Khoros Marketing vs. Salesforce Marketing Cloud Social Studio (retiring)

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Khoros Marketing
Score 7.9 out of 10
Enterprise companies (1,001+ employees)
Khoros (Formerly Spredfast + Lithium) is a social media management platform. Key features include: Plan and Organize Social Campaigns, Manage Real-Time Engagement, and Learn and Prove Social ImpactN/A
Salesforce Marketing Cloud Social Studio (retiring)
Score 5.9 out of 10
N/A
Radian6 was acquired by Salesforce.com in 2011 and - along with Buddy Media - became Salesforce Social Studio. The product is slated to be retired in November 2024.
$1,000
Per Org Per Month
Pricing
Khoros MarketingSalesforce Marketing Cloud Social Studio (retiring)
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Basic
$1,000.00
Per Org Per Month
Pro
$4,000.00
Per Org Per Month
Corporate
$12,000.00
Per Org Per Month
Enterprise
$40,000.00
Per Org Per Month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Khoros MarketingSalesforce Marketing Cloud Social Studio (retiring)
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
YesNo
Entry-level Setup FeeOptionalNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Khoros MarketingSalesforce Marketing Cloud Social Studio (retiring)
Considered Both Products
Khoros Marketing
Chose Khoros Marketing
I wasn't involved in the selection process. However, I know that the previous tool was Salesforce Social Studio and it was decided to dismiss it because of the need to have a more efficient tool for social media management. Moreover, Khoros Marketing gives you way more features …
Chose Khoros Marketing
Far beyond the capabilities of social studio with reports and keeping up with the changing landscape and features on social
Chose Khoros Marketing
I would say Khoros is among the better platforms I've evaluated, near the top of the pack.
Chose Khoros Marketing
Khoros is by far the easiest to use
Spinklr has more functions with ads for TWitter and you can keep track of budget easily on Sprinklr but it is an absolute MONSTER for the interface. I am a certified Sprinklr admin and I still have problems figuring stuff out.
Hootsuite is …
Chose Khoros Marketing
Khoros' product offering supports multiple teams within the enterprise whereas many of their competitors lacked 1 product or another, which would have required us to vet, sign, and renew with multiple vendors. My team vets competing platforms every year, and Khoros continues to …
Chose Khoros Marketing
I was not involved in the selection process for Khoros Marketing. However, it serves the needs of our business and compares well with other products used in the organization.
Chose Khoros Marketing
Every other year, we evaluate social media monitoring, engagement, analytics, and display tools. Khoros consistently comes out on top for its strong products, great support, competent services team, and fair price point. I highly recommend them for organizations that want a …
Chose Khoros Marketing
Khoros stacked up very well to the competition in our analysis. The only tool which we graded better was Sprinklr, which costs twice as much. Though Sprinklr had more and better features, it was not twice as good. Khoros compared very well to Falcon (slow due to data centers …
Chose Khoros Marketing
Radian6 was on the short list because of our relationship with Salesforce.com. However, we evaluated over 20 other social media management systems before choosing Khoros. No one else offered the workflows, audit trails, and permissions-based system we needed to scale our social …
Salesforce Marketing Cloud Social Studio (retiring)
Chose Salesforce Marketing Cloud Social Studio (retiring)
Did a brief evaluation of other tools, but at the time, Radian 6 was the industry leader.
