Acoustic Campaign vs. WordPress

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Acoustic Campaign
Score 8.6 out of 10
N/A
Acoustic Campaign (formerly IBM Watson Campaign Automation) is a scalable, SaaS-based, cross-channel, digital marketing platform providing digital marketers the ability to implement and manage email, mobile, social, and lead management campaign processes.N/A
WordPress
Score 8.5 out of 10
N/A
Wordpress is an open-source publishing platform popular with bloggers, and a content management system, known for its simplicity and modifiability. Websites may host their own blogging communities, controlling and moderating content from a single dashboard.N/A
Pricing
Acoustic CampaignWordPress
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Acoustic CampaignWordPress
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
Acoustic CampaignWordPress
Considered Both Products
Acoustic Campaign
Chose Acoustic Campaign
IBM Watson Campaign Automation is more of an enterprise product for large organizations where you're plugging into all kinds of systems and workflows tend to be slower.
WordPress

No answer on this topic

Top Pros
Top Cons
Features
Acoustic CampaignWordPress
Email & Online Marketing
Comparison of Email & Online Marketing features of Product A and Product B
Acoustic Campaign
7.0
10 Ratings
11% below category average
WordPress
-
Ratings
WYSIWYG email editor4.010 Ratings00 Ratings
Dynamic content8.07 Ratings00 Ratings
Ability to test dynamic content7.58 Ratings00 Ratings
Landing pages5.18 Ratings00 Ratings
A/B testing7.010 Ratings00 Ratings
Mobile optimization6.97 Ratings00 Ratings
Email deliverability reporting8.010 Ratings00 Ratings
List management8.09 Ratings00 Ratings
Triggered drip sequences8.08 Ratings00 Ratings
Lead Management
Comparison of Lead Management features of Product A and Product B
Acoustic Campaign
7.4
8 Ratings
4% below category average
WordPress
-
Ratings
Lead nurturing automation6.18 Ratings00 Ratings
Lead scoring and grading7.97 Ratings00 Ratings
Data quality management8.07 Ratings00 Ratings
Automated sales alerts and tasks7.54 Ratings00 Ratings
Campaign Management
Comparison of Campaign Management features of Product A and Product B
Acoustic Campaign
7.0
8 Ratings
9% below category average
WordPress
-
Ratings
Calendaring6.58 Ratings00 Ratings
Event/webinar marketing7.44 Ratings00 Ratings
Social Media Marketing
Comparison of Social Media Marketing features of Product A and Product B
Acoustic Campaign
6.3
5 Ratings
17% below category average
WordPress
-
Ratings
Social sharing and campaigns6.54 Ratings00 Ratings
Social profile integration6.25 Ratings00 Ratings
Reporting & Analytics
Comparison of Reporting & Analytics features of Product A and Product B
Acoustic Campaign
4.5
10 Ratings
50% below category average
WordPress
-
Ratings
Dashboards4.210 Ratings00 Ratings
Standard reports4.210 Ratings00 Ratings
Custom reports5.18 Ratings00 Ratings
Platform & Infrastructure
Comparison of Platform & Infrastructure features of Product A and Product B
Acoustic Campaign
5.7
10 Ratings
28% below category average
WordPress
6.4
104 Ratings
18% below category average
API5.29 Ratings6.394 Ratings
Role-based workflow & approvals6.04 Ratings00 Ratings
Customizability5.95 Ratings00 Ratings
Integration with Salesforce.com4.38 Ratings00 Ratings
Integration with Microsoft Dynamics CRM5.03 Ratings00 Ratings
Integration with SugarCRM8.02 Ratings00 Ratings
Internationalization / multi-language00 Ratings6.679 Ratings
Security
Comparison of Security features of Product A and Product B
Acoustic Campaign
-
Ratings
WordPress
8.2
127 Ratings
2% above category average
Role-based user permissions00 Ratings8.2127 Ratings
Web Content Creation
Comparison of Web Content Creation features of Product A and Product B
Acoustic Campaign
-
Ratings
WordPress
8.0
133 Ratings
5% above category average
WYSIWYG editor00 Ratings8.3120 Ratings
Code quality / cleanliness00 Ratings7.3121 Ratings
Admin section00 Ratings8.6131 Ratings
Page templates00 Ratings8.3128 Ratings
Library of website themes00 Ratings8.5130 Ratings
Mobile optimization / responsive design00 Ratings8.6129 Ratings
Publishing workflow00 Ratings8.5125 Ratings
Form generator00 Ratings6.3104 Ratings
Web Content Management
Comparison of Web Content Management features of Product A and Product B
Acoustic Campaign
-
Ratings
WordPress
7.9
131 Ratings
7% above category average
Content taxonomy00 Ratings6.9113 Ratings
SEO support00 Ratings8.2118 Ratings
Bulk management00 Ratings7.5100 Ratings
Availability / breadth of extensions00 Ratings8.5121 Ratings
Community / comment management00 Ratings8.5120 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Acoustic CampaignWordPress
Small Businesses
Vbout
Vbout
Score 9.4 out of 10
Divi
Divi
Score 9.8 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
PFL Direct Mail Platform
PFL Direct Mail Platform
Score 9.3 out of 10
Image Relay
Image Relay
Score 9.5 out of 10
Enterprises
PFL Direct Mail Platform
PFL Direct Mail Platform
Score 9.3 out of 10
Tridion
Tridion
Score 9.0 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Acoustic CampaignWordPress
Likelihood to Recommend
4.1
(40 ratings)
8.9
(169 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
5.5
(30 ratings)
9.4
(36 ratings)
Usability
8.0
(6 ratings)
9.6
(16 ratings)
Availability
10.0
(2 ratings)
9.5
(3 ratings)
Performance
7.0
(2 ratings)
8.6
(2 ratings)
Support Rating
5.9
(5 ratings)
10.0
(10 ratings)
In-Person Training
-
(0 ratings)
7.0
(1 ratings)
Online Training
9.0
(2 ratings)
10.0
(1 ratings)
Implementation Rating
7.4
(4 ratings)
9.0
(9 ratings)
Configurability
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(1 ratings)
Ease of integration
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(1 ratings)
Product Scalability
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(1 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(1 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(1 ratings)
User Testimonials
Acoustic CampaignWordPress
Likelihood to Recommend
Acoustic
Silverpop is a powerful and comprehensive tool for digital marketers, and is apprprioate for companies of varying sizes, as well as both B2B and B2C models. It's particularly well-suited for companies with large, accurate customer databases and the ability to track customer actions on their websites to use as marketing automation triggers.
Read full review
Automattic
If your business relies heavily on content creation, and particularly on blog posts, then WordPress is really the best option you have. But if you don't have a blog, you only need static pages, or you want to build an eCommerce site, then you might want to explore other alternatives.
Read full review
Pros
Acoustic
  • Automated Messages - we currently have over 70 automated messages going out on any particular day through feeds and API calls that we pass to Silverpop. We rely on these automated messages to communicate to our customers and can rely on Silverpop to always be up and running to get these messages out.
  • Robust query building - We can target customers easily based on a combination of demographic profile data, as well as email and site behavior and purchase behavior, allowing us to finely segment our audience
  • Deep dive reporting - the UI reporting, as well as the available reports to download through the API give us tremendous insight into how our subscribers are responding to email.
Read full review
Automattic
  • WordPress is incredibly easy to set up and get running with little to no technical knowledge. Most web hosts will do it for you, since it's so easy.
  • With thousands of themes available for free and for low cost, WordPress can accommodate any design you can imagine.
  • The community behind WordPress is generous, and there are loads of educational opportunities both online and in person to learn and connect with other users.
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Cons
Acoustic
  • Data syncing and errors - Silverpop does not do a great job of getting data to sync regularly with our CRM (Salesforce.com). The data had to flow back and forth several times before being added to campaigns and in some instances, it took days to update leads! Also, failed lead syncs get stuck in an alert list but it does not notify you otherwise that a lead failed the sync.
