Hootsuite vs. Livefyre (discontinued)

Hootsuite is a great starter tool for companies that want to use a scheduling service for their social media content. It allows access to nearly all of the commonly used social media platforms, so no matter where you share content, Hootsuite will allow you to do it with ease.

Incentivized

I was strictly the implementor of Livefyre (for my company only). That task alone was at least 3 weeks worth of work. From a user standpoint, Livefyre is a good product which is why this review is strictly about how difficult it was to implement. Therefore, if a colleague was to ask me if I recommend Livefyre, it's not a straight answer. Questions like, 'how fast do you need it?', 'how centralized is your user database?', 'do you want social login?', all come into question and were details that made my job not easy (hence, my review of 5/10 for suggesting it to others). Once implemented, Livefyre is a great product (notice my overall review is higher), but based on my experience with implementation, it certainly requires a senior developer's dedicated time and patience to set up exactly as desired. For smaller companies with small/simple user bases and websites, the process may be more straightforward, but from my experience, it wasn't out-of-the-box at all.

• Scheduling of content. The ease of use for Hootsuite's planner abilities is top of the industry. It is simple and effective in posting content to different channels and accounts.
• Analytics are superior on Hootsuite. Their custom reports allow you to view very specific KPI's that you can adjust for each channel or account. The reports are also exportable to be used for others in the company.
• Inbox management. The inbox manager is superior to any in the industry. Hootsuite allows you to tag certain phrases or keywords to better filter messages based on importance or topic.

Incentivized

• It provides and allows comments and comment management that is fast, seamless and shareable.
• Having used disquss, WordPress comments and many others I like Livefyre better for its seamless integration and transparency
• It is really nice that they have a range of services from free to enterprise with increasing functionality and benefits.

• Because of the way algorithms works, we would have loved to be able to automate making a post with no link and posting the first comment with a link (hello LinkedIn)
• We would have loved an easy way to post from a main account and repost the post for other accounts we administrate, for instance a corporate post reposted by individuals for LinkedIn, or retweets from one main account by child accounts

Incentivized

• Implementation was not easy. Although flexible, I personally wrote at least 1,400 lines of code to get this implemented over a few week's time.
• The social login aspect is cool, but again, hard to implement. They did not write any of those modules, although they could have. This required senior-level developmental skills and a knowledge of how social media is interfaced with programmatically. Lots of questions arose from this and it was difficult to implement with virtually no help from Livefyre, other than to provide the hooks into their system for when users were validated. I had to write at least 2 separate login/redirection scripts to accomplish this flow.
• CSS tweaking was tricky. We could override lots of common CSS classes, but to get things just the way we wanted it, I ended up writing LOTS of jQuery listeners and functions to transform the output into exactly what we wanted. This was a surprise since the software was sold to us as being 'fully customizable'.
• Documentation was sufficient, but not great. Getting the flow of the callbacks that are fired wasn't clear at first, and sometimes did not work as expected.
• It should be noted that, after this review was published, Livefyre contacted me stating they now have better documentation and process for implementation (for version V3, specifically) and urged me to revise this review. However, I can only write of my experience with V2, and it WAS difficult to implement over 3 weeks of dedicated time. Another developer on my team implemented version V3 and his evaluation is very similar to mine, claiming much difficulty with the CSS customization.

At this time we are satisfied that Hootsuite offers the most of what we are looking for at the most reasonable price point. As the social media landscape and monitoring/scheduling software changes, so do our needs. We re-evaluate our tools semi-annually or as new tools emerge onto the market. If we find at any point that we aren't gaining an advantage, then we are open to switching products.

Incentivized

We feel we have a real partnership with Livefyre and we both make each other better. Their customer service has been phenomenal even during a time of rapid growth.

The overall usability is awesome, the scheduling, reporting, etc. The spellcheck and feature that used to be a part of it was awesome and we are sad to see that it was taken away. However, we do like the AI feature and emoji customization. The new ad and paid media element is something we are starting to explore, especially for Facebook and Linkedin

It's really easy to implement that app but should improve some analytics.

Incentivized

Any outages are communicated in advance and have not been a problem. We let our clients know based on communications from HootSuite. Since we operate 24/7 with multiple shifts, planned outages can interfere with our operations, but we can always work around it.

Hootsuite makes passing on articles from the web very easy- when it works! I have had a number of gliches with Chrome where it does not open properly and the solution (after some toing and froing with support) was to uninstall and reinstall. The support staff are always very helpful (which is great!) but the gliches..... well, they suck when you are already busy!

I can manage all of my accounts on one site! It's absolutely amazing!
The dashboard is helpful to see how you are doing as well. Still
getting to understand the analytics and may need to reach out for help
on this

From purchasing to implementation, the customer service/support was really perfect!

Incentivized

Very easy to teach and learn

The online training is decent; however, it takes a lot more time to search for answers to my questions. Having a training session with a live person was much more effective as they were able to quickly address the business needs I have.

• Combination of vendor and internal. The vendor bumped up our account to the Enterprise version (quite simple and easy) and then set up our organization and team structure. We then had to log in and set up team members and assign members to social media accounts. This was pretty easy to do as they have a great user interface. We simply had to drag and drop people into the correct team giving them access to specific social media accounts.

Hootsuite is definitely the most cost effective of the bunch for the goals that my clients have. The AI caption generation is also perfect for cutting down on time. Caption creation actually takes up a lot of time in the scheduling process for content and this feature made Hootsuite stand out to me!

Incentivized

We felt Livefyre was more innovative and better at SEO. It felt like we were working with a partner for the long haul who was interested in our business and how to improve it.

We are only using in marketing and have been able to scale.

Incentivized

• I have been able to evaluate which posts, in general, do well and figure out what types of posts to make (content)
• It's been harder however to compare on social medial platform compared to another because it's hard to duplicate a post with a new owly (I think you used to be able to) but more so, you also can't assign it a custom owly link so I can see at a glance which owly link was associated with what platform.

Incentivized

• The heavy work is already done given that we take the time to implement.
• Very useful insights and AI powered delivery.

Incentivized