Top Pros
Top Cons
Features
Khoros MarketingSalesforce Marketing Cloud Social Studio (retiring)
Listening/monitoring
Comparison of Listening/monitoring features of Product A and Product B
Khoros Marketing
6.4
117 Ratings
18% below category average
Salesforce Marketing Cloud Social Studio (retiring)
8.5
10 Ratings
11% above category average
Boolean keyword searches7.290 Ratings7.09 Ratings
Filtering out noise/spam5.999 Ratings7.09 Ratings
Sentiment analysis6.889 Ratings10.08 Ratings
Broad channel coverage5.8111 Ratings10.010 Ratings
Publishing
Comparison of Publishing features of Product A and Product B
Khoros Marketing
7.3
148 Ratings
8% below category average
Salesforce Marketing Cloud Social Studio (retiring)
8.5
10 Ratings
7% above category average
Content planning and scheduling8.4146 Ratings10.010 Ratings
Audience targeting7.2112 Ratings8.09 Ratings
Content optimization5.05 Ratings8.08 Ratings
Workflow management8.4130 Ratings8.010 Ratings
Engagement
Comparison of Engagement features of Product A and Product B
Khoros Marketing
7.5
113 Ratings
7% below category average
Salesforce Marketing Cloud Social Studio (retiring)
7.6
9 Ratings
6% below category average
Automated routing and prioritization7.290 Ratings9.99 Ratings
Customer interaction histories7.7103 Ratings9.99 Ratings
Bulk actions7.494 Ratings3.19 Ratings
Marketing
Comparison of Marketing features of Product A and Product B
Khoros Marketing
7.0
103 Ratings
9% below category average
Salesforce Marketing Cloud Social Studio (retiring)
5.5
9 Ratings
33% below category average
Lead generation6.747 Ratings5.08 Ratings
Content marketing6.686 Ratings5.09 Ratings
Paid media management7.12 Ratings6.07 Ratings
Campaigns and promotions7.790 Ratings6.08 Ratings
Channel coverage/integration
Comparison of Channel coverage/integration features of Product A and Product B
Khoros Marketing
7.6
147 Ratings
11% below category average
Salesforce Marketing Cloud Social Studio (retiring)
8.1
10 Ratings
5% below category average
Twitter7.7138 Ratings9.010 Ratings
Facebook7.9143 Ratings10.010 Ratings
LinkedIn7.5105 Ratings10.08 Ratings
Google+9.018 Ratings6.86 Ratings
Instagram7.3132 Ratings8.07 Ratings
Pinterest6.346 Ratings6.54 Ratings
YouTube7.533 Ratings6.76 Ratings
Reporting/analytics
Comparison of Reporting/analytics features of Product A and Product B
Khoros Marketing
7.1
131 Ratings
10% below category average
Salesforce Marketing Cloud Social Studio (retiring)
8.6
9 Ratings
9% above category average
Campaign success analytics8.0121 Ratings8.99 Ratings
Real-time tracking6.6120 Ratings7.09 Ratings
Competitor analysis6.777 Ratings9.97 Ratings
Account management
Comparison of Account management features of Product A and Product B
Khoros Marketing
6.1
136 Ratings
29% below category average
Salesforce Marketing Cloud Social Studio (retiring)
9.5
9 Ratings
15% above category average
Role-based user permissions & privileges6.4132 Ratings9.08 Ratings
Mobile access5.8112 Ratings9.99 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Khoros MarketingSalesforce Marketing Cloud Social Studio (retiring)
Small Businesses
Publer
Publer
Score 9.8 out of 10
Publer
Publer
Score 9.8 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Social Suite by Reputation.com
Social Suite by Reputation.com
Score 9.3 out of 10
Social Suite by Reputation.com
Social Suite by Reputation.com
Score 9.3 out of 10
Enterprises
Social Suite by Reputation.com
Social Suite by Reputation.com
Score 9.3 out of 10
Social Suite by Reputation.com
Social Suite by Reputation.com
Score 9.3 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Khoros MarketingSalesforce Marketing Cloud Social Studio (retiring)
Likelihood to Recommend
8.0
(184 ratings)
8.9
(51 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
8.9
(34 ratings)
8.8
(38 ratings)
Usability
8.9
(29 ratings)
9.0
(9 ratings)
Availability
9.7
(11 ratings)
9.6
(5 ratings)
Performance
8.0
(8 ratings)
8.4
(5 ratings)
Support Rating
8.0
(31 ratings)
9.0
(8 ratings)
In-Person Training
8.9
(7 ratings)
10.0
(1 ratings)
Online Training
6.0
(7 ratings)
7.6
(6 ratings)
Implementation Rating
7.7
(24 ratings)
9.8
(6 ratings)
Ease of integration
5.4
(4 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
7.3
(122 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Khoros MarketingSalesforce Marketing Cloud Social Studio (retiring)
Likelihood to Recommend
Khoros (Formerly Spredfast + Lithium)
The best it could be used for is running campaigns. Be it a product launch or be it any new event that you are hosting. If you need to quickly grab attention, then this might be your choice. Also the report given after the campaign is a good insight for improving your next campaign.
