot of custom code elements to blog posts to get the desired control. This means adding new posts and getting them looking the way we want takes way more time than it should do. Also doesn't support next-gen images, which is impacting our page speed scores and leaving us behind when it comes to Core Web Vitals update. Finally, the fact that only one person can enter the designer at one time is really annoying. I get that the Editor should be the solution to this, but it's so so so slow and jumpy that this is essentially unusable.
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.
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.
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
It is extremely easy to use, especially with available templates and guides. It is used primarily by accounts and creative rather than dev. It is also easy to import/export projects or duplicate them for re-use and modification for another client. While it is rarely the end platform for a deliverable, it is often instrumental in pitching.
In my experience, their customer service is an absolute joke, I tried reaching out to them they took forever. I had to keep following up with them as if they never received it in the first place. It’s a new platform, so guidance is needed. Tried the university they offer, in my opinion, it is completely useless, I would just completely move on from this website.
In my opinion, it is horrible, the rendering takes forever. I have the newest MacBook and the platform will still lag and slow down on me. I’m not a developer, I am a designer which makes it worst because I am using the features they are providing not extra coding features. In my opinion, it is a horrible platform really, stay away.
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.
We pay hundreds of dollars a month to Webflow, yet their support is worse than a typical free SaaS product. We were prevented from deploying changes to our site because of how Webflow structures its support. It delayed a product launch for the whole company. Support options? Beg for help on community forums, it took a threat to email the CEO to finally get movement. If there were easy alternatives, we would switch. But for now we just pray nothing breaks and that we don't need to interact with Webflow support.
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.
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.
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.
The code quality and speed can't even be compared to Elementor; Webflow is simply a much better tool. Instapage has a cool feature for dynamic landing pages, which changes according to Google Ads Keyword, which I miss; however, amazing webflow community members recreated that functionality with a custom script. For the majority of users, it's a safer bet than WordPress in terms of speed and code quality. WordPress could provide amazing results if hosted properly (nginx, caching configuration) and requires best practices to maintain code quality. Webflow solves these issues out of the box at a fraction of cost.
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.
I feel it doesn’t perform the way it’s supposed to and it doesn’t have any beneficial factors to it. In my opinion, there is no reason to use a platform like this when Wix and Shopify, and WordPress exist. I believe Webflow is a platform that shouldn’t exist and it’s only popular because of the hype it received. I tried it and hate it completely.
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
