Bonterra Apricot is a cloud-based solution for nonprofits of all sizes. It's designed to bring data to the forefront in order to bolster a nonprofit organization’s impact. Apricot helps organizations to save time and resources because the tool makes managing data more efficient, so that users increase the time spent delivering the mission. Apricot offers configurable forms and fields so organizations can customize their experience to their clients and mission. It allows…
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Bonterra ETO
Score 6.4 out of 10
Enterprise companies (1,001+ employees)
Bonterra ETO is a case management platform that consolidates data, caseloads, and service delivery programs, helping users to save time and serve more people. ETO is purpose-built for organizations looking to improve their program and case management. ETO is built in accordance with industry security standards and includes tools that helps users to focus on advancing their missions, as well as: Reduce time spent entering data into separate systems to increase…
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Pricing
Bonterra Apricot
Bonterra ETO
Editions & Modules
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Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Bonterra Apricot
Bonterra ETO
Free Trial
Yes
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
Required
Required
Additional Details
Pricing for Bonterra Case Management is driven by individual usage and needs of the nonprofit.
Organizations aren't one-size fits all, so neither is Bonterra's pricing.
For my purposes of tracking participant case notes and data, Apricot functions well. The layout is sleek and organized, and the platform is user friendly making for an easy adjustment period for new staff. We are able to track important deadlines on the home page so the user doesn't need to take time out of their day to see what needs to be prioritized, they can just jump into the work
I can see from an education perspective how it would be an incredible fit. The functionality is all there and growing. From a CAC perspective, it's still a work in progress, especially for larger CACs where lots more services are provided and the lines between programs blur a bit more. I think that ETO is becoming more user-friendly for CACs and Social Solutions is moving in the right direction too. I can't wait for some of the new features to roll out and be able to use them in our system. I really do think that will improve our user experience significantly.
There are several things in the "suggestion" area that have been there for a while. For instance, to be able to see the client's age instead of just the birthdate. Many people want this, but I don't understand why it can't be done for us.
Luckily, whenever an issue arises, it's not there for long, as you have a fairly quick turnaround for resolving them.
Being able to view notes and other information sources with just a drop-down, instead of opening the entire note, would be preferred.
There are times when the system is just slow or doesn't work at all and it takes a little extra time for it to be resolved. This causes some stress.
ETO needs to be mobile friendly because a lot of our staff do outreach work, including all touchpoints, demographics, enrollments, and dashboards on their phone.
Too many ways to get to the same thing. E.g. Add New Participant Tab, Add New Participant in Navigation Bar, Add New Participant on Home Page, etc. This generates mistakes and a need for very thorough training and tight oversight.
Inability to remove touchpoints from custom universes once they have already been added. There is a limit of 20 touchpoints per custom universe. If the touchpoints in a universe have become obsolete or irrelevant, there is no way to make room for a new, more relevant touchpoint. Old touchpoints can be disabled but not removed.
Need to pay extra for email and calendar notifications. This should be a built-in function, as the software already costs a lot, and many organizations cannot afford to spend more to get this vital functionality.
It would be great if a "Case Conference" chat feature could be attached to participants. Case managers could enter the chat room and relay important information about the participant to each other. This could also work when people aren't there in real time, like emails. The important part is that all of this information would be accessible UNDER the participant's profile or dashboard that it's regarding.
I went to the Summit a few weeks ago to learn about the future expansion and vision of Social Solutions. I already been with Apricot for 5 years and researched other products I still come back to Apricot and where it can grow with us.
Social Solutions has been great for our organization. It has allowed us to not only report on data, but to dive into it to see trends and give snapshots of the current status of our neighbors. Social Solutions has been helpful in getting us to see additional ways we can use our data and ways that it is easier for front line staff to use this tool
Without any formal IT education, I was able to utilize their articles and videos to teach myself how to configure and customize the software to our organization (although I do recommend their Apricot Admin training to polish your skills). The majority of users are able to adapt immediately with minimal training.Staff that have challenges with technology in general do adapt to using the system once you can create buy in and engagement (although it does take time and training)
6 years of experience dealing with a poor interface, unreliable reports, and broken promises with virtually zero improvements. I have too many issues to list but have an entire file if anyone ever shows interest from a site Manager. I listed some of the issues in some of the first questions in this review and I appreciate the opportunity to share my experiences.
