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Salesforce Experience Cloud vs. Sparkcentral (discontinued)

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    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    Salesforce Experience Cloud

    Score8.3 out of 10
    N/ASalesforce Marketing Cloud Engagement (formerly Salesforce Experience Cloud or Salesforce Community Cloud) is an online forum powered by Salesforce that enables businesses to connect with their employees, customers, partner organizations, and prospects. Designed to help facilitate communication and information sharing, customers can ask questions and request help, administrators can integrate data from third-party apps, and employees can collaborate across projects and…N/A

    Sparkcentral (discontinued)

    Score10 out of 10
    N/ASparkcentral was a social customer care solution and cloud-based customer engagement platform that catered specifically to customer care teams within large enterprises, enabling them to deliver real-time social customer service. Sparkcentral was acquired by Hootsuite in January 2021. The product has since been discontinued.N/A
    Pricing
    Salesforce Experience CloudSparkcentral (discontinued)
    Editions & Modules
    No answers on this topic
    No answers on this topic
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    Salesforce Experience CloudSparkcentral (discontinued)
    Free Trial
    NoNo
    Free/Freemium Version
    NoNo
    Premium Consulting/Integration Services
    NoNo
    Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
    Additional Details——
    More Pricing Information
    Community Pulse
    Salesforce Experience CloudSparkcentral (discontinued)
    Considered Both Products
    Salesforce
    No answer on this topic
    Discontinued Products
    No answer on this topic
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    96%
    Would buy again
    45 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Delivers good value for the price
    97%
    Delivers good value for the price
    37 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Happy with the feature set
    96%
    Happy with the feature set
    45 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    97%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    28 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Implementation went as expected
    91%
    Implementation went as expected
    30 Answers
    No answers on this topic
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    Salesforce Experience CloudSparkcentral (discontinued)
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    Score9.3 out of 10
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    User Ratings
    Salesforce Experience CloudSparkcentral (discontinued)
    Likelihood to Recommend
    8.9
    (71 ratings)
    10.0
    (16 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    9.0
    (1 ratings)
    8.7
    (4 ratings)
    Usability
    8.2
    (15 ratings)
    10.0
    (1 ratings)
    Performance
    9.1
    (5 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Support Rating
    8.0
    (18 ratings)
    10.0
    (3 ratings)
    Ease of integration
    9.4
    (4 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    Salesforce Experience CloudSparkcentral (discontinued)
    Likelihood to Recommend
    Salesforce
    For well-suited, this product is great for your external clientele groups that you would not necessarily want to have a high user fee rate for. So basically general public or a group that will be authorized to come in and just do a few things here and there, but you don't necessarily want them access to all of your systems and your data points for groups that it would not be a great use for. I'd say probably your high level internal staff, they're going to be using a lot of the backend functionality automations, evaluating data, managing data, and doing custom inputs. That's just not what's intended for.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Discontinued Products
    Sparkcentral has an extremely dedicated customer service team The platform UX is brilliant Reports are very detailed & easy to export The system is stable more than 98% of the time Queue management is extremely easy They need to work on a mobile app / making the website mobile friendly The ability to add more social media channels is essential
    Incentivized
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    Pros
    Salesforce
    • Easy to use, just like Salesforce's other products. Many users can sit down and figure it out in no time, and with a little training become power users.
    • Fast and secure - Salesforce is a leader in the cloud world so you get consistently fast results and security that is top notch in the industry.
    • Accessible from anywhere - if you use cloud CMS already this is a no-brainer, but for those that do in-house CMS still, this is a major difference. Mobile access from anywhere on the planet without a VPN is something you just can't do without the cloud.
    Incentivized
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    Discontinued Products
    • The biggest advantage of the Sparkcentral platform is its "inbox zero" philosophy. With this, our customer support requests are queued within the app, and agents need to work down the queue to keep it empty.
    • The app is designed from the ground up for customer care - instead of taking a generic social platform, and sprinkling in some customer care tools. Everything about Sparkcental is designed for helping our customers.
    • Sparkcentral allows us to do much better CRM. We can make customer notes, see recent interactions, determine who helped the customer (and when).
    Read full review
    Cons
    Salesforce
    • Unlike other CMS platforms like Wordpress and Adobe Experience Manager, Salesforce does not provide a fully featured editor with a drag-and-drop design tool.
    • Our content creators and marketing team often struggle with permissions and how to distribute content across different experience cloud sites.
    • Also, there is no side-to-side comparison view for content editors to update the content easily.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Discontinued Products
