Acquia DAM (Widen) vs. Aprimo

Acquia DAM is well suited for large companies that need to organize and control the flow of assets being used by their teams and vendors. It provides much better control than file storage sites like Dropbox, where there's little control over what goes where and almost non-functional search functionality. If you're a smaller company, you may be able to get by or have someone dedicated to doing so, but for larger companies, it really takes a lot of the manual work out of it!

Incentivized

I think Aprimo is well suited when you are looking for a DAM to house all of your content. It will be easy to find what you need based on the metadata you are including. I think Aprimo works very well in situations where you are looking for both a DAM and project management system. We are using the DAM and Aprimo productivity and they pair well together

Incentivized

• They offer valuable guidance and educational resources to Administrators
• Their I.T. support is knowledgeable and responsive. And friendly!
• They build community among Acquia DAM (Widen) Admins
• They aren't as salesy and pushy as many of the other DAM Vendors that we considered. I don't feel like they are constantly trying to upsell me or take advantage. I hope this continues to be the case with the acquisition by Acquia.
• They're just plain nice people to work with.

Incentivized

• Audit - The trail of what you can look back on is so robust and the IDs are on every task and asset. You see a full picture of something that has been approved and can see any amends that have been made. Having the full view and timeline of any updates is essential for our teams.
• Reporting - Most if not all fields can be reported on. This is essential for us as we use reports to influence management decisions as well as managing day-to-day operations.
• DAM - The DAM functionality and connectivity is a big one for our future plans as well as existing ones. Connectors into the DAM help us integrate the systems we have already, plus plan and support the business with new plans in growing areas.
• Service - Aprimo support is amazing. The support we get as a company is always great, no matter how big or small any issues or queries are. The team at Aprimo is always so attentive and comes back with great answers and support.

• The AI tagging is not very intuitive; if you upload 100 assets, you have to wait for ages to see if they have been tagged by constantly checking the field views over and over again. It would be good to have an AI tagging manager where you could submit and check tagging status.
• For image downloading, it would be good to be able to select an image size rather than an aspect and then adjust the image to the size.
• We would have jumped at the chance for SSO or Site Core integration, but the costs were so high it just was not worth it; we could have hired people to do it manually for cheaper.

Incentivized

• Customer support is slow to resolve system issues
• Complicated configuration with no in-depth training amounts to a huge learning curve and expensive concierge services
• The consumer-facing UI does not have all of the functionality that is required
• Training videos are out of date or purport functionality that does not exist

Incentivized

Acquia DAM (Widen) is changing its pricing model and at this point, we are unsure whether it is a good thing for us or not. While we consider this a robust tool, we will take our time to evaluate the competitors.

Incentivized

While Aprimo provides the fundamental tools to track our actual spend, it has a major void when trying to plan for future programs. Our teams often have offline Excel spreadsheets to track actuals spend vs. our original budget, and lay out the future programs against which we plan to use budget funds. Would also appreciate reporting mechanisms which could splice data in non table format. For example, we often use marketing calendars to display programs/spend over time. This helps our team ensure that programs which are intended to run concurrent with in-store sales executions are happening in the correct time frame. The visual is simply easier to follow.

Acquia DAM (Widen) is very intuitive, it does not take extensive training as some tools do to use the tool. Uploading assets, creating portals, collections and sharing are all very simple. Acquia DAM (Widen) also does not force you to fill out all of the metadata. You can fill out as little or as much as you would like.

Incentivized

Some of the workflows are complex - that's more a function of internal processes - but managing them and getting them to a place the users 'understand' can be challenging. The more usual DAM features and benefits are a much easier 'sell' from a change management perspective.

Never had an issue where I was unable to access Widen.

Incentivized

We have not yet experienced any downtime

There have been a couple of rare instance where after I uploaded an asset, I was unable to rename it, or after uploading it it took a while before it actually appeared and can be viewed in the DAM.

Incentivized

We are struggling with it though I think it’s our firewall i.e. an internal issue. Accessing the software outside or on mobile is faster.

