Sococo vs. Statuspage

We tried Sococo as means of gamifying a natively remote office. It does the job but the tool suffers from a lack of integrations. You will run out of free minutes very quickly and the additional charges are too high to make business sense.

StatusPage is well suited for notifications on services and products. If you need to have a passive way to notify users, internal staff, or executives on the status of SaaS services, StatusPage is a low barrier way to do this with minimal setup and maintenance. StatusPage is not well suited for scenarios in which you want info kept private. If StatusPage is updated, the subscribers to those alerts will be notified so you just want to make sure you're addressing the right audience with updates.

Incentivized

• Visual layout - the virtual office visible was very helpful because it made the organization feel closer and as a whole, much more connected. Further, you can group departments in your layout, so it gave a good visual understanding of who was part of each 'department/team.'
• Sound - the sound quality was good overall in meetings, and I liked the realistic sounds for opening and closing an office, etc. It allowed for a real office feel, and this is especially important since a lot of companies offer the option to work from home now - this removes the 'disconnect' that usually exists when working from home.
• Communication options - it allowed for multiple ways to communicate and places to communicate - i.e., in the auditorium, lunchroom, conference room, or a smaller room. Very realistic and a variety in that sense.

Incentivized

• Interface is very intuitive and easy to use with very little training.
• Ability to customize messaging for events and notify before, during and after maintenance.
• Integrations with app like Twitter and Slack.
• Ability to automate all our maintenance notifications.

Incentivized

• It would be great if it supported other major browsers. Not everyone has Chrome installed.
• The ongoing subscription cost is difficult to justify. This is the only reason we stopped using it.

Incentivized

• I wish I had more ways to customize the layout.
• I wish I could show custom date ranges when looking at historical up-time.

Incentivized

It was easy to use but still needs lots of improvement to collaborate with other tools

Incentivized

Sococo didn't seem to have a strong support line. In comparison to other products, such as Microsoft Teams, it did not regularly check in with us. There should be opportunities to give feedback on the quality of the program periodically and if we had any issues. Sometimes, Sococo would crash, and we would 'restart it' but not know why it happened.

Incentivized

Support is very responsive although we haven't had to contact them in a time of emergency, all of our support inquiries were answered in a timely manner and usually resolved with their first response. Support responsiveness played a big role in our decision since if we need help during downtime, we can't really afford to wait.

Incentivized

I prefer Sococo over Lync/Skype for a few reasons. I feel the user interface is slicker, better voice clarity, easier to hop between calls. And, all call members can go to a common chat room on their own accord instead of one person trying to invite everybody. I also feel that it's easier to share one's screen and swap between different shared screens with Sococo.

Incentivized

I would say StatusPage on its own is a great service. StatusPage for Hipchat can only be used with that specific chat client. But on its own StatusPage can be integrated with many tools, like Slack, email notifications, text notifications, etc. I don't know of a tool that compares with StatusPage. You could essentially host your own status site with Greed Yellow or Red statuses, but you would be missing out on the robustness of a tool that keeps historical data, uptime, and segregates services based on components.

Incentivized

• Morning meetings are much simpler with sococo than without. Small powwows with coworkers to work out little bugs are also a lot more enticing since setup is essentially nonexistent.
• It might be argued that the cost of sococo isn't worth the benefits of simplicity and ease of use.

Incentivized

• Helps organize communication to our clients during an incident.
• Demonstrates our level of transparency to prospects.

Incentivized