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Discontinued Products
If you're tasked with publishing content to social on behalf of your organization then this tool is certainly worth considering. You have quick and easy capability to schedule across multiple platforms with drag-and-drop simplicity. It ties into Salesforce's real strength of its CRM platform so you can quickly tie social activity and leads to those already in your database. And it does a good job at monitoring and analyzing brand and competitor content across multiple media types. Having said that, if you're into deep-dive and full functionality SaaS tools then this might not be for you as it covers three areas adequately, but not in enough detail or strength to make it a star performer
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Pros
Khoros (Formerly Spredfast + Lithium)
  • Reporting is great - easy to create bespoke dashboards for multiple ways to view the data and trends in platform
  • Onboarding and training - a good repository of knowledge articles for users to access on most aspects of the platform for self-learning
  • The user-friendly and intuitive interface allows any user to quickly assimilate how to use the platform.
Read full review
Discontinued Products
  • The amount of the information that radian6 can pull from multiple social platforms is absolutely phenomenal. Its just not only the pull but the way the information can be presented in dashboards was way good. It helped us understand in various aspects of our social presence.
  • Multiple profiles helped us to break down the Big/Huge social buzz cloud to smaller and more manageable pieces. This helped us concentrate on the lows and helped us to plan better on turning them to highs.
  • Radian6 allowed us to follow thru the crowd trends with the latest information presented in a single view. This also helped us to collect the social opinion on the product releases.
  • The ease of use, one need not be an expert to start using this platform. The interface is easily understandable by anyone.
  • A keyword can be edited quickly to tailor the needs and the results were quick.
Read full review
Cons
Khoros (Formerly Spredfast + Lithium)
  • Look and feel of the interface could use a refresh as it's not very exciting to use
  • Improve analytics features and accuracy
  • Facilitate bulk actions
  • Better alerts/visibility of collaborative actions and assigned tasks
  • Clearer communication around new feature releases and announcements
Read full review
Discontinued Products
  • Instagram Social Listening - it currently does not offer much social listening in terms of Instagram.
  • Instagram Owned - It currently stops pulling once an update is "old" by their standards, even if it receives recent comments. They can force pull, but you have to work with their tech team to do so.
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Likelihood to Renew
Khoros (Formerly Spredfast + Lithium)
There is no product like Khoros. Our company lives and dies by the analytics, and to date, we have not seen a more comprehensive analytics structure for any social media management tool. Khoros support is also fantastic, responding and resolving any and all questions, ideas, or complaints, usually in 24 hours.
Read full review
Discontinued Products
I spent a lot of time researching the right platform for me and our organisation (thanks to the other reviews on TrustRadius also). Having used other platforms when I found frustrations getting my everyday work done, I knew exactly what I wanted and this is why I chose Social Studio. While there have been a few hiccups, the quarterly update releases and the outstanding tech support have kept me more than happy.
Read full review
Usability
Khoros (Formerly Spredfast + Lithium)
Khoros Marketing is very user-friendly and easy to navigate. The calendar visibility is the view I use most so I can see all posts going out on all of our channels. It allows us to time posts in a proper cadence so we don't overlap with other pressing content.
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Discontinued Products
• Would rate this a 6. The User Interface is pretty intuitive, but the platform was still considered pretty intimidating by our non-technical staff when they first saw it. It took a while to get used to it and feel comfortable. There was quite a lot of setup work in the beginning (for example, we had to build our own reports using a canned report as a template, and this was not simple). Although it took a while to get it setup correctly, it’s quite intuitive once that work has been done.
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Reliability and Availability
Khoros (Formerly Spredfast + Lithium)
• We still experience a bit of downtime and slowness here but things have drastically improved in the last year with their feature updates and reconfigured hosting.
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Discontinued Products
The platform is rarely down
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Performance
Khoros (Formerly Spredfast + Lithium)
Khoros has greatly improved the performance of its SaaS products in the last 5 years. Their applications, including Conversations, Intelligence, and Experiences, all load quickly with real-time data. This performance is critical to provide meaningful, social customer support, and marketing. The performance maintains integrity even when you deploy powerful integrations like Salesforce Customer Relationship Manager.