Routine maintenance is announced with plenty of lead time, and the few times I've been unable to log in to the system properly a simple refresh was all that was required to fix.
Mostly really strong now, although I understand that for some years before switching their hosting service to AWS performance was a real issue with ETO and we had frequent problems with pages timing out or other glitches stemming from performance issues. With AWS that is mostly a thing of the past, although it is still a major issue with the reporting tool which is unable to run reports on the entire database due to performance limitations, instead requiring admins to define universes prior to running queries.
This is a difficult question to answer because when I hear the word "support" I think of this in multiple levels. The customer service on the front end, with my account manager is pretty good. There was a time for about a year and a half where I didn't even want to get to know this persons name because they wouldn't be there there long enough for me to get to know them. For the past 8-9 months we've had the same account manager, and this is helpful as a way to grow our trust in Apricot social solutions as well as the account manager understanding the needs of our organization. The technical support is also fine. The issues we most have problems with is how the technical support is calculated and the lack of roll-over of technical support time. If our account has 1 hour of technical support per month, but we don't need any technical support for 4 months, it would be great to have the ability to use those 4 hours (as time allows per the IT calendar) when we need them, even if it falls within one month. We've also had instances of working with IT persons who didn't seem to care at all about our issues, and seemed eager to put our call behind them and get onto the next without much thought as to why we were calling them in the first place. We've also had instances where the IT person didn't seem to really be listening to what it is we needed, and was heck bent on what they THOUGHT we needed rather than listening to what we actually did need. While we also have had experiences of working with IT persons who were absolutely great at working through issues. They were patient and understanding and would explain why a solution (c)would or (c)would not work. We even worked through those options in real time if they were unsure whether a data solution would work or not. That was great because we felt heard.
We love the first tier customer support folks! They're friendly, helpful, and knowledgeable within the scope of their position. The experiences we've had with their supervisors have also been mostly good and again they seem to be doing what they can within the scope of their positions. This is what prevents me from selecting 1. Unfortunately, none of these wonderful folks can offer real solutions when things are actually broken. They verify there's a problem and send it to the black hole called "the developers". After that, we don't hear anything useful and we figure out how to live with/work around the problem ourselves. (Requests for updates typically get "still with the developer" responses.) This is highly frustrating given that most of our issues are basic system issues (functionality that worked then broke after an update by Social Solutions, servers not syncing, report universes not flattening automatically, etc.). All we want is for the system to work as designed and to be fixed in a timely fashion when it doesn't. Apparently, that's too much to ask. (And no, we don't expect it to happen instantly, programming and quality control checks obviously take time.)
Really good trainer and exhaustive curriculum covered, but ETO is a complex enough system that you don't *really* know how to use it until you've been in the trenches for a few weeks. For instance, I took a Report Writing training and emerged with some fluency in the reports interface and a vague understanding of the process, but immediately encountered a legion of instance-specific idiosyncrasies that would have been totally impossible to address in a webinar training for a dozen folks from different orgs working in different instances.
There need to be specialists who know how to best work with an organization developing a new program, not just transferring existing forms to a digital format.
Hard to say, as I was not with the agency at the time. However, based on our use of the software ~5years later I can say that there were no catastrophic design choices made during implementation that have become unduly burdensome as we've scaled up.
I have used RealTime is a different role and purpose, but I always thought it was hard to navigate and just confusing as a whole. I do not use Apricot for IEP's, which is what RealTime was used for in my previous role. However, I do like the way that Apricot functions and think it is just more user friendly
We originally built our program around SharePoint and were dissatisfied by the lack of transparency it provided. We then moved to ETO, primarily because it was the cheapest of the other solutions that we looked at. Now, we are realizing that we are not getting any real value from our ETO system, so we will likely be investing in a more sophisticated system.
The core product scales well, and we've grown quite a bit as an agency during our use of ETO. However, there are some real pain points particularly around creating new programs and managing report universes that require extensive offline checklist resources and a full-spectrum understanding of how changing settings in one part of ETO can have downstream impact in other areas. This can introduce a "chilling" effect on proposed changes to the system, where there is strong incentive to leave things as-is to avoid unforeseen consequences.
It has saved us time in terms of putting together reports for internal use and for external funders.
Better accountability for gathering information.
Given the monthly cost of the system we are probably paying too much but the cost of switching to another piece of software doesn't quite justify a move yet.
