SolarWinds Serv-U vs. SPS Commerce

For anyone who needs to receive/send files between themselves and others, in an organized fashion, I would strongly recommend Serv-U as a great tool at a sensible cost. In our line of work, we can get several customers signed in at once, each sending in hundreds of Megabytes of data simultaneously. Serv-U has never struggled with this. We don't use the Quota set up for sending/receiving data but I can see it is useful where an exchange of information is the point.

When you find yourself growing and finding success faster than you can keep up with, SPS Commerce will save your life and your reputation. The services they offer are easy to understand, they are available with suggestions and ideas for better ways, personalization is available to best suit your needs or the needs of your customers so that you can really shine and relieve the worries that come with growing pains. SPS also helps to keep information accurate with less human touching to cause errors.

Incentivized

• The Wizard allows us to create new user accounts very easily and quickly. We do not have a formal IT department so those of us "mere mortals" can use this easily.
• Using the Web Client has made it very simple to set up and instruct our customers on getting to the server from any device with a minimum of fuss. We have many customers with ESL, and school students including middle and high school. Most of them are not computer experts, just regular users so the simplicity allows to do the whole setup over the phone in minutes.
• The newer version of Serv-U does not appear to be very resource-hungry so our computer runs nice and fast, without having to be a top of the range powerbox. We concentrated on large storage to cope with the file sizes we receive daily.

• We can easily create and send order confirmations.
• We respond to the corresponding receiving departments with timely and accurate ASN's.
• Once the order has shipped, customer service utilizes the invoicing function.

Incentivized

• The user interface on large screens becomes tiny and nearly unreadable without the aid of Windows Magnifier.
• Active Directory integration is either absent or not straightforward.
• Settings and configuration aren't always intuitive.

• We have quite a few people here who use this portal, and we have it set up to receive an email when an order is available to print. As of now, you can only add a few recipients to receive those emails; it limits you.
• Invoicing is challenging at times as you have to remember to go in and invoice. If you forgot, it is hard to find the order to invoice, as it seems to disappear.
• We still haven't figured out how to have some of the invoicing features auto-populate, so there isn't so much to fill out. I wish some of those features were easier to use, or find if you have them.

Incentivized

If I can drop it, I will this year. We gave it a decent try for over 4 years and it has gotten worse with each added connection.

Support was the biggest hurdle for us. It definitely needs improvement, but not to the point of being a deal breaker.

Incentivized

Phone support is generally very good and you can get a person on the phone within a few minutes. Their emailed customer support however is very poor and often goes several days or longer before receiving a response, if ever at all

Incentivized

Previously we have used FileZilla and Microsoft FTP services, but neither out-performed Serv-U. although it was easy to use, FileZilla required constant attention from IT staff and did not live up to security protocol in place. The Windows Server FTP was difficult to configure for clients due to the tight integration with Active Directory. This also limited who could help administer the server.

In my opinion, SPS Commerce is the bottom out of all three provided here. I think, essentially, if you are looking to be hands off and only oboard on setup and don't plan on growing your business and want to not understand anything about EDI and how it affects your company, SPS Commerce is a fine choice. Just if you want to do anything beyond that, I believe you are going to have the worst time.

• I have been using it for over 10 years so the ROI was there for sure.
• It is not a constant attention needing program.
• Set up and it does its job.

• I enrolled in a product I ended up not using because the vendor that required it ended our working relationship and SPS refused to offer a refund. After I canceled it, they continued to charge our account for three more months of service.
• The interface is simple and easy to understand and use, so it saved time when preparing shipments.

Incentivized