Frontify vs. CommUnity by Personify

Well suited to organization starting their journey of design system creation. It provides a ready to go foundation that requires minimum effort to set up and get going. It may be limited if scaling into thousands of design elements and multiple users - we have not tried at scale of more that 10's of users.

You can tell from the CEO and all staff that this is a very competent company that wants you to succeed with integrity. There is a strong
support and services team that works collaboratively with us to make
sure we are always getting what we need. They provide
24x7 emergency support, online ticket support, email support, a client
community, and the ability to call and talk to the same account manager or
community consultant every time (I even have Mariano's skype and he replies on weekends!). They recently launched a client community - so they are now even practicing what they preach. Our questions in the client community are always answered quickly.

• It manages the visual aspects of a brand very well.
• It is easy to use and update.
• It converts the colors from hex to rgb and cmyk seamlessly.
• It has a nice user interface.

Incentivized

• It's easy to use. The admin panel has a number of drag and drop options to modify the experience
• Flexibility. There are a large number of standard block features that can be added to areas. In addition, each dynamic block as a number of settings that allow you to tailor the experience you want to create. You can do this without being a programmer.
• Personalization. There are good tools that allow you to personalize the experience based on whether users are logged in or not, whether they are in particular segments (which we can create) or recommendations based on information the user has provided about themselves.
• Mobile. Small World Labs has a really great way of doing mobile. They give you a drag and drop interface for designing the mobile environment so there is a lot of flexibility with this. We are currently turning this module on.

• I believe having an agency option would be great so that one could manage and build multiple brands for multiple clients.
• Having sections for voice and personality would be great.
• The ability to export a brand document to a .PDF to share with partners.

Incentivized

• Integration with our Association Management System (AMS) didn't go as smoothly as I had wished. Having said that all of the issues with that integration have been addressed.
• Because the platform is updated so frequently you need to stay on top of what is available to you and your end users or you may miss out on key functionality releases.

Frontify is very easy to use and makes updating information a breeze. Frontify acts a central location to house assets and information for easy sharing. You can plug and play information and even white label the guide if desired

Incentivized

From the first conversation and beyond, it has been a pleasure working with Small World Labs. Their staff are genuinely interested in understanding our business and our goals, and actively make recommendation on continued improvement and long-term strategy. All of their staff demonstrate a clear understanding of the product and when to expect new features. Furthermore, their CEO, Michael Wilson, is more than competent and has proven to be an industry expert. He understands both the technical side and the community strategy side of the business. In fact, we have already initiated a project to build a second community with Small World Labs for a separate business unit

There are a multitude of options to configure the exact user experience you want and what you want to emphasize.

Uptime has never been an issue.

Speed is not an issue.

The people at Small World Labs are very accessible. I can email, open a ticket, or call and they are there. I'd also point out that senior management is quite available too. We frequently have talks about potential strategies and new things we might be doing, which is great. I think the whole organization genuinely likes what they do and likes helping us succeed.

In-person training is more ad-hoc based on if they are traveling to you or you are going to visit them. I imagine that if I paid for in-person training that it would be set up as well, but I've just used the standard training that comes with the initial set up and ongoing support.

Online training is through online webinar & how-to posts and videos in the client community.

We had staff turnover at our own organization during the implementation. We were able to get the community up and live in a good timeframe even though that happened and we had to switch some people around for managing the project on our side.

We've invested time building our own hosted interface, and recently begun exploring Figma for design system management too. The benefit of Frontify is it's easy public access. The downfall is integration with other systems required in the UX, Design, Product Management, and Development processes - something Figma supports well.

We evaluated a few different community platform vendors over the course of a couple of months. I believe we also evaluated Jive, Lithium, KickApps, and Powered.

• Solid cost benefit - the cost is not prohibitive for the value it brings
• Overall value depends on internal federation of usage

• Our community has been very active since the re-launch of our site. Have seen some increases in member engagement.
• Feedback from our membership has been nothing but positive since we transitioned off of our older Sharepoint community. Look and feel and ease of use have been real pluses for our members.
• Having the Small World Labs community is allowing us to be more creative with the way we integrate our community into all aspects of our online presence, web-site, social media, etc.