  • Design issues - we use custom HTML to build emails and landing pages, and we were unable to render background images on our campaigns. Also, once you toggle between design and source (code) view to make edits, it often broke the code and threw off the design.
  • Administrator alerts - when sync fails altogether between systems, there is no email alert sent to the system admin (me/my team) so we at times have found that we have gone 18 hours until we stumble across the fact that the system sync has failed.
  • Reporting - it is not very comprehensive and we had difficulty generating the level of reporting that we need to have.
  • Support - there are a few gems in the support team who know what they're doing, but largely calling support is a lesson in frustration.
  • Product bug fixes - in two instances, my open support tickets were identified as product bugs. One related to incorrect cookie tracking which was causing our leads not to be scoring properly. They determined that this wasn't critical enough to build into their product fix road map. This is core to an automation system working properly.
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Automattic
  • WordPress breaks often so you need to have someone who understands how to troubleshoot, which can take time and money.
  • Some plugins are easier to customize than others, for example, some don't require any coding knowledge while others do. This can limit your project if you are not a coder.
  • WordPress can be easily hacked, so you also need someone who can ensure your sites are secure.
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Likelihood to Renew
Acoustic
SilverPop is a great marketing tool that integrates with Salesforce to provide customers and employees a great buying and selling experience. The software takes some very difficult tasks and makes them easy to accomplish. With proper setup and management, Silverpop gives you the tools to gain insight into the productiveness of campaigns.
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Automattic
My rating is based on the knowledge I have of the community that WordPress has had built around it for years now. It's as solid as it comes when you talk about community involvement and expansion. There's no other CMS out there that can match-up with it, hands down.
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Usability
Acoustic
This is a little bit difficult to rate because Silverpop is gradually updating its interface to improve usability all around. I know users are able to do their job with minimal assistance. However, some of the interface is dated, and the Programs interface, while functional, has a bit of a learning curve.
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Automattic
It's a sophisticated but easy to use piece of software. Many of the content addition pieces are familiar from other pieces of software so there isn't a huge learning curve. And for new areas, there is a lot of info on WordPress.org as well as other WordPress help sites.
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Reliability and Availability
Acoustic
While several of the other reviews have mentioned poor performance in this department, we have only had one situation where the system was down (although it was down for several hours). Silverpop segments its clients on different servers, and I know that the problem we experienced only occurred on our specific server (maybe other servers have had their own problems?) but our service has been reliable otherwise.
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Automattic
Anyone can visit WordPress.org and download a fully functional copy of WordPress free of charge. Additionally, WordPress is offered to users as open-source software, which means that anyone can customize the code to create new applications and make these available to other WordPress users.
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Performance
Acoustic
The throttle time for sending emails would vary depending on how many other campaigns were going out that day, which I found inconsistent
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Automattic
Mostly, any performance issues have to do with using too many plugins and these can sometimes slow down the overall performance of your site. It is very tempting to start adding lots of plugins to your WordPress site, however, as there are thousands of great plugins to choose from and so many of them help you do amazing things on your site. If you begin to notice performance issues with your WordPress site (e.g. pages being slow to load), there are ways to optimize the performance of your site, but this requires learning the process. WordPress users can learn how to optimize their WordPress sites by downloading the WPTrainMe WordPress training plugin (WPTrainMe.com) and going through the detailed step-by-step WordPress optimization tutorials.
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Support Rating
Acoustic
The Salesforce Integration support team is fantastic. I'd give them greater than a 10 if possible. The rest of the support team can be extremely frustrating to work with. Too often they try to blame something obscure and refuse to escalate or look into the issue. And on occasion when you find system glitches they don't seem to care about fixing them
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Automattic
WordPress itself only has community service so your experience will depend on where you turn. Online, through forums and community boards, support is rudimentary but effective. You can easily turn to your local community and find exceptional individuals who know and use WordPress regularly for more advanced, inexpensive, support. I'm rating this less than 10 because of the lack of any formal support provided by a company.