They have a multi-tenant and single tenant option (more expensive) . We bought the single tenant option in anticipation of using Campaign Management and based upon our scale. You get more capabilities with single tenant

The Acquia DAM support team is fantastic! Not only do we have an amazing customer support contact, the regular chat support is a great resource. Our CSM schedules meetings with our team regularly to ensure that we're meeting our goals. And the general support is great at responding quickly!

Incentivized

Support is support, so mainly reactive when it is about product inside and common issues. But when it is about specific enhancements and business concerns related to our own configuration and settings, we surely feel a gap. and this is why concierge is a must have solution when facing Aprimo support

Aprimo offered a number of hands on sessions customized for each group. As such, they address specific needs and configurations of each team. These sessions also offered another round of cross-functional collaboration in process design.

The training was very thorough. The recordings for all our traning sessions were provided to us so that we could go back and review. Our trainer was always available for follow up questions. Our trainer shared a spreadsheet with us as a checklist for all things that needed to be done to ensure proper import and setup of our assets and DAM.

Incentivized

It was very generic and we took it prior to configuration. It was however adequate to educate our user in the basic capabilities that will have become available to them after deployment.

It was a lot of work! But worth the effort to get our assets cleaned up and organized. Enough time and personnel need to be allotted for any implementation, but we had some advantage in having our assets in a previous DAM with attached metadata in XML, and our users were prepared with knowledge of our existing DAM at that time. Though old habits present their own issues, a company that is starting from scratch with no DAM has to think farther ahead about how it will organize and collect assets. Far more pre-planning with stakeholders would be needed for a company starting an implementation from scratch.

Incentivized

We were very well supported. TopRight who performed the process/requirements definition as well as project management functions came with ample experience with various marketing automation platforms. They also came with very good multi-channel marketing experience that allowed them to tackle this implementation as a marketing deployment and not a technology deployment. TopRight bring expertise in multi-channels strategy.

Aprimo performed the configuration and training functions. Their personnel were very well versed in their platform and brought much empathy to a deployment that required a great deal of change management.

I am stunned by how many people (from for-profit sector who work here) have not been exposed to these types of platforms. I want to make sure that folks are so accustomed to user interface. When I roll-out campaign management, teaching them the art and science of campaign management versus just learning the tool. TopRight are marketers. They are familiar with all these technologies. Their job has been to define processes, best practices and turn into training. Similar to training from Salesforce.com about funnel mgmt etc, vs. just the product. We will create training modules that are agnostic to the platform

We started with the Widen system but ended up switching to Brandfolder. Brandfolder had the consistent interface across internal and external platforms. It was easier to use and search for assets for our internal team and brand partners. I preferred the Widen system's ability to share assets with direct links and the ability to add metadata upon upload.

Incentivized

Unica - Both platforms (i.e. Unica and Aprimo) delivered comparable capabilities. However, due to internal limitations around technical support and technical maturity of the organization we selected Aprimo as it delivered the more user friendly user interface. Unica requires more technical saviness. With Aprimo you can be completely non-technical.

We evaluated Epsilon, but they were too expensive and don’t compete on price.

We evaluated Axciom. They offered an outsourced full service and were very powerful, but we wanted to bring capabilities more in-house. The capabilities were more advanced that we needed today. We felt Aprimo or Unica could both carry us a long way.

We did not look at marketing automation vendors like Eloqua, Marketo. From a scale standpoint, we were looking for campaign management and not just marketing automation. Also wanted MRM (Marketing Resource Management) or internal workflow management capabilities. We did not take a deep dive as they didn’t have the full suite solution

• Acquia DAM simplifies global access by offering an intuitive platform for easy asset uploads
• With centralized storage, sharing becomes seamless, fostering efficient collaboration worldwide.
• Utilizing Acquia DAM, I efficiently apply metadata for accurate categorization, enabling easy reference to past content whenever needed.

Incentivized

• The stream-lined content process with agency partners who have access to our Aprimo client.
• In app creative review and redlining makes changes easy for client and agency.
• Cost saving in the way that we were able to build custom products and not try and use a costly less effective tool.

Incentivized