    • In the beginning our team had the option to see what another user was typing as they responded to a post. With the latest update, this was taken away. That feature was key for us to shadow agents remotely who are still in training to provide real time feedback.
    • Our company has a number of different brands that we manage. Having a truly unified queue would be a great addition for us!
    • The bulk resolve should allow the option to select on the posts that you wish to resolve instead of selecting a time frame for bulk resolve. Often we find that marketing posts generate more volume in the evening. However, there are sometimes posts where the customer needs assistance during that time. So, if we were to bulk resolve for a certain number of evening hours we would potentially miss a customer's concern through that option as it is currently. But, if the option was to go through and select on all marketing posts and then bulk resolve you would ensure that you are not missing a post where a customer needs assistance.
    Incentivized
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    Likelihood to Renew
    Salesforce
    Renewal exercise is already underway. Platform is to ubiquitous to not leverage, especially at a Fortune 50 firm
    Incentivized
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    Discontinued Products
    Sparkcentral has never given us a good reason to consider any other option. Aside from all the positive points I mentioned in previous areas of this review, something else that has really impressed us is their customer service (makes sense, they're a customer service company after all!). Any time we have a question or concern, we send them an email and we get a response almost instantly.
    Read full review
    Usability
    Salesforce
    Strengths: - Intuitive for Salesforce Users – If you’re already working within the Salesforce ecosystem, the Salesforce CMS is easy to navigate, with a clean UI, drag-and-drop content management, and reusable assets for quick updates. - Seamless Integration – Since it connects natively with Experience Cloud, Marketing Cloud, and CRM, it allows for efficient multi-channel content distribution without needing extra third-party tools. - AI-Powered Personalization – The ability to deliver dynamic content based on user profiles and engagement data is a huge plus, making content delivery more relevant and impactful. Challenges: - Learning Curve for New Users – If you're not already familiar with Salesforce, the interface can feel overwhelming, requiring training to fully leverage all features. - Limited Customization & Workflow Automation – While it works well for structured content, advanced approval workflows and deep editorial customization are limited compared to enterprise CMS platforms like Adobe Experience Manager. - Media & Design Limitations – Salesforce CMS is not as robust for managing rich media-heavy content, which can be frustrating for teams needing more flexibility in multimedia presentation.
    Incentivized
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    Discontinued Products
    The system meets all my expectations.
    Incentivized
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    Performance
    Salesforce
    Again, since we provide and recommend solutions, I can't speak to every client's individual experience, but can offer general reflections as to keep their collaborations private, that they are satisfied with the experience. We hear a lot about how this system helps to encourage collaborations between their own business partners, customers, and internal members, and enables quality integrations with other products that help drive revenue.
    Incentivized
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    Discontinued Products
    No answers on this topic
    Support Rating
    Salesforce
    Although support from Salesforce itself can be quite unresponsive sometimes, the community hub is incredibly helpful. The large user base of Salesforce products contribute to troubleshooting and the forums are a powerful tool for finding solutions and possible bugs and response times can be quite fast compared to your regular support channels.
    Incentivized
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    Discontinued Products
    Incredible customer service team that replies back very quickly, follows up on the reported issue till it's resolved in a very timely manner.
    Incentivized
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    Alternatives Considered
    Salesforce
    Salesforce Experience Cloud was selected due to its tight integration with our existing Salesforce CRM platform. Customization of the portal was much, much simpler compared to Sharepoint - especially with role-based security parameters that are ultimately inherited based on attributes within the Salesforce CRM platform. Salesforce Experience Cloud was a natural fit for this customer-facing purpose.
    Incentivized
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    Discontinued Products
    Sparkcentral does what it has offered to do, where other software made empty promises, Sparkcentral delivers. They also inform us, anytime they are undergoing maintenance or when Twitter or Facebook has an API change, where in previous cases we would have to discover this ourselves.
    Incentivized
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    Return on Investment
    Salesforce
    • Time savings for our customer success team - no need to continually follow up on tickets as customers have access to see status themselves
    • In the future, it will also allow us to create more impactful knowledge articles that will increase self-service over ticket creation
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Discontinued Products
    • Customers appreciate fast responses to the things they post on social media. This tool allows that to happen.
    • The dashboard allows us to keep up with how many are waiting in our queue so we can keep up with how busy we are during the day and manage it.
    • Customer satisfaction has seemed to increase while using this tool.
    • Being able to add notes with the customers address and phone info is awesome as well.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    ScreenShots