Juicer vs. Livefyre (discontinued)

Juicer is great for any campaign, hashtag, or event-related website. For example, we've created this website for a friend's event (the "Pirate Summit", and it looks like this https://www.juicer.io/pirate-summit). Also, artists use it a lot, for example, Bon Jovi's official site at https://www.juicer.io/bonjovi. You can also build a lot of stuff around it, and just keep Juicer's aggregated social media feed in an iFrame. Juicer is less well suited if you want to enable actions from social media, e.g. buying a physical product. In these cases, classic e-commerce shops are better suited.

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.

• Juicer allows me the opportunity to set it and forget it so that I can use my valuable time to focus on other things.
• Juicer has allowed us to seamlessly ensure that our social media feed can be found on our website and that it will stay up to date at any given moment.

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.

• There might be one or two social media sources worth adding, e.g. Tripadvisor.

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.

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.

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

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

I haven’t had the first-hand opportunity to try other platforms. Juicer was already being used on our other websites and therefore we’re now utilizing it for the Foundation.

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.

• It's very quick to deploy, so no IT/development costs (except putting in a small javascript, which takes 5 minutes).
• Definitely positive ROI, it's much cheaper than other solutions which can cost some times 10x as much.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized