Sawtooth Lighthouse Studio vs. Square 9 Softworks

Anyone wanting to design and analyze advanced studies, particularly those that incorporate discrete choice modeling (such as MaxDiff and / or Conjoint) should be using Sawtooth Lighthouse Studio. The capabilities and flexibility offered by this platform for these choices is far beyond any other platform I am aware of. It is less appropriate where you need the survey tool to 'play well with others.' Two examples: 1) pulling in live data streams so they can be cleaned and visualized. 2) Integrating into any service where an API call is appropriate such as adding / removing people from a mailing list, incentive management tool, or qualitative community tool.

Incentivized

Square 9 Softworks is really good for internal and external filing services. Square 9 Softworks is also an application that can be utilized for databases to store and extract data. If the volume of your filing isn’t heavy or on a day-to-day basis then I wouldn’t recommend Square 9 Softworks.

Incentivized

• Powerful programming capabilities
• Advanced analysis
• Fantastic customer and technical support
• Good documentation

Incentivized

• The software is very flexible, and the technicians were great at implementing our customizations for the PO project.
• While indexing fields in Global Search, the Key Free tool works great.
• Global Search is well-organized. It's easy to navigate and find your documents.
• The process for completing your project was well done. Communicating with individuals at Square 9 who were responsible for different aspects of the project was easy.

Incentivized

• They could focus on integrating API type functionality
• I would love if the data came out labeled
• I am not a fan of the 'limited' time a study can stay up. This causes issues with longitudinal studies.

Incentivized

• GlobalSearch could use some enhancements in layout - THIS IS FIXED WITH THE NEWEST VERSION OF GLOBALSEARCH 6.3 and their Sleek GUI GlobalSearch GO! - WELL DONE!
• GlobalSearch could use external sharing of documents THIS IS FIXED WITH THE NEWEST VERSION OF GLOBALSEARCH 6.3 and their Sleek GUI GlobalSearch GO! - WELL DONE!
• GlobalForms could have better formatting tools to enhance the fields and text formatting

Incentivized

We absolutely can't imagine not continuing software maintenance as there are always new additions that improve the system not to mention the excellent tech support when issues are encountered. Response times for troubleshooting are very quick and usually, my issue is resolved in less than an hour after connecting with support.

Incentivized

It is incredibly powerful, very rhobust and has fantastic support. The only reasons I'm not giving it a higher rating are 1) There is a very steep learning curve when it comes to designing more complex studies. 2) It is difficult to get Sawtooth Lighthouse Studio to 'talk' to other systems as the Perl upon which it is built is not really designed to work with API calls, etc.

Incentivized

The items I am searching for are easily found. They are found in at least 95% of the searches. The failure rate generally is related to another employees user error or a template error set up by our Square 9 team in house.

Incentivized

Square-9 can get this product out to you in almost the same hour your order it. We got ours very fast.

With the PDF projected viewer, the document retrieval-to-display can drag for a second more than some systems, and the capture workflow if you overload a server array can also drag, but those are the only two issues we've ever seen with this product, and they are not serious issues at all.

I cannot explain how great the support team is. They are prompt and very thorough in their responses.

Incentivized

We had one "production down" incident that took about a day to get help on. I think that's a bit too long. The support people seem confident but not that friendly. I feel like I'm bothering them when I get help, but they get the job done.

Incentivized

It would have been higher, but the training is a bit muted for the lesser qualified office equipment vendors who signed up as partners to sell and support it. The more experienced ECM vendors and customer end-users will find the training very good, but a bit slow.

I think the implementation could have gone a little smoother than it did. Now that I know how to use the software, I could do it myself. I feel that as an organization, we could have been a little better prepared. If the consultant was more aware of what we were looking for, they could have assisted in setting up some workflows for us as per the contract. But because we were not prepared, the initial implementation process was a little painful. That said, adding a document management system to ANY business kinda means everyone has to re-think the way they do their work which can be difficult for some staff.

Incentivized

While QuestioPro has the capability to build surveys and even do some advanced analysis, it is less powerful (and less intuitive) than Sawtooth Lighthouse Studio. It cannot handle studies with the complexity we are used to designing. The CMNTY Platform was initially sold to us as a combined Quant / Qual platform, but we found very quickly that the quant side of it is extremely limited.

Incentivized

We tried Etrieve before Square 9 and it never got off the ground. Our requirements were too complex and the platform could not accommodate them. Square 9 offered the flexibility and customization we needed from the start. Support worked with us to build workflows that actually fit our processes instead of forcing us into a rigid structure.

Incentivized

The scale-ability is quite good actually, but you need competent sales/support folks providing it to you, so the scale is set right for the demands of your system use. Some resellers are not good at doing this, some are fantastic. If you are scaled correctly at first implementation, you'll be very happy with this system.

• Our business is survey data so we rely heavily on sawtooth
• The advanced design and analytics are incredibly useful
• Negative - I wish it would work natively with API calls

Incentivized

• Reduction in human error through manual data entry process now being automated
• Reduction in cost due to automation allowing the function to not require a full time employee
• Reduction in time spent performing the previous manual tasks. Example: on our consolidated shipment days, it could take doc clerk 2-3 hours to prepare master document package. This has been reduced to 30 minutes or less (depending on size of shipment and time needed for OCR to complete)

Incentivized