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In-Person Training
Acoustic
No answers on this topic
Automattic
Varies by the person providing training. High marks as it's incredibly easy to find experienced individuals in your community to provide training on any aspect of WordPress from content marketing, SEO, plugin development, theme design, etc. Less than 10 though as the training is community based and expectations for a session you find may fall short.
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Online Training
Acoustic
The online trainings are very detailed (for the most part) and really walk through the entire system. They are a little dry, but they are usually broken up into segments to allow you to skip to the parts you need.
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Automattic
It is very easy to find online resources to learn how to do just about anything with WordPress.
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Implementation Rating
Acoustic
Based on recommendations from Silverpop we made some implementation decisions that we later regretted pretty substantially. In hindsight we should have started a pilot implementation earlier so we could learn and then start over. The big issue for us was that Silverpop recommended a non-keyed database, or at least a database that doesn't use email address as primary key. This is resulted in a large number of duplicate email addresses so that the end user is forced to unsubscribe multiple times to stop receiving emails.
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Automattic
WordPress is not a great solution if you have: 1) A larger site with performance / availability requirements. 2) Multiple types of content you want to share - each with its own underlying data structure. 3) Multiple sites you need to manage. For very small sites where these needs are not paramount, WordPress is a decent solution
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Alternatives Considered
Acoustic
We evaluated alternate providers less than a year into our IBM Watson Campaign contract because the system was so clunky to use (and we wanted a system that would include or better integrate with our SMS provider). Bluecore and Klaviyo were the front runners at the time, and we came close to moving forward with Bluecore. The pricing model and overall the cost of Bluecore was much higher than IBM for us though, and the timing of this was right when the IBM to Acoustic changes took place. We decided to give Acoustic a shot and are optimistic it will be enough to keep us on board once all the dust settles, though I find it unlikely we will renew with Acoustic when our contract is up again. My main email specialist is a Klaviyo expert and finds that platform very easy to use in comparison-- it might be a better fit for a team of our size.
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Automattic
We have considered and operated within Shopify and Squarespace. Both serve their purpose for niche clients, but we do recommend WordPress as being the superior option. We find that WordPress is easier to use and offers maximum scalability while the others are more challenging to design, code, configure and launch.
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Scalability
Acoustic
No answers on this topic
Automattic
WordPress is completely scalable. You can get started immediately with a very simple "out-of-the box" WordPress installation and then add whatever functionality you need as and when you need it, and continue expanding. Often we will create various WordPress sites on the same domain to handle different aspects of our strategy (e.g. one site for the sales pages, product information and/or a marketing blog, another for delivering products securely through a private membership site, and another for running an affiliate program or other application), and then ties all of these sites together using a common theme and links on each of the site's menus. Additionally, WordPress offers a multisite function that allows organizations and institutions to manage networks of sites managed by separate individual site owners, but centrally administered by the parent organization. You can also expand WordPress into a social networking or community site, forums, etc. The same scalability applies to web design. You can start with a simple design and then scale things up to display sites with amazing visual features, including animations and video effects, sliding images and animated product image galleries, elements that appear and fade from visitor browsers, etc. The scaling possibilities of WordPress are truly endless.
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Return on Investment
Acoustic
  • we have not experienced any currently but moving to lead automation and lead scoring could change that.
  • i'm not sure how increased employee efficiency would ever be a benefit b/c lead importing and visibility, along with setting up email templates is quite cumbersome.
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Automattic
  • WordPress helps us reduce website management costs because we can oversee updates in-house.
  • WordPress is easy to use, reducing the amount of time we spend on website management.
  • The ease of use enables us to offer website management for clients, helping us grow our capabilities/business.
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ScreenShots

Acoustic Campaign Screenshots

Screenshot of Digital marketingScreenshot of Journey design