Read full review
Discontinued Products
No issues with performance.
Read full review
Support Rating
Khoros (Formerly Spredfast + Lithium)
Overall, support does a great job and is timely in their responses and efforts. We have had to contact support many times due to the Capture app. Some tickets have remained open for months, while others get resolved quickly. I understand this is not always up to support and they often have to wait for their engineering team to fix issues that we identified, but it's difficult to deal with issues that are affecting our workflow, especially for extended amounts of time.
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Discontinued Products
As mentioned previously, it can be hard to get through to people who can help you. On occasion when I have spoken to customer service/tech support, they all seem nice and try to be helpful, however instead of admitting the system cannot do certain things, they will persist it saying that it can, which results in many wasted hours overall.
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In-Person Training
Khoros (Formerly Spredfast + Lithium)
• As a very early customer, we did not undergo formal training but worked closely with the team to get the system set up to do what we wanted. However, online training resources are now available with many blog posts / video lessons and tutorials.
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Discontinued Products
No answers on this topic
Online Training
Khoros (Formerly Spredfast + Lithium)
it is important to note that my perspective is not necessarily common - I'm a geek/nerd/poweruser in general, so I found the online resources to be more than adequate (and often very aesthetically pleasing, too). That said, a less "geeky" person might struggle a bit.
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Discontinued Products
• We initially received dedicated online training for our team which was delivered by our account rep. This was pretty effective since it happened after our data had been loaded into the system and it had been configured for specific needs our organization. The training was perhaps a bit shallow though, as it was only an hour long. Online videos are available to be taken individually, and these have been useful.
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Implementation Rating
Khoros (Formerly Spredfast + Lithium)
The implementation team from Khoros were great - they worked hard to understand our somewhat complex organization, and were with us all the way through face to face meetings, user training, and technical training. We had a clearly defined account manager and implementation manager, who worked really effectively together and with us.
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Discontinued Products
Implementation was pretty simple. Just a matter of giving the account rep a list of our search terms and having him set the system up to pull the data we wanted to see. Once this had been done, we tweaked it with his help. Process was pretty smooth, although there was some back and forth until it worked the way we wanted.
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Alternatives Considered
Khoros (Formerly Spredfast + Lithium)
On some accounts that I am on, I use Asana in place of Khoros marketing but I much prefer Khoros Marketing. I prefer Khoros Marketing over Asana because I can post directly (and schedule posts) on Khoros but not on Asana. Also, I can moderate directly on Khoros but not Asana
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Discontinued Products
Compared to Radian6, I found Meltwater Buzz, Simply Measured, and Sprout Social to be much more user friendly. Meltwater Buzz and Radian6 are very similar products with many of the same functionalities but Buzz presents your analytics in a way that is much easier to understand. I did a two week trial with Sprout Social and absolutely loved the product but our company needed the capability to connect to Salesforce, which is available on R6 and Buzz. Simply Measured is my all time favorite but I have only used the free version so I am not completely sure how it stacks up to Radian6
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Scalability
Khoros (Formerly Spredfast + Lithium)
Khoros seems to struggle a little past a certain level of scale. More than 30 separate per day makes it difficult to view all content in the weekly calendar view, which is frustrating and could cause issues. However, the ability to schedule one post across multiple channels is hugely valuable and cuts down on a lot of duplicative work.
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Discontinued Products
No answers on this topic
Return on Investment
Khoros (Formerly Spredfast + Lithium)
  • Negatively impacted relationship with Khoros as they're notoriously difficult to engage with or able to produce viable results from our feedback.
  • Negatively impacted KPI reporting, as metrics were inaccurate for six months.
  • Negatively impacted resource management, as there've been so many restrictions with this platform that simple, day-to-day tasks take so much longer.
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Discontinued Products
  • Monitoring social brand awareness is not something you can consider to have a meaninful impact in your business ROI short term, however it's a must for taking care of long term relationships and customer intimacy.
  • Radian6 connects with other analytical tools like webtrends, Google Analytics, etc..however it's not directly linked to a revenue driven platform, you can´t see the immediate ROI generated in the tool.
  • If you bet for social relationships you should consider this tool, no question on that. Social Commerce might be of course impacted postively by the proper use of this tool.
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